Ep. 3: In the Air
“Uranium miner's safety research includes testing filters and respirators in mines as well as in the laboratory. c. 1969” (Flickr/U.S. Department of Energy)
By the 1980s, uranium towns like Uravan had weathered a few booms and busts. The promises of the atomic future – like flying cars and limitless electricity – weren’t coming to fruition. Along the way, health professionals began to notice that miners were dying from cancer at alarming rates. As radiological science improved and regulations were put in place, it was clear that uranium posed a health risk to those who mined and lived in uranium towns – but just how much is still a point of contention.
Episode Transcript
Archive Footage: This is the news station WNEP 16.
Alec Cowan: On March 28th, 1979, a slow-moving disaster began at 4 o'clock a.m.
Archive Footage: There are people, there are hundreds of people out there with survey meters. And, and all this information is coming in.
Alec Cowan: It was at Three Mile Island, just outside Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Due to a single pressure valve, the island's nuclear reactor core went into a partial meltdown.
Archive Footage: The news tonight is not encouraging. To sum it up in a word, it is still confusing from Harrisburg.
Alec Cowan: Inside, the uranium fuel pellets used to create energy and drive the plant's turbines began creating an uncontrollable amount of heat. This brought the rest of the facility to a standstill. And then, amidst the panic, plant workers chose to release a buildup of xenon and krypton gas into the open air.
Archive Footage: One EPA's recommended guide, I believe, is 1,000 over the course of the incident.
1,000 millirems?
Alec Cowan: Soon after, one word began to grip the world. Radiation.
Archive Footage: Throughout the day, chaos and confusion reigned as monitors tried to determine exactly how much radiation was released.
Alec Cowan: Seven years later, a catastrophic meltdown in the fourth reactor at Chernobyl would grip the world with the images of radiation sickness and the fear of cancer.
If the 1950s were a time of exploration into the nuclear world, the 1980s became an era of fear – and not without reason. Here in the United States, more than 100 communities were a cog in the country's nuclear machine.
Thousands of people were subject to atomic bomb tests, nuclear energy production and, of course, uranium mining.
But even today, not everyone agrees on just how dangerous it was to live in an atomic town.
Howard Stephens: It took like 15 to 20 years before the miners started actually getting sick, and then probably another 10 years to study why they were getting sick.
Dr. John Boice: The bottom line of what we found, we found a significant increased risk of lung cancer.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: It doesn't seem like there was any more cancer that come out of the workers there than anywhere else. It's in the dirt, in that area.
Alec Cowan: It's just part of the landscape?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: It's part of the landscape.
Alec Cowan: I'm Alec Cowan, and this is Boom Town: A Uranium Story.
Episode 3: In the Air.
Pt. 1: Just a Number
Alec Cowan: Just to start off, can you tell me your name?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: It's Tandie Van Sell Morgan.
Alec Cowan: Awesome. And so what are your earliest memories of living in Uravan?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: I hated it. We had moved a lot because my dad was in the army, and civil service, and we went to Uravan. And pre-teen attitude, everything went with it… but come to love the place, quite a lot.
Alec Cowan: Like a lot of former Uravan residents, Tandie lives in nearby Grand Junction, Colorado. The place where I grew up.
Here on the western slope of the Rockies, small towns dot the countryside like constellations. And it's not uncommon to move back and forth, depending on whatever industry is hot at the time.
When I grew up, it was oil and gas. But during Tandie’s childhood, in the 1970s, it was uranium.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: What's interesting – and we didn't learn this until after we had moved there – my mom lived there. My grandfather worked in the mines when she was about five and they lived in the Quonset huts. They had metal Quonset huts that they lived in.
Alec Cowan: By the time Tandie’s family had moved there, Uravan had survived quite a bit. The golden years of uranium in the 1950s ended with a thud.
By their own policies, the government was the only entity allowed to buy uranium, and it was quickly in oversupply. The advent of nuclear energy helped keep small ore mining towns afloat, but even that was starting to run thin.
And then there was an issue slowly creeping its way into conversation… radiation.
It's something Tandy is very familiar with.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: Well, my dad was an instrument technician, so he fixed all the gauges and all over the plant and everything. He had to wear a radiation badge all the time.
