Ep. 6: Underground
Steven Puderbaugh looks at a cave wall in the Sunday Mine Complex near Paradox, CO.
With the promise of nuclear energy on the horizon, the demand for uranium is reviving a once-dormant industry. After a trip to a nearby uranium mine, it’s clear the region sees this development as a kind of deja vu. Residents are optimistic their prized industry can return. But can uranium mining be safer than it once was? Dedicated opponents upriver, and a decade of legal battles, may say otherwise.
Archive Footage: Good morning. I'd like to welcome everyone.
Please stay standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. Bow your heads, please.
Alec Cowan: It's Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017. The time is 9:03 in a Montrose Board of County Commissioners meeting.
Montrose County Colorado stretches from the outskirts of the San Juan Mountains to the east, over to the Utah border on the west
Archive Footage: I pledge allegiance to the flag…
Alec Cowan: About an hour and six minutes into this 2017 meeting, a woman named Dianna Reams walks to the podium. She's the president of the Nucla/Naturita Chamber of Commerce, and she's here in support of a proposed uranium mill in what locals call the “West End.”
The West End of Montrose and San Miguel counties.
Dianna Reams: The mill still enjoys overwhelming support in our area. And we look, we are trying desperately to find any acceptable form of economic development into our area. And this is definitely one. It’s historical, it's cultural, and we support this entirely.
Alec Cowan: The West End is uranium country. Even though it was closed almost three decades earlier, many locals still remember when the old mill at Uravan was still open.
It was an economic anchor for the region. But when the industry took a downturn, those uranium companies, and their jobs, packed up and left.
After that, focus turned toward the damage these mines and mills did to the environment and to locals. All in all, uranium mining, this once proud industry, the engine behind nuclear power and nuclear weapons… Well, it practically vanished. The miners moved elsewhere, or began to pass away, and the towns were cleaned up and buried underground.
But even if the opportunities left, the pride and history didn't. It's just been dormant. Waiting for a perfect storm to draw interest to this remote pocket of western Colorado, yet again.
And George Glasier, the next man at the podium, is one of the people bringing it back.
George Glasier: The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment also issued a license for the uranium mill. And that license was challenged, okay?
Alec Cowan: But as this meeting shows, any attempts will be met by some dedicated opposition.
It's a good thing you're a young man, George, this thing's getting drawn out.
George Glasier: I'm getting older all the time, Ron, there's no doubt about it.
Alec Cowan: Western Colorado was a hub of uranium mining through the 1900s. It lifted workers out of dire straits, it built entire towns that still thrive today. But at the same time, lax regulations meant these towns posed a danger for workers and for the environment.
For the last 30 years, a debate has played out on how safe or dangerous uranium mining can truly be, both for those directly involved and those who live nearby. As the threat of climate change puts immense pressure on our energy sources, interest in uranium is again shifting from nuclear missiles to nuclear power.
So it's time for me to revisit a question I asked at the beginning of this series. Can an element that's been the very symbol of sickness and destruction become one of sustainability and survival? The answer is divided.
George Glasier: The new uranium mills are totally different than the things that were, you know, built 50 years ago.
Jennifer Thurston: The fact is they sacrificed their lives and their health and prosperity did not last.
Rod Ewing: The United States is not so rich that we can place a huge bet on nuclear and fail.
Alec Cowan: I'm Alec Cowan. And this is Boom Town: A Uranium Story. The final episode: Underground.
Pt 1: Development
So let's go back to that hearing from 2017 and the man at the podium, George Glasier.
George Glasier: If uranium milling and mining come back. You know, and again, you know, the uranium price is quite low today.
Alec Cowan: A bit about Glasier.
George started his career as a lawyer, specializing in mineral rights. In the 2000s, when prices were on the rise for the first time in a while, Glacier got into the owning and operating business himself.
And he's been in a lot of meetings like this one, trying to get a new uranium mill in the area.
George Glasier: …we are more than 90% dependent on foreign uranium to run all the reactors in the United States. So, again, we think, you know, U.S. production needs to come back. Obviously, you need higher prices, but what you need is you need another uranium mill. There's only one left, and that cannot handle much production beyond what it has now, so…
Alec Cowan: When I first sent George an email, it was after reading about his latest mining operations in a Utah newspaper. But to locals in Colorado, he has more of a reputation than just an offhand entrepreneur. As the president and CEO of Western Uranium and Vanadium, he's kind of like the uranium guy in the area.
And if I'm going to get a sense of where the future of uranium is going, I have to spend more time in Nucla.
So I just drove through Nucla. It's about five months after I first came through here for the Uravan picnic.
Western Uranium & Vanadium is headquartered on Silverhawk Ranch, a sprawling set of prefab offices in the Colorado countryside.
Cell service drops off about halfway there. But once inside the office, I sit down with George for an interview.
Can I just get you to acknowledge that it's cool that I'm recording?
George Glasier: …sure, I understand you're recording…
Alec Cowan: To start, I want to break down the two important pieces of uranium production.
There's the back end milling, where uranium ore is separated and concentrated for use in things like nuclear reactors. And then there's the front end mining, where the ore is actually pulled out of the earth.
George’s company, Western for short, happens to own a number of mines on either side of the state border, including a nearby mine called the Sunday Complex.
George Glasier: Obviously, we've got the mine operating at the Sunday Mine Complex out there. A complex of really five mines, four of which are fully permitted, uh, and in partial production, not in full production because we're waiting for a processing plant, obviously. But we could start mining ore out of that plant, you know, at any time.
Alec Cowan: Back in 2009, there were 14 underground mines operating in the United States.
