Ep. 1: Virtues Unknown

“The Manhattan District Uranium Mill Site from 1943 to 1945 at Uravan, Colorado processing for uranium for the atomic bomb from mill tailings at various sites.” From the Library, Museum of Western Colorado, Grand Junction, CO. (Flickr/Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

In the early years of atomic science, the discovery of cancer-curing radium drove prospective miners to the far reaches of the Four Corners region of the United States. As they hunted for the rare mineral, workers uncovered a yellow ore called uranium – a glowing rock worth little to nothing at the time. But soon, scientists with the secretive Manhattan Project would set their sights on the isolated deserts of Western Colorado and put that yellowcake to use. After their success, a monumental change was on the horizon.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Alec Cowan: On August 6th, 1945, the second atomic bomb ever made – nicknamed “Little Boy” – was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

The bomb itself was filled with 141 pounds of uranium, an earthy yellow ore. Inside a shaft at the center of the bomb, a trigger fired a uranium bullet into a second cylinder of uranium.

Atoms flew uncontrollably, creating an immense amount of kinetic energy, heat, and radiation.

That first bomb ever put in use exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT. Since then, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been developed.

But even as mechanisms have changed, one key ingredient has remained essential:

Atomic element number 92. Uranium.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: A million tons of water alive with deadly rays. Awe inspiring in its significance for man who learned how to control the atom, but must now learn to control himself.

Alec Cowan: So right now I'm standing on the banks of the Colorado River, and I'm at Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Today, this park is filled with ducks, it's got birds, big gnarled cottonwood trees and a disc golf course. Growing up here in Grand Junction, I would often ride my bike or walk down the riverfront trail here.

You wouldn't know it today by walking through this park, but this used to be a uranium mill. And Grand Junction, my hometown, used to be at the center of the uranium mining world, 

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: They're off and running at uranium downs 

Alec Cowan: For me, uranium conjures up images of nuclear bombs, radioactivity, and cancer. And this park where I'm standing used to be where uranium was refined and purified into perfect “yellowcake.”

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: What was once a uranium site is now Grand Junction's popular Las Colonias Park. But making that change was no easy task. 

Alec Cowan: Now, I had no idea about any of this history growing up. Grand Junction's long been an oil and gas town, and even now, a local university is starting to make it into a bit of a college spot.

It matches all of your Colorado stereotypes. A big mountain biking and hiking community. Trendy eateries. A brewery on every corner.

But it turns out there's something percolating right now. The uranium legacy of the town has largely been forgotten, especially for younger generations, like me. And I can understand that. What would locals think if they knew that right next door to their butterfly garden, millions of tons of radioactive waste was being removed and stored elsewhere? 

Ever since I graduated high school here and moved up to the Pacific Northwest, I've worked as a reporter covering news and making documentaries. I'm especially interested in change in rural America. And the more I come home, the more I start to see this uranium legacy come to the forefront. 

And that got me curious. Why didn't I know anything about this growing up? If this really was the center of the uranium world, why didn't it feel more obvious? And my assumptions about uranium, were they right or wrong? 

Those questions sent me on a year-long reporting chase to learn more about uranium and its legacy in my home region. And the more people I talked to, the more I found out that uranium put this place on the map.

But the more I looked, the more I found out that Grand Junction was just a piece of a larger puzzle. As time went on, and nuclear weapons proliferated, the miracle of uranium started to get more dangerous. Scientists were learning more about radiation, and that put towns like Grand Junction – in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – well, they were at risk. 

Companies haphazardly stored their waste, and put locals in danger. Many of those towns have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up those mistakes from the past. But one town, called Uravan, was destroyed entirely. 

Uravan was a model atomic town where uranium was a fact of everyday life. 

Bob Ince: It looked like gray sandstone, but I've also seen uranium look like a mosaic.

Tandie Van Sell Morgan: We had, growing up, we had a huge chunk of raw ore as a doorstop. 

Maxine Johnson: They looked like big piles of yellow dirt.

Alec Cowan: Even as this town might seem like a relic from the past, its story lives on in the present. 

As the threat of climate change brings into perspective our reliance on fossil fuels, nuclear energy is starting to make a comeback. And here, in the former uranium belt of the country, that's bringing back a lot of mixed feelings. 

Caren Stephens: Years later, people started thinking, did I get this cancer from this? Did my kids have nosebleeds from this? 

Franz Costanzi: There weren't environmental laws back then, so we ended up cleaning them up. 