Alec Cowan: These badges are also called dosimeters.
Inside the badge was film, the kind you'd put in a camera. This would catch radioactive particles from the environment. If the film developed an outline of the badge's case, it was irradiated.
But in a place like Uravan, in the uranium heartland of America – what wasn't radioactive?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: That country is saturated with raw ore, uranium ore. It's in the dirt, in that area.
Alec Cowan: It's just part of the landscape?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: It's part of the landscape. We had, growing up, we had a huge chunk of raw ore as a doorstop.
Alec Cowan: Even a layman could tell these rocks were special. Your run of the mill sediment doesn't glow at night.
But to Tandie’s memory, uranium was more of a novelty than anything else. In a town saturated with ore, radiation was just a number.
For her family, it was basically just a quota.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: The fun memories with that is whenever he'd get irritated with the safety guy, he would take that badge off when he got home at night and lay it on top of the TV. And then put it back on in the morning and turn it in and it would be maxed out.
Alec Cowan: It's hard to say if putting a film badge on a TV would actually have the intended effect of maxing it out. They weren't that sensitive, but they were known to be affected by all sorts of things.
Like if you lived somewhere humid – or if you happened to live in the Colorado desert, where it was hot.
Miguel Morales: So radiation is a funny thing because it's a word – which is a jargon word – that is leaked into popular words. But in such a way that it adds to a lot of confusion.
Alec Cowan: This is Miguel Morales, a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle. I spoke with Miguel to understand more of the science behind radiation, and in particular, how uranium affects the body. And these are the building blocks.
Radiation is categorized according to the electromagnetic spectrum. On the low end are microwaves, radio waves, visible light.
Miguel Morales: So radio wave photons have tiny amounts of energy. If you go up, though, you get to ultraviolet. Now, people all know that ultraviolet's a little dangerous… you can get sunburnt.
The reason is that ultraviolet's starting to get to enough energy that when it comes in, it can break chemical bonds.
Alec Cowan: We're constantly exposed to various forms of radiation. It's how we see, it runs our appliances. But most of that radiation isn't enough to harm our bodies in the way we use them, or break the chemical bonds in our cells.
And sometimes, powerful waves go through us entirely.
Miguel Morales: An x-ray has so much energy it'll break a series of bonds as it kind of makes its way through you.
It also, it can make its way through you… so it's good for taking x-rays of your teeth and your bones and things like that because it will go through you, and uh, in small amounts – not a big deal.
Alec Cowan: But on the most intense end of the spectrum, where elements go from non-ionizing to ionizing radiation, is where we start to talk about radioactive elements, or what are called radionuclides.
These elements emit three things called alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma waves.
I won't get too deep into the minutiae here, but in large doses, these ionizing waves can wreak havoc on our bodies, breaking up the bonds that make up our cells. From a physics perspective, they're all very different things, as are the ways humans can protect themselves against them.
But in the early days of uranium, miners didn't have the luxury of today's science.
Miguel Morales: So in the ‘30s and the ‘40s, you had, you know, a little Geiger counter or something like that. And so it was so hard to measure that if you took something and it said, ‘this is radioactive’... it was pretty radioactive, because it needed to be pretty strong for you to even be able to tell.
And so then if you have something like uranium mining or things like that, they typically the – whether it's uranium or some of the things that they decay into or some of the other things that are found – they release some admixture. So you have alpha, and beta, and gamma, coming out.
Howard Stephens: The problem with exposure like we're talking about, you can't tell in a year, two years, or five years whether it harms the body or not.
Alec Cowan: This is Howard Stephens. He worked with Union Carbide as a safety engineer, living in Uravan.
Howard Stephens: It took like 15 to 20 years before the miners started actually getting sick. And then probably another 10 years to study why they were getting sick.
Alec Cowan: Of course, any mining job has had its dangers through time. The cramped and fragile caverns, the lack of fresh air.
As uranium miners dug deeper into the mountain, gas and dust was getting kicked up and left to hang in the air. Breathing that in was sure to be impacting their health… just like black lung for coal miners.