But since 2016, that number has bounced between just one and zero. In recent years, U.S. uranium mining is at its lowest levels since 1949.
So why have those underground mines disappeared?
Well first, there's the environment. In Colorado specifically, a federal court issued an outright ban on uranium mining in this pocket of Colorado in 2011. As part of that ban, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service was ordered to run some studies on how mines would affect local fish. That ban was lifted in 2019, after those studies found there was no likelihood that a mine could be dangerous to the species habitat.
But secondly, there's the economics. Underground mines are expensive to operate. And for years, there's been a processing bottleneck because the mills where uranium ore is concentrated started going under.
But in the last year or two, that's changing. Here's George again.
George Glasier: The demand for uranium around the world is about 180 million pounds a year, and mine production is only about 140 million. We got 40 million pounds shortfall, which is coming out of inventory. But once the inventories are gone, you've got to have more mine production. It's, it's a supply/demand issue.
Alec Cowan: George said that today, uranium is jumping over either side of $100 a pound. The price hasn't been this high in 20 years, and it's finally broken a threshold to justify underground mining again.
And this brings us to the Sunday Complex, Georgia's nearby uranium mines.
When I first spoke with him over the phone, he said they were operating about three days a week. But today, five months later?
George Glasier: The mine is working seven, seven days a week, 12 hours a day, seven. We've got two crews. One comes in and works seven days. Second crew comes in and works the next seven days. So we're working every day of the week, 12 hours a day. That's what the miners like to do. At a hundred dollars a pound, you know, you want to go as fast as you can.
Alec Cowan: Now, I didn't drive out to George's ranch for a quick chat in the boardroom. For months, I've been hoping to take up his invitation to actually see this mine in person.
So after my interview at the office is done, I'm instructed to hop into my truck and follow Mike Rutter, Western's Chief Operating Officer.
Okay, so we're about 20-25 minutes driving from the Western Uranium Vanadium office. We're now in the big gypsum valley. You got these rolling hills with juniper trees, pinyon pine.
We turn off an empty highway and drive down a long dirt road, where you can see the La Sal mountains in the distance.
Here we are.
We pass a chain link fence and park at the office where Mike shows me a series of maps pinned into its laminate wood siding.
Mike Rutter: We’ll be coming down this section here, and then I'll take you back in the back where we're doing some long haul drilling out this direction.
There's a lot there.
A lot to mine. Yeah.
Alec Cowan: On a nearby table are the safety materials for the day. So I'll take that, my hard hat, light, safety glasses on, take some air plugs with me. Wendy Puderbaugh, who works on compliance for the company, shows me a small metal canister. This is in case of an emergency underground fire.
Wendy Puderbaugh: So then all of this ends up being in your air if you have to have it. They'll be there, you shouldn't have to have it, but I just have to show you.
Have you had to use one before?
Noooo.
Alec Cowan: Wendy makes sure the radon testing in the mine is up to snuff. And I have to be honest, after hearing how radon killed most of the miners from the past, I'm The fact we don't have to wear ventilators is a little surprising, but everyone on the team assures me that they just had an inspection from MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and they passed air and dust tests with flying colors.
So with hard hats on, we hop into a UTV – a kind of off road golf cart. And head into the mine. It's just a quick left, and we begin heading down, and down, and down.
The view from the office outside the Sunday Mine Complex, near Paradox, CO. The La Sal Mountains in Utah are visible in the distance.
A map detailing the extent of the Sunday Mine Complex, which is comprised of 5 mines
The portal entry to the Sunday Mine, which slopes down to the main area of the mine, about 600 ft. below ground.
Vehicle sound
We're currently in the first major stope of the mine — a hollow, carved out room.
So, uh, where are we?
Mike Rutter: We are in the Sunday mine.
Alec Cowan: The ceiling here is maybe 20-25 feet tall, and tunnels branch in every direction. Mine manager Steve Puderbaugh leads the way.
How, uh, how far underground are we?
Steve Puderbaugh: 600 feet. Right here. And probably, Oh, I don't know, if you got all the way down to the bottom of the Sunday, it's probably a thousand feet.
Alec Cowan: The Sunday Mine is an old complex, dating back to as early as the 1950s. But as the price of uranium has bobbled up and down over the decades, mining here has been sporadic. And to be sure, the company isn't really quote unquote “mining” right now.
Or more technically, they're not really “producing.” The company is currently doing what Mike described as “development,” basically surveying the mine to see what's left, and prepping for when they can start extracting full bore.
Mike Rutter: Right now I think they're getting ready, I call it plug drilling, where they just drill a hole, and stick a counter through it, and pull it back, and measure what the uranium is.
But yeah, you can see the holes over here that they drilled, the one, two, three, the five holes there.
Alec Cowan: What Mike just described is “coring.” Basically taking long chunks of wall to see which direction the ore goes and how radioactive it is. Higher readings mean higher concentrations, means higher grade ore.
Mike Rutter: We can drill about 1,500 feet with this drill.
Alec Cowan: Everywhere we walk, we can see uranium in the wall. From thin streaks of ore, to a large and beautiful mosaic.
Mike Rutter: This is what we call the full face of ore. Just a huge chunk of it. You can see where it comes down in the back. They've been itching at me to mine this out and I won't let them yet.
Yeah, you can see the vein.
Alec Cowan: According to the Department of Energy, there's still a whole lot of uranium in the Uravan mineral belt. That's the 210 square miles covering this pocket of Western Colorado. And estimates say there's $800 million worth of uranium still in the mountain.