John Findlay: Yes, some people know it's risky, um, do they know exactly what the risks are? No. So, they can't tell anybody what happened.

Alec Cowan: Uranium was an industry of the past, a boom that made life here possible – and a bust that's always threatened its future. At the center of those nuclear reactors is uranium, and some are hopeful that an element representing the death and destruction of the past could pave the way for a more sustainable future.

But before we can get into all that, we need to understand Uravan, the small Colorado town that's become the poster child for nuclear success and atomic failure. As interest in uranium spikes again, are the towns that once mined it reopening a wound of our atomic past? 

Can an element famous for destruction become one of hope?

Marty (Docent): Well, you're looking at the front face of the reactor. 

Jennifer Thurston: You know, hundreds and hundreds of mines across the west. 

Alec Cowan: How far underground are we? 600 feet. 

Ann Maest: If we're going to go forward with it, then we should clean up the messes from the past. 

Jane Thompson: To just wipe that town away and let's not talk about that history anymore, it's gone, it's done, it didn't… was wrong. 

Alec Cowan: I’m Alec Cowan. And this is Boom Town: A Uranium Story.

PT 1: DISCOVERY

Alec Cowan: It was 1896. A cloudy day in February. 

In a small apartment in Paris, physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel is experimenting with large photographic plates. Becquerel studies fluorescence – basically how different minerals glow when exposed to sunlight. But on this overcast day, with no sun, he gives up on his experiment.

He has three materials: that photographic plate, a cross made of copper, and a chunk of uranium crystals. To keep them unexposed to sunlight, he wraps all three together in a black cloth. First the plate, then the cross, then the crystal. He then places the bundle in a drawer on his desk. 

A few days later, when Becquerel opens and unwraps his materials from the drawer, the photo plate is black… except for a perfect outline of the cross, right in the center.

He knows this is something big, but not in the religious sense. The outline of the cross shouldn't have been possible without any exposure to sunlight. But something had leached onto the plate, creating the perfect outline. 

Two years later, Becquerel's doctoral students, Pierre and Marie Curie, would figure out just why that was happening.Through a series of chemical reactions, they isolated Becquerel's uranium crystal into a number of distinct elements. And in the process, they discovered something new. 

The three of them already had a name for the phenomenon Becquerel accidentally observed two years earlier: radiation. And thanks to the Curies, they had a name for this new element: radium.

Michael Amundson: And so in the 1890s, radium is this miracle element because they find that it can cure cancer. Unfortunately, it also causes cancer. 

Alec Cowan: This is Michael Amundson, professor of history at Northern Arizona University and author of Yellowcake Towns: Mining in the American West. 

Michael Amundson: I teach classes in the history of the American West, and public history.

Alec Cowan: In the United States, a small industry was forming that gathered the ore radium was sourced from. This was all largely based in the Colorado Plateau region. 

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: And here is the source, the desolate mountain land of the Colorado Plateau. 

Alec Cowan: The Plateau covers more than 130,000 square miles of dusty mesas and wide canyons spread through the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.

Today, the plateau is famous for hosting more national parks than anywhere else in the country. Think of Utah's Mighty Five.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: Look at that wall from the mesa down to the bottom of the canyon. You are looking there at over 300 million years of rock formation. 

Alec Cowan: But in the early 1900s, the Bureau of Mines believed there could be more radium in the region than anywhere else in the world (Yellowcake Towns, Pg. 29).

With its newfound uses, that meant radium was in high demand. And I mean big demand. 

Michael Amundson: Radium was selling for like $100,000 a gram.

Alec Cowan: That's around $3.5 million in today's money. 

To find radium, miners had to locate a composite ore. Something called carnotite.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: Now say that I would like to go and search for some carnotite ore, how would I get started?

Well, I'd recommend you go on some prospecting on your very own.

Alec Cowan: Carnotite isn’t hard to find. But the radium inside it is. 

Michael Amundson: They were mining tons of ore to get grams of radium. And so it was exorbitantly wasteful.

Alec Cowan: Over three decades, from 1890 to 1920, it's estimated that miners in the Plateau processed 67,000 tons of carnotite ore. Just 202 grams – less than half a pound – was radium (Yellowcake Towns, Pg. 32). 

Digging out a mountainside, just for a handful of radium, was clearly unsustainable. So for companies, the solution became finding a use for the two main byproducts of radium.