But there was speculation that those outside of the mines were also at risk. Once it's pulled out of the wall, uranium stays radioactive through every phase of processing. And Uravanians were using the mines’ waste for small projects around the house, and around town.
So as the science around radiation grew, ordinary places began to look less and less safe.
Howard Stephens: We found several garden spots in Uravan that were very radioactive, so those were the first areas that we took care of, to get rid of. And the same thing happened in Grand Junction: they used the tailing pile to bed pipelines. Because, I mean, it's a nice easy sand. They put the pipeline in it and never have to worry about it again for the rest of life because it was bedded in really, really soft sand. And then all of a sudden they'd run a meter over it and it would spike and then they had to go dig all that up and replace it all.
Alec Cowan: Residents found this out in piecemeal ways. Howard has a particular memory from when he was on the local Uravan school board. At this point, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had an agreement with Colorado allowing the state to monitor and license local uranium mills.
And as environment and health standards became more robust, the state wanted to see just how radioactive the town was.
Howard Stephens: And in our grade school, surprisingly, it came back hot.
Alec Cowan: Howard and a state inspector went into the school to get readings. The inspector was armed with a radon meter. Howard had a Geiger counter.
Howard Stephens: And as soon as I walked through the door, it went from, from 12 microcuries to 30 microcuries. Just as soon as I walked through the door. He got, he got, uh, 100 picocuries per liter.
Alec Cowan: …for comparison…
Howard Stephens: 8 was the maximum they could have.
Alec Cowan: As radiological measurements were taken throughout Uravan, including the public buildings and the piles where mine waste was discarded, the results were similar to Howard's.
Close to 10 times higher than the growing state and federal regulations. By industry standards, these levels were considered safe. (Yellowcake Towns, Pg. 151, 157)
But it wasn't just the town the government was worried about. Uravan sat on the San Miguel River, and both the solid and liquid byproducts of uranium were either housed or transported on its banks. So it was possible the environment was radioactive, too.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan has a particular memory about that.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: [Colorado Fish & Wildlife] was trying to find out, and the company was trying to find out, what kind of fish were in the river, and that was surviving. Because, you know, they take water out of the river to run the mill, and then they would put it back in the river.
And so they wanted to know what kind of fish was actually still living there, so they did a fishing competition. And you turned in all your fish that you catch for that day to the company, and you could win prizes and stuff.
Alec Cowan: But then those were used to determine if the river was radioactive? (laughs)
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: Yeah I’m sure that was probably part of the… stuff like that.
Alec Cowan: In discussions about radiation, you’ll often hear an idea that if it was easier to see – like a bright red or neon yellow – it would change our relationship with the radiation around us.
Sur, it can be quantified. You can measure the radiation shedding off something like uranium, but you may need a different number to describe the radiation absorbed by the person mining it. And while those numbers can help set standards, the invisibility of radiation can make it feel innocuous.
For decades, people in Uravan were living with radiation – something as routine as the air they were breathing. But as numbers began to tell a different story, bigger questions emerged.
Was the radioactivity enough to cause widespread or predictable sickness? Was it just in the mines or everywhere in town?
That's after the break.
“Loading car in uranium mine. Scoop dumping ore into car is part of an overhead, mechanical loader (not visible) operated on compressed air brought into the mine by the pipe at the left. c. 1957” (Flickr/U.S. Department of Energy)
“BETTY SCUDDER, TECHNICAL ASSISTANT, READING DOSIMETERS IN THE E,S&H DEPARTMENT [WESTINGHOUSE MATERIALS CO. OF OHIO (WMCO) WAS THE FIRST CONTRACTOR TO RECEIVE ACCREDITATION FOR ITS WORKER RADIATION EXPOSURE MONITORING]” (Flickr/U.S. Department of Energy)
Pt. 2: Occupational Hazard
Dr. John Boice: My first assignment was they sent me to Grand Junction, Colorado.
Alec Cowan: This is Dr. John Boice. He's a radiation epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. John Boice: I've been studying human populations that have been exposed to radiation since the 1970s.
Alec Cowan: That first assignment sent him personally knocking on the doors of former uranium miners. And sure enough, once he was inside, there was radiation.