At full bore, Mike tells me this single mine complex could produce up to 300 tons a day, more than all of the United States uranium produced in 2022. Multiply that by the seven days a week it's operating for a full calendar year, and that's a big change — just from this single mine.
To keep up with predicted demand, the Uranium producers of America said the U.S. needs between eight and ten new mines over the next decade.
But on this particular day, there aren't full mining or blasting operations going on – and I'm a little thankful, at least for my first time being underground.
We do come across a group of two miners drilling bolts into the ceiling. The metal stabilizing rods are about four to five feet long, and the ground and the miners are soaked from the water the drill uses to cut into the ceiling. Ore and shale is on the ground by their feet.
This is when I remember that I was supposed to bring earplugs with me.
Drill sound
As the bolt goes in and everyone nonchalantly goes about their business, I see specks of dust floating across my headlamp. In our group today is Bruce Norquist, who's been working in mines since high school.
Bruce has a small fan hooked to his belt to show that air is circulating, making it safe for us to breathe.
Bruce Norquist: And so I'm just, right now I'm just checking the air flow, what direction it's going. There's a couple different ways to do this. Wet your finger and see which way… This won't turn if it's too low of a flow. But that’s a pretty decent flow.
Alec Cowan: The mine uses a variety of ventilation systems to keep the air clean and the dust minimal down here.
There are boreholes that open up to the surface, as well as giant fans near the portal entries. In a few sections, we pass big yellow and orange air tubes that look like misplaced pieces of a bounce castle.
Outside the mine, Mike bumps my shoulder and points out a few gravel spots that look like helicopter pads.
Someday, these pads will be filled with uranium before it's loaded onto trucks and taken away for processing. They're empty right now, because as I've mentioned, the mine isn't actively processing its uranium. And regulations say they can only keep ore topside for six months at a time. That's because wind could carry uranium dust elsewhere.
So for now, uranium is just being piled inside the mine, waiting to be taken out here for loading onto trucks that will then take it to be processed. Even then, Mike tells me the mine is required to take dust prevention measures, both inside and on the gravel road outdoors. And when asked Mike tells me that the recent inspections have found the mine is meeting all the environmental and safety standards they need to.
But now that we've visited the mine, let's talk about the mill — that second major piece of production. Just as mines have dwindled to the single digits, so have processing mills. As of right now, there's only a single mill in the country still operating: the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah. That means that if the company wants to actually make this uranium mine profitable, they need to build that second major piece.
And George Glasier has plans for that.
George Glasier: Oh yeah, we're looking, you know, to be having something ready to go, you know, late 26 or 27, two or three years out. You know, it's no secret that, you know, we'll probably build one closer in here in Colorado.
Alec Cowan: George says that there are two locations he has in mind.
There's the proposed Maverick Mineral Processing site in Green River, Utah, a small community on Interstate 70, about 130 miles northwest of Nucla. And then there's Piñon Ridge, just half an hour from here in the Paradox Valley. If built, either of those would be the first new uranium mill in the country in more than 40 years.
And there's a reason for that. If you remember, the two uranium mills in Uravan were the most polluted and radioactive areas of town. Even though it's still operating, the White Mesa mill has faced years of local pushback regarding its environmental impact. So when considering a new mill, it's natural to ask if George has the same confidence in milling that he does in his mining.
Can they both be safer, and less polluting?
Yeah, and what are your thoughts on the kind of environmental concerns?
George Glasier: Well, you know, a technology that Western owns basically reduces the quantity ore you have to put through that mill. It's a physical process that basically takes, you know, anywhere from five to ten times and reduces the quantity that you put through there.
The chemical process of the mill. And so you don't have nearly as much toxic waste from a mill using this technology, and this will be incorporated into any mill that we build. So what happens, your tailings are much smaller, your tonnage to the mill is much smaller, and we think that's a real plus. The new uranium mills are totally different than the things that were built 50 years ago.
Alec Cowan: George is talking about a process called “ablation.” This technology separates uranium from the natural stone the ore is found around, using water and sandstone to sand away the minerals they want. The benefit of ablation is that it uses water to separate uranium earlier in the mining process. In turn, that means less material needs to be separated with the toxic chemicals of a traditional uranium mill.
All in all, entrepreneurs see this process as more efficient, with less toxic waste. But regardless of the efficiency, this process still leaves mines and mills with uranium waste that they need to put somewhere.
And this takes us back to that 2017 Montrose Board of County Commissioners meeting. At the time, George was fighting for the rights and licenses to the Piñon Ridge mill site, in the Paradox Valley. A company named Energy Fuels Incorporated had just spent five years trying to build a mill there. But after its announcement, the site was quickly litigated over concerns for the environment. And after a decade of back and forth legal battles, even after the site was sold to George, a judge ruled in favor of the environment.
Today, George is confident the safety and innovations in uranium can put the industry farther ahead of what it once was. And so, he's willing to try again.
George Glasier: Starting over might be our option, and so it's still a very good site, and a lot of the data, you know, the engineering data and all that data that was originally collected is still valid, so that could, you know, very well be an option.
We haven't picked a new name for it, but we'll probably have a new name.
Alec Cowan: Of course, George is just one side of the coin. Those who fought the developments of the past aren't sharing in George's optimism. You can be certain that because of the toxic legacy of towns like Uravan, any new uranium activity in the area won't go on without protest.
That's after the break.
A long hole drill, which is used to harvest cores that determine the quality and direction of uranium ore. A yellow air ventilation tube is also seen above.
Raw uranium ore, in its classic yellow, is pictured in the wall is pictured.