First, there was vanadium…

Michael Amundson: …and vanadium was used as a hardener in steel. 

Alec Cowan: Then, there was uranium…

Michael Amundson: …and then they also used the uranium in the 1930s to make glass, as a yellow dye. 

Alec Cowan: While at this time, select scientists in places like Berkeley and Chicago were unlocking the secrets of radioactive elements, the people mining uranium in these early years didn’t know much about it.

There were stories about its danger in the Navajo Nation. There’s an old Diné story that says at creation, The People were given a choice between two yellow powders — one was corn, and life-giving. The other was uranium, representing evil, and imbalance.

But elsewhere, as the lucrative hunt for radium continued, uranium was more of a novelty — a cheap yellow rock that would glow in the right kind of light.

Amundson says this period reminds him of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Michael Amundson: “A weed is a plant whose virtues are unknown.” And uranium really was a weed that was just not really that helpful, because it was basically worthless.

Alec Cowan: By the late 1930s, companies like U.S.Vanadium began establishing company towns with the express purpose of mining carnotite. One particular site — a place called the Joe Jr. Camp, tucked in a remote canyon of Western Colorado — soon became a de facto hub thanks to its rich deposits. 

To recognize its mission, company officials christened it after its two most important products. From uranium and vanadium, they called it: Uravan. 

Maxine Johnson: My dad first arrived there in about 1940. 

Alec Cowan: This is Maxine Johnson. Today, she's in her 80s and living in Washington state. But she was just five years old when her father was first transferred to Uravan. 

At this time, the town was little more than a few hundred people, and slowly growing.

Maxine Johnson: When we first moved over there, we lived up on the mountain where the mine was. We lived in a tent that had the wood floor, and it had wood sides up partway, and then the rest of it was tent. And there were several of 'em up there that a lot of the first people that worked in the mill or the mines worked up there.

And, I remember they had some kind of a big whistle or horn or something, if there was any kind of an accident, they blew this horn and all the ladies would be so upset because until they found out… what happened in the mine? Was it their husband? Did somebody get hurt?

Alec Cowan: True to company town fashion, life revolved around the mine and mill in the center of town. Ore was pulled from nearby mines and trucked to the top of the big sandstone hill that overlooked the small valley.

It was then sent down a long metal tube for processing in the mill at the bottom.

Maxine remembers her brief time on the hill quite clearly. 

Maxine Johnson: Our home was right up against the red rocks, and we played up in those rocks – we never thought about rattlesnakes and all of those kinds of things that were there. And our parents never said a word. We were never cautioned or anything about that. 

Alec Cowan: Maxine's house was a little unorthodox. Most workers lived in housing provided by the company, U.S. Vanadium, but Maxine's dad wanted a custom home, and that put them a little farther down the canyon. 

Maxine would walk half a mile down a long gravel road to Uravan, which hugged the nearby San Miguel River. She then crossed a bridge to get to the center of town, where she went to school. 

Maxine Johnson: There was, you know, the big, one big building that was the town hall. They had dances, all the kids went there, all the school activities were there. Everything took place in the community hall. 

Next to that, or very close, was the main office of the company, and that's where my mother was secretary to the superintendent. And that's where she worked. 

Alec Cowan: The Uravan of Maxine's memory is an industrious little town. But just past the metal bridge into Uravan was something Maxine remembers as a little strange. Massive piles of dirt. 

These are called tailings. 

Maxine Johnson: They looked like big piles of yellow dirt… very fine yellow dirt.

Alec Cowan: Yellow, because they were filled with uranium. And very soon, those piles from a remote piece of nowhere would become the focus of a new, secret, government program. Something called the Manhattan Project. 

More, after the break.

A postcard featuring Uravan, date unknown. The uranium mill was spread across two plants that spanned the slope of Club Mesa in Western Colorado.

PT 2: SECRECY

Michael Amundson: So the Manhattan Project starts, of course, from the famous letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt, basically warning that the Germans are working on nuclear fission and the Americans should start doing it as well. 

Alec Cowan: Historian Michael Amundson again. 

Michael Amundson: Uh, Leslie Groves is the organizer. Uh, he had built the Pentagon in Virginia. He is from the Army Corps of Engineers, he's the overall supervisor of it. 

Alec Cowan: The Manhattan Project chose strategic sites across the country to begin developing a top secret nuclear program. 

You may be familiar with the famous nuclear lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer developed the first nuclear bombs.