Dr. John Boice: They were a little elevated, but not so much that you would say, oh my gosh, let's, you should leave the house.
But what was really high that set the meters off was that some of the, uh, former millers or miners had these rocks next to their lazy boy that glowed in the dark.
And they were emitting high levels of gamma radiation from the, you know, the tailings of the rocks and the radium and all the stuff that was in there.
Alec Cowan: In response to the readings he was seeing, Dr. Boice gave out some advice: maybe move the radioactive rock from the recliner to the garage.
With his background in radiation and uranium, it was only a matter of time before he made his way to Uravan, and he'd have an unprecedented amount of data when he got there.
Thanks to Union Carbide providing a company doctor, he'd be looking at documents covering thousands of residents over more than 60 years.
Dr. John Boice: It just goes without saying that's very unique, it's never done in epidemiologic studies where you study everybody in their population and you could identify the population from previous records as well as, uh, milling records and mining records and all of that, and could put that together.
Alec Cowan: Dr. Boice’s study was published in 2007, and followed up on a previous report done in the 1980s.
The two surveys looked at demographic information, things like gender, occupation, how long they lived in Uravan, and their cause of death. They were curious about exposure to radiation from not just the mines, but everywhere in town.
And with those factors in mind, one thing clearly stood out.
Dr. John Boice: The bottom line of what we found, we found a significant increased risk of lung cancer. But the risk was concentrated entirely among those workers who had been underground miners.
So, you know, where they got really high exposures to radon and its decay products.
Alec Cowan: When radionuclides make contact with our bodies, it kills our cells. How those cells are able to heal is what decides the most adverse effects of radiation exposure.
The cells can heal like normal, in which case there's very minimal impact. Or they can mutate, which eventually leads to something like cancer.
For the miners, the uranium they were digging decayed into radon gas, which stuck to dust particles and filled their lungs.
Dr. John Boice: And then it's the alpha particles, which are helium nuclei – two neutrons and two protons – that, they don't travel very far, but when they do, they cause huge destruction of your DNA and mess up all your cells. There's no question.
And then cancer is when the cells get out of control and grow.
Alec Cowan: The thing is, people had been warning about this very problem since back in the 1940s – but nothing was being done about it.
It took until 1967. A bombshell story came out in The Washington Post and made its way all the way up to the Department of Labor. The DOL oversaw the safety of miners alongside the Bureau of Mines.
Here was the story's headline – “Hidden Casualties of Atom Age Emerge; Cancer: Uranium Mine, Occupational Hazard.” If that wasn't enough, this story was just the first in a series by Pulitzer-nominated reporter, John Reistrup.
The backstory here is an interesting one.
It turns out that the Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz, wasn't even aware that the department was in charge of uranium mines, and so they had 20 years of issues to catch up to. It's one of those victories of journalism kind of stories.
But in short, nobody in the government actually knew who was in charge of making sure uranium mines were safe. Any dangers were basically being covered up by ambivalence.
Judson McLaury, a Department of Labor historian, wrote in a DOL paper that because of this mix up, nobody in the Bureau of Mines had even visited a uranium mine.
But after the story, things moved quickly. In the next few years, government agencies came together with company and labor leaders to create the first national standard for radiation exposure.
They called it Working Level, or WL. Basically, the government believed this standard would match the average yearly exposure of everyday Americans. And then there were actual changes to the way mining was done, the biggest thing being ventilation, and it made a huge difference.
Dr. John Boice: Having good ventilation, no question, lowers the risk of developing lung disease, not just from radon, but from the other exposures.
It's been a, you know, it's one of the things in epidemiology, if you remove the exposure, you're going to lower your risk. And so essentially, did it remove the exposure completely? No. You know, there's still, but it's such low levels. It becomes very, uh… it will be very difficult to detect risks in underground miners today because the levels are so, so low in contrast to years gone by.
Alec Cowan: Of course, just passing some regulations doesn't mean they're followed to the letter. I've seen anecdotes that during inspections, company officials would just pull miners topside where their radiation badges wouldn't measure so high. And that in addition to ventilation, which started in the 1970s, miners were encouraged to use respirators – but they weren't required to. And the company wasn't required to warn workers about the dangers of mining, how the dust was known to kill people.