Pt 2: Predicting the Weather
Here we go. Hey!
Alec Cowan: Jennifer Thurston grew up in Telluride, just over 50 miles east of Uravan.
It is now still a good time to chat?
Now, whether you're from Colorado or not, Telluride today brings to mind luxury ranches and packed out ski villages. But Jennifer says that when she was growing up, In the 1970s, it was still just a mining town, a hub of silver and gold.
Jennifer Thurston: Many of the families, you know, they'd spend time in the gold mines and then the price would drop and those mines would drop off and they would go out to the West End and work in uranium for a while. And so there were a lot of families that kind of crossed over and out of foot in both worlds.
Alec Cowan: At the time, Uravan’s uranium mill was still operating, approaching the last years of its run, on family trips to the canyon lands of West End Montrose County.
Jennifer remembers driving past the towering mill, the trucks hauling dusty ore down the highway.
Jennifer Thurston: There was definitely some spook factor going on with Uravan. The tailings ponds would be all kinds of crazy colors. You would see cows grazing right up next to the ponds, right on the fence line, which, you know, definitely made me want to be a vegetarian as a teenager.
Alec Cowan: Those unsightly problems weren't unique to Uravan.
Telluride's mills were also spilling tailings and pollution into the local San Miguel River, which, coincidentally, starts in Telluride and flowed through Uravan. And Jennifer says that back then, that tandem damage was noticeable.
Jennifer Thurston: Aquatic life was virtually wiped out by mining pollution. Upstream the river was dead because of the silver mine, and downstream the river was dead because of Uravan. And thinking about how that river was impacted by all kinds of mining as a child growing up and trying to play in it, I think really shaped a lot of my outlook as an adult.
Alec Cowan: This circles back to something I covered in earlier episodes.
While it's easy to be concerned with uranium as a radioactive element, the more alarming aspect is often the fact that the ore is a harmful metal. And uranium isn't the only concern. The mining and milling process can release other harmful toxins into the environment, specifically aluminum, arsenic, and ammonia.
As I mentioned last time, Uravan’s final cleanup report says agencies did find ammonia and arsenic, both at the town site and farther downriver.
And aquatic surveys elsewhere, at the Atlas Uranium Mill on the Colorado River in Utah, have shown that the area's old mine products made it nearly impossible for fish to live in the river. In 2000, if you put a fish in the water near the mill, it died within moments.
So as remediation of hard rock mines continued, the water traded and the tailings buried elsewhere, the environment as a whole started to make a rebound. And all those negative signs of Telluride in Uravan's pasts were fading into the rearview.
But then, in 2009, driven by interest in nuclear power, the price of uranium started to rebound. And in Western Colorado, a license was approved for a brand new mill at a place called Piñon Ridge.
For Jennifer Thurston, the timing couldn't have been worse. Her dad, who was a staunch conservationist and an opponent of uranium mining, had just passed away.
Jennifer Thurston: He was only 44. He died from leukemia. And we believe it was because of exposure to radiation. So when they proposed a mill right in the middle of this beautiful valley, it was really awful. And my father was gone, and I wanted to do something. And that is what made me an activist.
They came to a place where I'm not going to stand for a uranium mill. And I don't think anybody else will either.
Alec Cowan: This new potential mill was a big deal. For decades, uranium mills were closing all over the Colorado plateau. Piñon Ridge, which was pitched by a Canadian company called Energy Fuels Incorporated, would have been the first new uranium mill in a quarter century.
The process for getting it approved started off pretty smooth. The Montrose County Board of Commissioners approved the local license in September 2009. Then in 2011, the Colorado Department of Health and Environment gave a green light to the mill’s radioactive materials license.
But from the beginning, the project was controversial.
Locals in Nucla and Naturita were excited. Their long lost industry was returning, along with an estimated 85 to 300 jobs. The fiercest critics came from Telluride, who saw the mill as a return of the health and environmental problems of the past.
Jennifer was part of that crowd, working with an activist group called Sheep Mountain Alliance.
Jennifer Thurston: Uranium mills have a radius of 50 miles where the radioactive air pollution falls and settles out. And that landed directly in the Telluride area, not Naturita. Those impacts are what gave Telluride a leg to stand on, right, in the legal fights.
Alec Cowan: With memories of cancer and toxic rivers front of mind, Sheep Mountain quickly sought to appeal the license. They gathered thousands of signatures against the project, not just from locals, but from conservationists throughout the American West.
Part of their petition was the specific risk of radioactive air pollution in Telluride, but it was also a chance to point at the extensive cost of past remediation.
There was the progress on cleaning pollution in the rivers, the return of wildlife, and the peace of mind that radioactivity was finally gone. Was a new facility, and its inevitable cleanup, something the region really wanted to do all over again?
Energy Fuels Inc. said this project would be different, and that the concerns were overblown. Their perspective was similar to what you hear today – that decades of growing concerns have actually improved the industry, as have regulations.
In the end, the Sheep Mountain Alliance achieved something you could call close to success. In 2011, as litigation continued, a Colorado judge determined that the project hadn't done its due diligence in collecting public feedback, and stopped the project from moving forward so public meetings could take place.
Then, the Fukushima nuclear disaster hit Japan that same year, sending the reactors into a partial meltdown and spilling out radiation. That crashed the price of uranium. So by the time the mill was re-licensed, years later, the company said it just didn't make economic sense to move forward with construction. They’d also just bought the White Mesa uranium mill across the state line, adding some redundancy to the mix.
For Jennifer, the volatility of that process, both from environmental and economic pressures, is a feature of the uranium industry — not a bug.