Then there was Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. And lastly, there was Hanford, in Washington state, where they were creating highly radioactive plutonium. 

Michael Amundson: They know there's two sources that they can use to make atomic bomb: uranium and plutonium. Uranium they can mine naturally and process it, plutonium they have to make by basically having a uranium, uh, based power, or uranium pile, fissioning.

Alec Cowan: At this point in time, scientists are unsure a plutonium bomb will actually work. But they're certain a uranium weapon can fission and explode. Even then, making plutonium requires uranium, meaning they need a lot of it, and fast. 

So Uravan seemed like a natural fit. Most of the uranium was already mined, and just lying around in piles by the river, a forgotten waste.

Michael Amundson: The Manhattan Project comes into Uravan and basically sets up their own processing plant across the river. 

Alec Cowan: To residents, things didn't seem much different. 

Michael Amundson: It was just a small refinery plant where they made green sludge. And that's all they were told. 

Alec Cowan: Amundson tells me there's not a lot known about operations during World War II. But in the 2010s, the Atomic Heritage Foundation conducted a series of oral history interviews with the people who worked on the Manhattan Project across the entirety of the country. 

These weren't just the paper pushers and decision makers, but chemists, mill workers, and uranium miners. 

J.P. Moore: James Philip Moore, Jr.

Alec Cowan: People like J. P. Moore. 

J.P. Moore: And, um, yes, double O. 

Alec Cowan: Here, Moore is recalling his time as a chief chemist for the project in Grand Junction, Colorado. 

He's being interviewed by Ron Elmlinger in 2013. 

Ron Elmlinger: Uh, so what was special about your background or your ability or education that made you a good candidate for working for the Manhattan Project?

J.P. Moore: That's been a puzzle of my life [laughs]

Alec Cowan: Moore was working for U. S. Vanadium in Uravan when company leadership transferred him to the chemical plant in Grand Junction, about 90 miles north. There, he analyzed uranium ore samples. 

But J.P. says he didn't know why they chose him for the job. In fact, he didn't know much of anything about the Manhattan Project.

Ron Elmlinger: Uh, did they tell you really, uh, what your role was? What part you were playing in the Manhattan Project? 

J.P. Moore: No they didn't. 

Ron Elmlinger: So he even kept a secret from, from, from you. 

J.P. Moore: They were for a long time. 

Ron Elmlinger: Did they ever tell you that, uh, the purpose of the project was to build an atomic bomb? 

J.P. Moore: No, they didn't. They, uh, made sure that we all kept our mouths shut and didn't say anything, but they wouldn't tell us why.

Alec Cowan: Emlinger pokes at this line of questioning for a while, asking the same thing over and over. 

They didn't tell you about work going on in other parts of the country? No.

They didn't tell you anything about the specific operations of the project? No. 

Your buddies never asked about it?

J.P. Moore: They didn't know what they'd ask me, and I'd just say ‘I don't know.’ 

Ron Elmlinger: I think in the military, I think they call that uh, compartmentalization, compartmentizing, you know… not telling the guy next to you what you're doing. 

Alec Cowan: When Elmlinger says this, Moore does mention that there was an army supervisor on the premises. They were the one in charge of things. And the facility had a number of guards to keep the overly curious from getting in.

But otherwise, there was no atmosphere of intrigue for Moore. He clocked in, clocked out, and didn't think twice about it. 

J.P. Moore: I had a job, and jobs were scarce in those periods, and I just did what was necessary to keep my job. Worked eight hours, and sometimes 16, and, uh, walked home and slept a while and went back to work again.

Alec Cowan: Down in Uravan, residents weren't the wiser to what the Manhattan Project was doing. To them, uranium was a waste product. But when the Manhattan Project built their own mill on the opposite side of the canyon, they had to know that something was happening. 

Maxine Johnson again, talking about her father.

Maxine Johnson: He never talked about that, and I'm sure would not have been allowed to. He was a foreman in the mill, so I'm sure he knew about it. And yes, he did talk about it in later years, but he talked about it as more… the information that was made public. 

Alec Cowan: The United States eventually dropped two bombs on Japan in World War II. One on Hiroshima, and one on Nagasaki. 

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: Good evening from the White House in Washington. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. 

Alec Cowan: Even today, these two instances are the only use of nuclear weapons in a war. And in 1945, just four years after the United States entered World War II, the bombs signaled a new era. 

Mastering the atom would mean change was coming to life everywhere, especially in Uravan. 