For the workers’ part, Howard Stephens says that by the later decades of Uravan’s history, the mining and milling were safe.
Howard Stephens: If you know what the problem is you can make it safe. It ended up when I was there at 4 working levels a year, which is very safe. And very few miners got sick after that. In fact I don’t know any that got sick after that.
Alec Cowan: But miners weren't the only ones being worried about. It was also likely that the mill's tailing piles, which had been thrown everywhere around town, were slowly emitting radon gas wherever residents decided to put them.
So if exposed miners had been dying, they needed to see if other residents were too. Here’s Dr. Boice’s perspective.
Dr. John Boice: The poison's in the dose. The dose is really low. And even though you can be exposed to levels two times back, natural background radiation, it's still very, very low.
And so in the studies that we conducted in, we'll say in Uravan itself, we did study people like the, the, the female spouses. We did study the nonworkers, you know, the people who ran the post offices and, and the, the stores. And there was no increase in lung cancer or any cause of death among that group.
Alec Cowan: Dr. Boice says they looked at two sources to make that conclusion. The first was leukemia, which can quickly develop even with low doses.
They found no excess rates in Uravan when compared to the national average. The second factor was the inhalation and ingestion of uranium itself.
Dr. John Boice: And so what you would look for for that would be damage to the kidneys. Because uranium, you know, there's two parts of uranium. It's radioactive, but it's also a heavy metal, and heavy metals, it's shown they can go through your kidneys and smash them and cause disruption.
Alec Cowan: When he looked at kidney disease or cancers, they didn't find any increases throughout Uravan's population. The rates were on par with nonuranium towns. And Dr. Boice says this wasn't just true for Uravan.
He went on to complete studies in Grants, New Mexico. He also looked at uranium mining operations in Texas. Both reinforced their findings in Colorado: that there was an increased risk of lung cancer for minors, but minimal risk for everyday townspeople.
But it's on this point that I want to pause for a second, and it's for a fact that caught me off guard because of just how relevant it was for me.
And everyone else, too.
Dr. John Boice: Uranium is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. When we drink water, we're drinking uranium. When, when, when we eat, you know, high concentrations of uranium? Potatoes. I love potatoes. I mean, it's just really low level stuff. We don't worry about it whatsoever, but it's there all around us. And those low levels are little to no consequence.
Alec Cowan: When Dr. Boice told me this, I was kind of stunned. Not just because of how commonplace it was – like, yeah, potatoes are great. But because it upended the way I think about radiation, I'm from a generation that grew up in the wake of the world's worst nuclear disasters, so radiation still felt like a dangerous word to me. Anything nuclear carried with it the baggage of meltdowns, bombs, and World War III.
And Dr. Boice said that feeling isn't uncommon.
Dr. John Boice: Whether it's the media or it's the concern about, um, teenage mutant ninja turtles or Spider-Man, there is a concern about radiation and the bad outcomes. I understand that, that we have to be concerned, but that's then a focus more on weapons and weapons control and radioactivity and limiting it and downsizing.
Alec Cowan: Dr. Boice told me to think about the ways that our modern use of radiation can actually be useful… something we can use to cure the very thing Eurovanians were concerned about.
Dr. John Boice: You hear the media say, ‘Deadly radiation was found.’ ‘This hazard, very hazardous radiation was found around Uravan.’ I mean they would say things like that.
Whereas when they treat your cancer with radiation, they don't say the healthy radiation rays that are curing you or when you're getting a diagnosis, you know, with a CT scan or something, the life-giving radiation that will help diagnose whether you have an issue.
So there's a disconnect there, you know, it's the two-edged sword.
Alec Cowan: That said, there's one final factor that complicated the study in Uravan. This was an era when everyone smoked, and the study even points that out. Of the residents, researchers could verify as smokers, they smoked about 20 cigarettes a day – a full pack.
Oftentimes, miners smoked while they were underground radon gas. That exposure did double duty on their lungs. And not only that, but broader studies point out that in general, minors everywhere face more health problems from breathing and vehicle exhaust.
So how do you know which cancer was caused by smoking and what was from uranium? And, did it matter?
