Ep. 2: Company Town
Union Carbide was one of the giants of the uranium mining industry. This photo — picturing a hand taking the “pulse” of the canyon — accompanied a magazine advertisement beckoning workers West to dig for the element.
After World War II, uranium became one of the most sought-after elements in the world — and in the sparse canyons of the four-corners region, uranium company towns began to mine the ore for the U.S. Government. The 1950s were the golden years, when rich “uraniumaires” bought private jets and anybody could go from country rags to riches. But before long, the uranium rush would come crashing down.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: If I were to ask you to name the number one tourist attraction in Colorado, what would your answer be?
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The awesome power of the nuclear explosion has been harnessed and is being used to benefit all our lives.
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Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we've all thought that, one way or another.
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Our country is dependent upon the uranium industry and the uranium miners for a continuing adequate supply of this magic element.
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Alec Cowan: What was it like down there?
Howard Stephens: In the mine?
Alec Cowan: Yeah.
Howard Stephens: …If you ever want to see dark, go into any mine and turn off your light.
Alec Cowan (narrating): Howard Stephens worked in the uranium industry for more than 30 years. Today, he's retired and living in Grand Junction, where I met him for an interview. And like many miners in Western Colorado, his story with uranium began pretty early.
Howard Stephens: They used to have a dad-son day. And my dad was a surveyor, and I went when I was 12 years old, went underground, to eat lunch with my dad and the miners who were underground – I was just a little kid.
And, the miners that were there started teasing me, you know, wanting my sandwich and things like that.
Alec Cowan: Howard did pretty much every job you could for a company called Union Carbide. He supervised uranium refinement, worked in uranium mills, and he helped burrow deep into the sandstone cliff sides.
Howard Stephens: It was like a cave.
It's unlike mines… gold, silver, lead and zinc where you have actual veins. It's more like a coal mine that follows a river. It'll go, wander right and left and up and down. Sometimes it would take years, sometimes it would take, you know, just a few months depending on how big their bodies were.
Alec Cowan: What is uranium? I've never actually seen it. What does it look like?
Howard Stephens: Black. Sometimes blackish yellow, sometimes blackish green, and then the way you find it, you use a Geiger counter and then it'll, it'll set the Geiger counter off to, you know, pretty high, so you know, you know, you're, you're in a pretty good ore.
Alec Cowan: The first atomic bomb dropped on Japan was a showcase of incredible power. In seconds, the surface temperature beneath the bomb was just over 12, 000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Tragically, 70,000 people died instantly, and the mushroom cloud was visible from over 400 miles away.
Yet inside the bomb, only 2% of its uranium achieved the critical mass needed for an explosion. 2% of the bomb's full potential created this destruction.
For a time after this, uranium would become a symbol of a new era of safety and prosperity. It was a peak of scientific progress and military prowess.
So a rush was soon coming to the uranium heartland of the American West. And if you were lucky, you got to live in your own uranium town, become your own uranium millionaire.
But this era wasn't without its controversy.
Alec Cowan: Was there a lot of pride in uranium because of that kind of history?
Howard Stephens: Initially, yes, they were very proud.
Bob Ince: Nobody was sitting there thinking about the repercussions for digging this nifty mineral out of the ground, you know, and make an atomic bomb.
It was it was a way to make a living.
Eva Fernandez: It was it was raising your family, it was providing for your family. It was doing everything that you needed to do to survive. I'm
Alec Cowan: Alec Cowan, and this is “Boom Town: A Uranium Story.”
Episode 2: Company Town.
“Union Carbide's uranium mill at Uravan, Colorado, is one of the largest on the Colorado Plateau. c. 1976.” (Flickr/Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Pt. 1: Striking Rich
Alec Cowan: Of the 141 pounds of uranium in the original atomic bomb, only 14 percent was mined in the United States.
That's why the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, was created in 1946. They were in charge of making sure the uranium going into the country's nuclear weapons was actually sourced in the United States.
Up to this point, most of the country's uranium was sourced from small company towns – places like Uravan in Colorado, so named because of the ore it produced.
But the country was now in an arms race with the Soviet Union. So the government needs another major resource: people.
Michael Amundson: So they don't want government to do it.
Alec Cowan: History professor Michael Amundson.
Michael Amundson: But they want to incentivize normal people to do it.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: With the nation in need of uranium, the Atomic Energy Commission decided to open up the plateau, offering miners profitable prices for their ore. over the plateau are the signs of men who stake their hopes on the uranium search.
Alec Cowan: This is an excerpt from a promotional film from Union Carbide — a uranium mining company — called “The Petrified River.” It was basically a corporate documentary on how to become a uranium miner.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: This is an industry which did not exist a few short years ago. An industry that has brought to this area enterprising men, modern equipment, new mines, and expanding mills. Mills that work day and night. Night to extract from mountains of war, a substance precious beyond imagination, or in it is locked.
The energy that created our universe. Energy that was born far out in space.
Michael Amundson: You don't really have to have any special skills. You can find uranium with a Geiger counter.
Alec Cowan:With the Atomic Energy Commission’s sign-off, anyone could come to the Colorado Plateau and comb the hillside for what was basically a new kind of gold.
Michael Amundson: It had to be purchased by the federal government because it was a national security metal.
Alec Cowan: The government sets up a number of official buying outposts throughout the Colorado Plateau. These are in places like Grand Junction, about 90 miles north of Uravan. There was also a small Mormon settlement in Utah called Moab.
If you found uranium ore, you'd take it to one of these outposts to sell it.
Michael Amundson: They set up basically a price structure that will assure that people, anybody who finds it will make a profit.
Alec Cowan: And those profits were big.