Jennifer Thurston: Every time that uranium possibilities kind of flare up, the price goes up, people start talking about coming in, companies start sniffing around and looking at these mines… it then becomes an impediment and an obstacle to progressing in other ways.
The promise of prosperity with uranium is really fleeting, I think, and minuscule. And long term, it hasn't worked out, and it's not going to.
Alec Cowan: This again brings us back to George Glasier. I'll note here that George was a co-founder and a major stakeholder at Energy Fuels. Though, during the time of this mill debacle, he wasn't at the forefront of the legal battles.
It wasn't until the late 2010s, when Glasier split off to found Western Uranium & Vanadium, that he acquired the rights to the site and began fighting for a mill yet again. But eventually, a different judge revoked the approval of the site entirely, citing concerns with how it would impact the air, water, soil, and wildlife in area. That decision settled the argument in favor of the environment, essentially threw water on the Piñon Ridge uranium mill... at least for the time being.
But with the price of uranium reaching surprising highs today, the window for trying to expand again has never been more open. And Jennifer, who today works for INFORM, the Information Network for Responsible Mining, says that regardless of the when, the where, or the who, the arguments against uranium haven't changed.
Jennifer Thurston: It is less impactful than what happened in the ‘50s, but mill regulations have not been substantially updated in over 40 years at the federal level. They disperse radioactive particles into the air, into the soil, into the water.
So I don't feel that we're prepared in any way to adequately protect the environment or to protect public health.
Alec Cowan: With no new construction in the last 40 years, there isn't a whole lot of recent precedent showing just how safe a new uranium mill could be.
The one potential example is the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah, which is the last uranium mill still operating in the country today. It's faced years of pushback from the local community of just under 300 people, and in particular, the local Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. But I'm hesitant to get too deep into the minutiae there, both because the White Mesa Mill is older – opening in 1980 – and also because the main concerns with it are a lot of what you've already heard. Fears that the air is being polluted, waste is being improperly stored, and groundwater is being contaminated.
It's the same story you hear anywhere uranium is processed.
So I still felt like I needed to talk with someone who could share some technical expertise on the matter. Someone who’s worked on the ground with the cleanup of the past, and who could contextualize how that cleanup has guided the present.
Ann Maest: There are improvements in practices, you know, known as so called best practices in mining.
Alec Cowan: This is Ann Maest, an aqueous geochemist. She has experience studying uranium pollution and cleanup at sites in Colorado and New Mexico. She’s also worked as a consultant with nonprofits and state and federal agencies – and studies she’s worked on have helped shine a light on where things like uranium regulations can improve.
Her specific realm of expertise is water quality: one of the chief concerns from environmentalists.
Ann Maest: The mining and milling are not different. In uranium mining and in a lot of other mine types, the rock is crushed and then ground, and then some kind of a chemical process or a kind of physicochemical process happens where the stuff that they really want floats or is somehow removed from the waste. And the waste is often known as tailings.
So the tailings are saturated with water often, or I would say almost always. And then in general, they're put out onto the landscape, generally in unlined impoundments.
Alec Cowan: One of the main sources of past pollution came from those impoundments, or what are also called tailings piles, where the leftover and radioactive byproducts of uranium are stored in perpetuity.
Historically, those piles have often lacked a protective liner along the bottom, which let those harsh pollutants seep into nearby water sources, like rivers and underground aquifers. Once that happens, Ann says it becomes a never ending cleanup process.
Ann Maest: You pump out the water to a treatment plant, then you treat it and you discharge clean water, but you can pump and pump and pump. But because of all the constituents that are adhered to the aquifer, the rock materials, it takes a really long time, you know, eventually, you know, it takes forever essentially to get that cleaned out. And that's the situation that we're facing in a lot of the areas that have been mined for uranium in New Mexico and Colorado.
Alec Cowan: Now there have been updates in the mill licensing process over the years. The main federal agency in charge of those standards is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC. And to environmentalists’ point, the most recent licensing updates were made in the 1980s.
Those regulations say that private companies have to submit the design of their tailings piles as part of their license application. Furthermore, companies are responsible for cleaning up any contamination, and the plans for that cleanup have to be approved by the government.
As for George Glasier’s part, he said that the liners of the past were just single plastic layers, like what you'd use in a garden. He said that the new standards are totally different, and he was even looking at taking an extra step to dry the tailings, extracting all that liquid that makes leakage an interminable problem.
As for the end of a mill's life cycle, the NRC requires the Department of Energy to develop a long term surveillance plan, keeping an eye on the site into the future.
But for Ann, focusing on the future feels like it's pushing aside the past. Many sites that have long stopped operating, including the Homestake site that Ann is working on in New Mexico today, are still leaking pollution into water sources. And figuring out how to monitor and fix those sites for the foreseeable future is a problem that's still being worked out.
So if scientists, companies, and government agencies are already struggling with catching up, can we really put more on our tab for the future?
Ann Maest: When people think about uranium, they think about its end use as an energy source. What they forget about is, you know, kind of the beginning of the cycle, which is pulling the ore out of the ground and crushing and grinding it and putting the waste on the surface and all of that.
True state of the art best practices would limit the extent and the severity of contamination from uranium mining, but I think of it as entropy, you know, it's like the second law of thermodynamics. I mean, it's just really hard to control when you have that much material that you're moving. And it's that close to resources that we care about, like groundwater, surface water, air.
I mean, I'm not saying that we should be mining uranium at all, but if we're going to go forward with it, then we should clean up the messes from the past. You don't want to clean a floor of a house, for example, if you have dirt falling down from the ceiling.