Here's Howard and Caren Stephens again.
Howard Stephens: Everybody smoked. You know, it, it, Sunday morning after church, as soon as the church was over, all the men are out on the porch steps smoking cigarettes, you know, nobody knew it was dangerous.
Caren Stephens: We didn't worry about the sickness or, you know, how years later people started thinking, did I get this cancer from this? Did I get, did my kids have nosebleeds from this? We didn't worry about that. We didn't think about that.
We just, we had a happy life.
Alec Cowan: Yeah, it was just, life just went on.
Yeah, yeah.
Alec Cowan: For residents like Tandie Van Sell Morgan, whose father wore that radiation badge to work, the radioactive nature of Uravan is still a contentious topic.
As time wore on, the town's reputation became one of radiation, sickness, and death. And it wasn't long before other towns in Western Colorado started Uravan for bringing radiation and cancer to the region.
And that’s understandable. Few communities got to have a nuclear neighbor. And if someone you knew was diagnosed with cancer, it wouldn't be hard to point a finger at the uranium town upriver.
So residents got used to the looks and comments from outsiders.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: We were in high school. We had a couple of new teachers that came in. And one was a science teacher, and one was an art teacher. They'd, they'd told us in class that the whole problem, what was wrong with us kids was the uranium cloud coming from over Uravan.
Just total BS.
Alec Cowan: So, so not everyone was pleased with having Uravan nearby, it sounds?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: Um, well, they weren't, but they were transplants. They lasted one year and then they were gone.
Alec Cowan: Uravanians felt like they had all the answers. Tandie recognized that the miners saw the worst of it. And that made sense to most folks.
But a lot of people, people like her, also did just fine. And that felt like enough proof that Uravan was safe. Anything that came in conflict with that belief could be shrugged off as coincidence… even if it was close to home.
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: I know that they say a lot of cancers come out of it and stuff, and my dad had cancer. But to me it doesn't seem like there was any more cancer that come out of the workers there than anywhere else. You have families there that homesteaded and have been there for generations that are still there.
Alec Cowan: Yeah. So then for you and your father, never really thought that any cancer was caused specifically by it?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: Not really.
Alec Cowan: Generations of workers made a comfortable life out of this small canyon in the desert. And from the beginning, the ore they dug up allowed them to survive. Sure, it was dangerous work. Most residents made peace with that reality just fine. But throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, studies continued to be done, and the results were mixed.
A New York Times story from 1984 reports that there were two studies done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Environmental Protection Agency. Those studies corroborated that there weren't excess cancer rates. But a third study made it all the way to Congress in Washington, D. C. The results said that uranium exposure was leading to a spike in birth abnormalities throughout pockets of Western Colorado, leading to things like cleft lips and palates and lower birth rates.
Studies are still being done today to see if there's a link between uranium exposure and health effects like cancer or birth defects.
Not to throw too many numbers at you, but a 2001 meta-study from the United Kingdom's National Academy of Sciences looked at the cancer rate for more than 100,000 people exposed to uranium in the U.S. and the U. K. They found no increase in cancer risk. But the study adds a caveat that by their nature, these kinds of backward-looking studies will always lack important data… the kind of data that could only be measured when these towns were fully operational and before regulations were put in place and cleaning them up.
Over the years, extensive studies have also shown severe spikes in birth defects around areas like the Navajo Nation, where companies oversaw some of the most reckless and haphazard uranium mining. Many of the mines in that region have yet to be cleaned up. And over the decades, cancer rates have spiked.
But at the time, with mixed results aside, in the ‘70s and ‘80s state and federal agencies were creating more stringent standards for radiation exposure. And even as Union Carbide said it would meet those new standards, agreeing to invest millions of dollars in cleaning nearby tailings, the market wouldn't be favorable for them, either.
So a decision was made. Uravan was shutting down.
That's after the break.