Michael Amundson: They didn't find out until August 1945 after Hiroshima… 

President Harry Truman: The British, Chinese, and United States governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded. Our terms were rejected. 

Since then, the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future. 

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 

Michael Amundson: Front page of the paper in the Grand Junction Sentinel is, “Atomic Bomb Elements Produced Here.”

And so that's, they found out when the rest of the world found out. About what it was being used for. 

Alec Cowan: Uranium was on the map. And now, Uravan was too. 

The town was only a few decades old, but a mythology was already starting to form. There were whispers that Marie Curie herself, the famed Nobel laureate, made a trip to Colorado's western slope in her pursuit of radium.

Although the historical record is a little more skeptical.

Michael Amundson: I think as a historian, you sort of talk about, well, yeah, whether she came there or not is one fact. But the fact that people believed that, or thought that it was so important, just shows how they thought of themselves as being on a national, international stage, in this little town out in the middle of nowhere.

Alec Cowan: As soldiers returned home from the war, the country breathed a long sigh of relief. 

But amidst the parades and welcome home banners, there's one asterisk we should put on the end of that newspaper headline, the one that read, “Atomic Elements Produced Here.”

Michael Amundson: Only 14% of the uranium for the Manhattan Project came from the United States. 14%. 

The rest of it came from Canada, and we got some from the Belgian Congo. 

Alec Cowan: The United States wasn't the only place in the world with uranium. 

That uranium crystal that Curies were using came from the present day Czech Republic. The Nazis were experimenting with uranium from Europe and Africa. And after confirming to the rest of the world that the destructive power of an atomic bomb was possible, the United States knew it wouldn't be the only one looking to make more of them. 

So atomic policy needed to change.

Michael Amundson: The Manhattan Project is run through the Army Corps of Engineers. But it's firmly believed in the United States that the control of nuclear weapons, and testing, and uranium procurement and all that should be organized and run by a civilian agency – not by the army. 

Alec Cowan: In 1946, Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act, which creates a formal agency called the Atomic Energy Commission.

But the commission isn't just a gesture of goodwill, something saying that the future of atomic power is in the best interests of U.S. citizens. The military is concerned that only a fraction of the bomb's uranium was domestic. It takes a lot of trust to have other countries supplying your most important ingredient for nuclear weapons.

So the country is at a crossroads. 

Michael Amundson: You know, at the end of the war, there was sort of this year and a half where we thought about what we really should do is share the secrets with the world. 

Alec Cowan: But then, the Soviets refuse to leave Germany. 

Michael Amundson: Then, you know, all of a sudden it's like, well, we need atomic weapons as a deterrent against Soviet aggression. 

And if we're going to do that, we need more uranium. 

Alec Cowan: What came next, radically changed the face of the American West. 

Uranium went from a worthless byproduct to the most important metal in the world. And Uravan, in the uranium heartland of America, would become a tale of success – and caution – for a new atomic era.

Today, if you drive by Uravan, you'll see nothing but an empty lot… a fenced in patch of dirt. In the coming episodes, we'll hear firsthand accounts of uranium mining, its benefits and its perils. We'll hear from residents of the town formerly known as Uravan, who struggled to make a living only to later learn that the mineral making their lives possible, was also slowly killing them.

And we'll look at why the entire town was buried underground – and how its history is not only affecting the present, but possibly our future. 

Maxine Johnson: Uravan in those years wasn't like any town you ever knew. 

There were a lot of mining towns in Colorado, there's no question about that. 

But the fact that it was there for bomb making, to produce the uranium… those are experiences that not very many people have ever experienced.

——

Alec Cowan: Boom Town: A Uranium Story is reported, produced, scored, and mixed by me, Alec Cowan. 

That awesome guitar you're hearing is actually played by my dad, Ron Hayes. So, thanks dad. 

The interview recording with J. P. Moore is courtesy of the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, All Rights Reserved.

And Episode 2, titled Company Town, will be out soon. 

Bob Ince: It was definitely a boom, everybody you knew was a miner. 

That stuff was hot, you could walk with your Geiger counter and it would completely peg the counter when you walk in the room. 

Howard Stephens: People would take the tailings and put it in their garden. They could grow the best tomatoes in the world. Everybody was proud of their gardens in Uravan.

Alec Cowan: Thanks for listening.

RECOMMENDED REFERENCES:

Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West

J.P. Moore’s 2013 interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation

Copyright Alec Cowan 2024