Alec Cowan: Companies say things can be better. And looking at the Department of Energy, from which companies have to lease uranium mines on public land, they'd agree.
Their own analysis, based on a years long, court ordered environmental survey, says modern uranium mining has a “negligible to moderate” impact on the environment. Additionally, their uranium leasing program emphasizes that in order to even get a lease, a mine has to go through site specific environmental and public review. On top of that, there's a remediation bond required for a lease. Basically a down payment on future cleanup.
But many are still wary. Uranium by nature has an impact wherever it is mined and milled. And even if operations are minimal and follow the rules to the letter, isn't any impact too much?
That brings us to a broader crisis looming over the entire issue, and that's climate change. The price of uranium is skyrocketing today because countries around the world are turning to nuclear energy as a climate friendly alternative to fossil fuels.
And along with the minerals that go into electric batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines, uranium is at the center of an existential question about how we source the green energy of the future. Is uranium mining the lesser of two evils? Is the promise of more efficient energy enough to justify the possible pollution and radioactivity?
I'll look for an answer, after a final break.
Pt 3: The Future
Alec Cowan: Over the year plus that I've been working on this project, it's been hard to keep up with uranium news.
News Footage: Now we have to provide a pathway to enhance domestic nuclear fuel production.
Alec Cowan: New mines, and protests against them, are constantly making headlines.
News Footage:This nation is looking to boost uranium production here in the United States.
News Footage: Our lives, our future, our water, our air, our plants, that's, all of this is important in terms of who we will be tomorrow.
Alec Cowan: Congress is constantly passing incentives to spur uranium production, from banning Russian uranium imports to changes in centuries old mining laws.
News Footage: The EPA estimates that 40 percent of our western headwater streams Are negatively affected by abandoned minds.
Alec Cowan: I'm relatively new to this entire world, but to my naive sensibilities, it feels like there's something unique going on
Rod Ewing: In the last four or five years, the enthusiasm seems to me to be higher than I've ever seen it.
Alec Cowan: This is Rod Ewing. He's a professor at Stanford's School of Sustainability, and a co director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He mostly studies critical metals and nuclear waste.
And I reached out to Rod because I wanted to ask him the big picture question about climate change, and how nuclear energy fits into our goals for fighting it.
Rod Ewing: The attraction of nuclear energy is the energy density. So comparing nuclear to, say, just chemical reactions, that is, burning natural gas – you get a million times, roughly speaking, more energy out of the same volume of material.
So this is really no surprise that there's enthusiasm for trying to harness this.
Alec Cowan: Across the world, governments are setting ambitious goals to pivot off of fossil fuels and rapidly build a green energy ecosystem. But follow any conversation on the subject, and things will eventually turn to nuclear power – the elephant in green energy's room.
To Rod's point, proponents say it's the most effective form of energy production available… the only way we can meet the electricity demands of the future. And on top of that, it's often considered carbon free, but opponents say it's not very green when you consider the on the ground impacts, both before and after the actual energy is produced, that is, the front end uranium mining and the back end waste.
Rod says those are one and the same.
Rod Ewing: The front end of the fuel cycle and the environmental effects of mining is just, I would say, another version of what to do with radioactive material, either as you mine it or as you try to dispose of it. The numbers roughly are something like 39 different sites in 35 states, still have the spent fuel that was generated.
The volume is relatively small, all things considered. More importantly, the level of radioactivity is quite high.
Alec Cowan: As of now, 54 nuclear plants produce just under 20 percent of the United States’ electricity. And the current federal government would like to see that increase, along with sources like wind and solar power.
But Rod says that green energy expansion isn't as straightforward as just building anything and everything as soon as we can, even considering the existential crisis of climate change.
Every country is dealing with a range of opportunity costs when it comes to the resources available for a green energy transition. And as of now, we have a piecemeal approach to energy. Projects, incentives, and targets are largely left up to state and local governments.
Rod says that without a national plan guiding those decisions, that makes the margin for error that much more acute.
Rod Ewing: For many reasons, the year 2050 has taken on some significance as a time when we have to have met our goals in order to avoid tipping points that will take the planet to even higher temperatures. And so, from a technology point of view, the question to nuclear is: can you meet that timescale?
Now, one can be optimistic or pessimistic. Recently, at the COP28 meeting, the U.S. and I think some 20 other countries committed to tripling, uh, nuclear power across the world. I presume tripling the present capacity, which is around 400 reactors around the world – so 1,200 reactors, by 2050… that means you have to be plugging a reactor into the grid about once a week.
What we need is a strategy where we decide what the role of each type of energy might be. Because the United States is not so rich that we can place a huge bet on nuclear, and fail. Because that huge bet on nuclear takes away from other possibilities.
Alec Cowan: Compounding that lack of a unified energy strategy is the lack of a national plan to store radioactive waste – those dozens of sites currently sitting across dozens of states.
There have been efforts to build one repository for all of the country's nuclear refuse. The idea being that fewer overall waste is collected.
That includes a high profile attempt to build a giant repository inside a place called Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But even as the Yucca Mountain project has actually been built, the use of it has been mired in paperwork and public pushback since it was approved more than 20 years ago.
The reality is that nobody wants nuclear waste in their backyard – but nobody can agree on where to put it, either.
That dilemma gets at a broader problem with green energy right now. Solar farms are being moved to protect local prairies. Wind farms are being downsized to protect bird populations. And hydroelectric dams are being breached to restore salmon habitats. And that's not even mentioning the extractive industries that build those green technologies.