“WORKER PACKAGES THE URANIUM OXIDE IN DRUMS FOR SHIPPING. URANIUM ORE IS PROCESSED TO EXTRACT THE URANIUM OXIDE ("YELLOW CAKE") WHICH WHEN FURTHER PROCESSED AND ENRICHED BECOMES NUCLEAR REACTOR FUEL. THE MILLING PROCESS ALSO PRODUCES MILL TAILING, AN UNUSABLE RESIDUE OF THE MILLING PROCESS.” (Flickr/U.S. Department of Energy)
“THICKENER TANKS AT THE KERR-MCGEE URANIUM PROCESSING PLANT. URANIUM ORE IS PROCESSED TO EXTRACT THE URANIUM OXIDE ("YELLOW CAKE") WHICH WHEN FURTHER PROCESSED AND ENRICHED BECOMES NUCLEAR REACTOR FUEL. THE MILLING PROCESS ALSO PRODUCES MILL TAILINGS, AN UNUSABLE RESIDUE OF THE MILLING PROCESS.” (Flickr/U.S. Department of Energy)
Pt 3: Closure
In the 1970s, two things began to happen in the uranium world. One is Three Mile Island, and the scare that created. And then there was a change in the government.
For decades, the government had a hard line of only purchasing American uranium from American mines.
Michael Amundson: Starting in the ‘70s though, free market types are starting to say we need to end these kinds of protectionist models and open markets.
Alec Cowan: History professor, Michael Amundson.
Michael Amundson: Well, once that happens and we start opening up free markets for uranium, we start finding out that other countries can produce it cheaper than we can, because they have higher grade and lower environmental standards.
Alec Cowan: With that hurdle out of the way, it became much harder for companies like Union Carbide to make a profit off of towns like Uravan. Not only are they subsidizing housing, but they're providing all the essential services in town.
The company had already weathered a few boom and bust cycles until the 1980s, but with the added risk of health, it was hard to make an argument for keeping Uravan open.
Michael Amundson: They're a one-industry town. And as long as that industry is great, it's good, but when it goes under, you're in trouble.
Alec Cowan: When, uh, did you first get notice, um, what, when, when did that first start to happen?
Howard Stephens: Uh, okay, this is by, by memory. We, we got, we got notice, I, I believe it was in 1986. And Union Carbide and the state of Colorado were in negotiations. And they came, they came to an agreement.
Alec Cowan: Howard was a safety engineer for Union Carbide, and as state and company officials were deciding just what to do with Uravan, this was the decision that was given to him.
He would check sites around town to gauge their radioactivity, and slowly, the town would be decommissioned. Residents were evicted or transferred to other Union Carbide facilities.
After the town was emptied, it would be designated a “Superfund” site, marking it as one of the most toxic sites in the country. Not only was the soil radioactive from mine tailings and sludge, but it was likely that the groundwater was heavily contaminated.
Buildings would be emptied and buried underground, at least to keep the surface radioactivity in check. But fixing things farther in the ground would be a monumental feat, and it would pose the biggest risk to the people living in Uravan.
So closing the town wouldn't just be about limiting exposure, but limiting the people who were exposed to. This process was called remediation.
Howard Stephens: Uravan was everybody always had these white salt crystals that was hanging out over because of all the water leakage and everything, and, and it was ugly.
And we had, we had trees that was burnt because of, of the process and all that was ugly. It's not there anymore. You don't see it anymore. So, so the project worked. I, I see that.
Alec Cowan: Howard and Caren were some of the very last residents to leave town. And other areas of Colorado were caught up in remediation too.
In total, there were more than 8,000 sites in the U. S. flagged for possible radiation from uranium tailings. In 1984, 7,000 of those sites were in Mesa County, Colorado, and largely in Grand Junction – my hometown.
It's almost a little funny reading about this saga in old stories. To find potential exposures, there was a “scan van” that drove around with the meter, flagging homes and businesses. Uranium was out, the economy was down, and a lot of people were leaving.
But in Grand Junction, a quick fix was a luxury. Because the problem was so widespread in Uravan, the entire town was pulled apart, piece by piece, until eventually, the only thing left was a fence, a plane of dirt, and a small sign telling passersby to keep out.
Caren Stephens: There was a real sadness when we all got our notices. Because we knew that, you know, we couldn't believe that really Uravan was going to be torn apart. You know, we could come back and visit our hometown.
And, but there was a sadness… and then there was, you know, fear, about what are we going to do next, where are we going to go next?