To be frank, there's no solution to climate change without some kind of sacrifice somewhere. And so the current debate is on which of those sacrifices communities are willing to tolerate – a good solution in place of a perfect one.
All in all, Rod says that finding that balance between impact and ingenuity is something the entire world is dealing with right now.
Rod Ewing: Looking around the world, even at countries that have made good progress, who are pushing ahead, I think the lesson is that… It takes time and hard work. And that's because there are technical issues, which are generally, I think, uh, addressable, but there are also social issues.The public is good at mobilizing quickly, and these projects die as quickly as they start out. But of course they consume time and money.
So, I, I think as a country we need to think carefully about how to interact with the different components of our society in a way that doesn't stop us from doing things, but allows us to do them in a way that's acceptable to most who are affected by it. And I think this idea, as vague as it is, is the most important message that I'd like to leave you with.
Alec Cowan: The perceptions of communities on the ground play an immense role in our atomic future. And in uranium country, the argument over new mines and mills isn't just a matter of scientific studies or whoever shows up to the county meeting with more talking points.
It's really a battle over how the region sees itself, its identity. For example, let's go back to that previous legal battle over the Piñon Ridge uranium mill – which, as a reminder, never ended up being built.
Reading newspaper articles from that time, the issue was framed as Subaru driving hippies against blue collar ranch hands. Jobs versus the environment.
In the end, environmentalist Jennifer Thurston said the conflict created a rift in a place that had more in common than it didn't.
Jennifer Thurston: It was bitter and hard. We would get, oh, just the most horrible emails. People who were supporting the mill were convinced that it was all of just these rich, outsider, gentrifying, rich people types who had taken over Telluride and, and, you know, they were the ones trying to step on poor people and then crush their futures and just keep them down.
But people who were opposed to the mill were working class types, and people like me, people who had lived in the area for decades and decades and didn't want to see the negative repercussions of uranium coming back. It just, in the end, it didn't mean anything. It just made everything worse.
Alec Cowan: The vitriol from that time still has a lingering impact.
For Jennifer, it's led her to be a little less public facing about her work. When I initially reached out for an interview, she was hesitant to chat. She'd had enough of being the token environmentalist in the latest uranium story – another footnote in the sob story of your advanced displacement.
And it's almost a little funny because Jane Thompson, who runs that Uravan Museum in Nucla, was also hesitant to talk about the issue. In her case, it was the opposite reason. Jane thought that people only wanted to talk about Uravan as a pariah and a toxic scar from the past.
As uranium has waned, the area has become much more reliant on recreational tourism, like hiking and biking. It's an image that can come into conflict with the more hardened and traditional history of the area.
And Jennifer Thurston understands that – even if she thinks the end result is a little misguided.
Jennifer Thurston: The sacrifices that people made were really significant, and real. And you know, they sort of were wrapped up in the idea that, uh, you know, this was their patriotic duty. It was a national call. The fact is, they sacrificed their lives, and their health, and they did not receive just compensation… and prosperity did not last.
There's a lot of anticipation and hope from local people who want that development, want those jobs, and their hearts get broken again and again. And I, I don't see any reason at this point why that pattern would change now.
Maybe. Only fools predict the weather.
Alec Cowan: If there's anything my deep dive into Uravan has shown me, it's just how true the unpredictability of uranium truly is. And from my view, as someone who spent the last year jumping into this world, it does feel like the nuclear genie is out of the bottle.
Midway through 2024, three new uranium mines have opened in Arizona and Utah. There's even another mine in Colorado, not too far up the road in Gateway, that's ready to be up and running as soon as permits let it. And despite pushback from environmentalists, the momentum seems to be growing.
And that's understandable. Think about the imagery of climate change: ecosystems wiped out, sea levels rising, extreme weather forcing millions to migrate.
In contrast, the long term crisis of nuclear waste is more subtle. Polluted rivers and aquifers, sure. Potential cancer and birth defects that inconclusively develop over decades.
This reality might seem like the more manageable one because, well… it's the one we're already living in. The government has been playing hot potato with our nuclear problems since the early days of the Manhattan Project. But back then, many atomic towns volunteered themselves as pioneers. They took pride in accepting the risks of the nuclear world in the name of winning the Cold War. And our modern situation kind of feels like it's asking for the same thing.
So with those thoughts on my mind, I want to look at not just the past and present, but a possible future too. And for that, I'm taking a brief trip back home.
Archive Footage: The refining process of yellowcake…
This is the Atomic Legacy Cabin, the latest uranium landmark in my hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado. It's just past an old cemetery on the edge of town, attached to the regional office for the Department of Energy.
Honestly, I've never been to this offbeat corner of town. I never knew the DOE even had an office here. It's almost funny walking through the exhibit, because it covers almost all of the story beats I've been researching over the last year: the geologic process that creates uranium, the secret story of Western Colorado and the Manhattan Project, moving on to the uranium rush and the major cleanup projects nearby.
Archive Footage: Handling the tailings, they got real dry, they were quite dusty. And you go to dump them, there'd be a cloud of dust come up.
Sara Woods: So Legacy Management oversees the stewardship activities associated with remediated nuclear materials.
Alec Cowan: This is Sara Woods. She's a physical scientist with Legacy Management, based here in Grand Junction.
She oversees five sites in the area, which range from this museum to a massive uranium waste pile about 15 miles out of town. The thing I find so interesting about this agency is the fact that they're one of the few characters at the center of uranium's past, present, and future.
Take, for example, the Climax Uranium Mill, which used to be right in downtown Grand Junction.
Sara Woods: The Climax Uranium Mill company actually processed uranium and vanadium in that area for close to 20 years.
Alec Cowan: It's a familiar story by this point. When the industry went belly up, the site had to be remediated.
Sara Woods: They transported over 4 million cubic yards of that material out to the disposal site that is located roughly 18 miles southeast of Grand Junction.
Alec Cowan: As I've mentioned before, Grand Junction and Uravan faced some similar cleanup hurdles. There was the immediate pollution at the mill, which sits on the Colorado River.
But unlike Uravan, the town endured. People found new jobs, the culture changed, the tailings are being cleaned up, and today, the old uranium mill is now a public park. You can go see a weekend concert on a site that once held radioactive waste.
To me, in an uncertain future, that seems like one of the most promising outcomes for a former nuclear site. Here's Sara.
Sara Woods: So LM is essentially here for the long haul. So once a site is remediated and then it is transferred over to legacy management and we are going to oversee these sites and monitor them in perpetuity to ensure protection of human health and the environment, because we do want to return as much land as possible to the public, just like Los Colonias was done back in the 2000s.
Alec Cowan: Yeah. And I think it's just encouraging to know that it is possible to remediate a site. Yes. Very much so
Alec Cowan: In Uravan’s case, oversight from Legacy Management is the final chapter in its story. That giant, empty pile of rocks with the town buried beneath it will be overseen in perpetuity, likely for hundreds of years.
And it's impossible to know if people will be allowed to return and live on the land, if Jane Thompson's museum will move back to where it was intended.
But here in Grand Junction, I do see a glimpse of one way the future could go. The site could be cleaned, the people could stay, and the nuance of how all of it happened can come together at a place like this cabin.
While there are many uranium towns that demonstrate the danger of not cleaning things up, there are sites that show the other side of what feels like a bleak future. And Sara Woods says that's the intention of Legacy Management.
In order for cleanup to work, understanding the good, the bad, and the ugly of the past is critical.
Sara Woods: Essentially, we need to be able to understand our history of these sites in order to ensure that the future work that we do at these sites is meeting every single one of our goals. And so it, it sounds interesting having sites that we set foot on to do inspections and monitoring. And then we also have, you know, the Atomic Legacy Cabin that tells the history of the sites.
But all in one, you need all that information in order to effectively make sure that my kids, my kids’ kids are safe in these areas that were once contaminated, and foster a more informed public.
The Atomic Legacy Cabin in Grand Junction, CO.
A recreation of the cabin’s quarters as they would have been during the Manhattan Project and the subsequent years of the uranium rush.
Alec Cowan: After my trip to the museum, I hop back into my dad's truck. And as I drive through my hometown for my own nostalgia, I begin to realize just how present that uranium history has always been.
There's the local Museum of Western Colorado, where I remember playing in a cave tunnel filled with glowing rocks as a kid. It's obvious now, but turns out that exhibit was a model uranium mine. I then drive by my old high school, which is being demolished and remodeled. One of the people I interviewed told me a rumor that uranium tailings were recently found in its foundations. Which, I wouldn't be surprised. And as this series has been out in the world, more people have reached out to tell me their own homegrown stories of uranium – how their grandparents kept glowing rocks at home, how their backyard is radioactive.
And for me, after talking to so many people, seeing the arguments over the benefits and harms of the atomic past, this once familiar region takes on a new meaning.
In Grand Junction, at least, the recent nuclear boom has become a point of inflection. It's shined a light on the role of uranium towns in building the present, along with their varied perspectives on how to manage the future.
And that piece of this project in particular – the future – has been the most difficult thing for me to make sense of. I keep looking for a bow to tie, but along the way, new developments in uranium just keep coming. And considering its range of uses, from bombs to power, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that more nuance in the story of uranium has led me to less clarity.
When I started this project, it was out of curiosity for what I thought was a ghost town, just without the town. I thought I'd look into why it was demolished and hear what people thought about it. And I did. But the more people I talked to, the more I found that uranium isn't some niche corner of this area's atomic past.
Yes, uranium was dangerous, but conditions also improved. Yes, people who lived in uranium towns got sick, but how much that can be directly linked to uranium is still the subject of study and debate. And the long term questions, like if climate change justifies nuclear waste, and if there will be support for those who have, and may get sick – they don't feel like they have definitive answers.
And as of now, it's just impossible to close the door on Uravan’s past, as long as new ones keep opening for the boomtowns of the future.
So, I've come to accept that the story here is far from over. And the questions that the people of this region are asking over radioactivity, safety, the environment.. their context has changed, but they're the same questions that have been asked since the uranium rush first started. So I guess, why stop now? For better and for worse, the uranium in the ground and out of it isn't going anywhere soon.
So maybe chasing that future is next for me. And next for Boom Town.
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Boom Town: A Uranium Story, is reported, written, and produced by me, Alec Cowan. Original music for this series is also by me, with this guitar track played and recorded by my dad, Ron Hayes.
A huge thanks to friends and family who have taken the time to listen over the past year and provide feedback on the series. And Boom Town is far from done. If you have suggestions for Uranium stories to follow and report on in the future, drop me a line at acpodprojects at proton. me. And as always, thank you for listening.
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UPDATE: An earlier version of this episode mischaracterized the latest developments in the licensing process for the Piñon Ridge uranium mill. It originally summarized the final decisions around the mill’s radioactive materials license as “drawn out legal battles” leaving the site “in a continued state of limbo.” For clarity and accuracy, it has been updated to reflect that the license was revoked entirely in 2018 on environmental grounds, specifically related to its risks to the air, water, soil, and wildlife.