Alec Cowan: Did you know at the time that the Superfund site meant that it was basically going to demolish the whole town?
Howard Stephens: Absolutely. Yes. Every project was already decided and it was approved by, by, uh, the Colorado Department of Health before either signed an agreement, so that was… and it was a good agreement.
The rest of it was, was basically easy. You have a building, you tear it down, you have a meter, you see if the ground's radioactive or not, and you dig until it's gone, and then go on to the next project.
Alec Cowan: Those living in Uravan scattered elsewhere. Many moved down the road to Nucla and Naderita, small towns just south near an area called the Paradox Valley.
They also moved to Grand Junction, which is where I met Tandie, Howard, and Caren. They still take regular trips to the old Uravan site.
Caren Stephens: When we drive through it, you know, I can still see the rocks that, where my house would have been, where the swimming pool would have been, where the tennis, you know, would have been.
It's hard to say goodbye to your hometown because you never can go back to it, you know.
Alec Cowan: Tandie also visits when she can. But while Howard and Caren were understanding of the company's decision, Tandie believes the town wasn't as dangerous as it was made out to be. And this gets into a broader schism between how researchers believe radiation works at low levels.
Basically, some agencies like the EPA believe that low level exposure to radiation can present a measurable risk of developing cancer (Linear No-Threshold Theory). This is based on the extensive data we have from high radiation events, like the health outcomes of those who survived the atomic bombs in Japan.
But others believe there's a threshold, a kind of bar that you have to exceed before our body can no longer handle the radiation.This gets back to the potato example.
Our body already processes a lot of radiation on its own. So it's complicated. Major medical, environmental, and health organizations around the world buy into both philosophies.
And at the end of the day, about 4 in 10 Americans, millions of people, will develop cancer. Many of those cases will have no explanation.
But for people like Tandie, the lack of middle ground is the main issue at play here. Data aside, even if the company couldn't stay open, why demolish the whole thing? Why make everyone leave?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: I don’t mean to sound like a hick or whatever, but I think it was totally unnecessary and, uh, a very sad state of affairs that it just… it was a hysteria thing, you know, around that time. And, ‘Oh my God! Everybody's gonna die, radiation poisoning, we gotta shut it down.’
It's just… you know, when we first moved there, I absolutely despised Uravan. Hated it, because we had to move off and leave our house. It took me about a year, probably, before that gradually started to change.
But Uravan has been home ever since.
Alec Cowan: Uravan wasn't alone. There were dozens of towns across the United States who either mined, enriched, or tested uranium. And soon, they'd be joining a growing list of people who were angry with how their health, their jobs, and their town was handled.
So who was to blame? Was it the companies or was it the government?
It was time to find an answer. That's next on Boom Town: A Uranium Story.
——
Boom Town: A Uranium Story is reported, written, produced, and scored by me, Alec Cowan. The guitar on this song is performed and recorded by my dad, Ron Hayes.
And episode four, “Atomic Frontier,” will be out soon.
Bob Ince: There was some compensation. Let me put it that way. There was compensation for it. And that was, that was when they kind of wiped their hands and said, ‘okay, there you go.’
Kirk Gladwin: They got radiated. There's no question about it. This is something that just doesn't, isn't going to go away because they closed the mine. Or maybe the town, you know, is kind of forgotten about.
Alec Cowan: Thanks for listening.
RECOMMENDED REFERENCES:
Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West (Michael Amundson)
Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Traci Brynne Voyles)
Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos (Judy Pasternak)
URANIUM LEFTOVERS DUG OUT IN WEST (New York Times)
"Tragedy in the Uranium Mines: Catalyst for National Workers' Safety and Health Legislation" (Judson MacLaury)
Uranium Linked to Cancer on Navajo Nation (Mary Calvert)
Referenced Studies:
Mortality among residents of Uravan, Colorado who lived near a uranium mill, 1936-84
Reconstruction of atmospheric concentrations and deposition of uranium and decay products released from the former uranium mill at Uravan, Colorado
Potential Health and Environmental Hazards of Uranium Mine Wastes : A Report to the Congress of the United States
The health hazards of depleted uranium munitions: Part I
Copyright Alec Cowan 2024