Michael Amundson: You read stories in like the Saturday Evening Post. Buy a Geiger counter, go off on weekends, go hiking in the backcountry… and just test rocks as you're going and maybe you'll start getting rich. You get a $10,000 bonus from the government for finding it? I mean, buy a lot of Cadillacs for $10,000.
Bob Ince: You went in there and you just worked and worked. You know, because the farther you went in a day, the more money that you made.
Alec Cowan: This is Bob Ince. His father owned a handful of uranium mines in western Colorado. He's also a long time friend of my dad's.
Bob Ince: We met when, uh, I was 15. That's probably almost 45 years (laughs).
Alec Cowan: Bob lived in the small town of Gateway, Colorado. Close enough to Uravan you might as well call them neighbors.
Bob Ince: There was a little bit of agriculture, you know, uh, cattle and stuff like that… but everybody was into the mining scene. Everybody you knew was a miner.
Alec Cowan: The way Bob tells the story, his father lucked his way into the uranium business. It started with a hog farmer on the other side of the Rockies.
Bob Ince: And he called my dad Mickey, he said, ‘You know something, Mickey?’ He says, ‘Well, I'm gonna get you a little money, and we're gonna get you a mine, and we're gonna make some money in it.’
Alec Cowan: Well, there was definitely money in it. Bob was involved from an early age. On Sundays, he would visit the mines with his dad to make sure things were safe. The pumps were working, no water leaking into the shafts. And after high school, he was a full-fledged employee, scoping out new veins of uranium.
Bob Ince: It looked like gray sandstone. But I've also seen uranium look like a mosaic, and in some cases they would get into what they call pitch blend and it would look close to coal.
You'd go out there and they'd drill some holes and then they'd pay a crew of four guys to go in there and they'd say, we'll pay you $85 for every foot of, uh, of tunnel that you dig.
We were very poor. At the end, my dad had an airplane and we had vacation houses in Mexico. So, you know, there was a big disparity of where we started and where we finished.
Alec Cowan: Several journalists called these new miners “uraniumaires.” The most famous of these was a guy in Moab named Charlie Steen. Newspapers at the time reported him taking his personal plane all across Utah and Colorado, just for one off errands. Things like laundry, rumba lessons.
But uranium became a symbol for more than just money. It was a poster child of the Cold War… a point of American pride.
Michael Amundson: You’d read it in just all the, you know, Popular Mechanics, how to build your own Geiger counter. You start seeing it in toys, uranium hauler toy trucks.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: Now don't forget, this is the scintillation counter for sensitive readings.
Michael Amundson: Movies, television shows, music.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: As soon as we find uranium, I'm going to come back and ask you to marry me.
Michael Amundson: Just about any form of pop culture you can think of had something to do with it.
Michael Amundson: I have the Uranium Rush board game, sort of works like Monopoly. You spin a dial, you get little cards… and it may say, you were killed by a mountain lion.
And then once you had found a claim, you would take this Geiger counter — this little flashlight kind of thing — and touch it to the board, which was like Operation. And was electric. And if it lit up, then you discovered uranium and you won.
Alec Cowan: To Amundson, these are collectibles of a bygone era. But they also say something deeper about how the country viewed uranium, and the new nuclear arms race.
Michael Amundson: I think this was part of a disassociation, you know, because what you basically have is the raw materials of mass destruction. Yes, it's for national security, and you get a little bit of that. But it's also, if we actually use any of this stuff, it's going to be World War III… and nobody wants to think about that, so we think about the fun stuff instead.
Alec Cowan: Of course, the new Cold War wasn't far from the miners making that war possible. Bob Ince says that nuclear war was always somewhat present, but mostly abstract. Always a looming threat, but less pressing than the need to put food on the table and gas in the tank.
Bob Ince: We did have a nuclear fallout shelter because, you know, we used to have to do the drills in school and stuff and hide under our desks and everything. We had a bunch of miners around, so they just went in there and dug it.
Alec Cowan: From Bob's view, it wasn't patriotism driving hundreds of miners to the region.
Bob Ince: People were just trying to take care of their families. And I know that's what my dad did, and he worked… 12 hours a day, six days a week, for 20, 25 years.
The men there could work in the mines and their wives didn't have to work. And, you know, they could have the kind of things that make people happy (laughs).
Nobody was sitting there thinking about the repercussions for digging this nifty mineral out of the ground and, you know, and making atomic bombs.
It was... It was a way to make a living.
Alec Cowan: A lucky few became rich off uranium, but hundreds more came to the region for something more reliable than the chance strike on a mountainside.
Although the ceiling wasn't as high, living in a nearby company town would have its benefits, too.
A return to Uravan, after the break.
A movie poster for “Dig That Uranium,” a 1956 film following a series of Wild West mishaps on the hunt for uranium. (Courtesy of Michael Amundson)
Pt. 2: Stable Ground
Bill Barnes Sr.: My father-in-law said there's all kinds of work out here in the uranium industry.
Alec Cowan: Did you know much about uranium?
Bill Barnes Sr.: Not a whole lot. It was a booming place, you know, back then.
Alec Cowan: Today, Bill Barnes Sr. is 95 years old, and originally from Decatur, Illinois. But in 1952, he moved to Uravan.
Bill Barnes Sr.: They had all the blocks, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. And we lived in G Block, which was some of the newer houses. We had a nice three bedroom house.
Alec Cowan: Bill says everyone knew about the history of the war at this point and what the uranium was being used for. Production had ramped up to the point that there were two uranium mills in town, where chunks of ore were processed fresh after mining.
A plant was at the bottom of the valley, near town. And Bill worked in B plant, at the top of the hill that imposed over the small town. This is where the ore was crushed.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: The mill at Uravan, Colorado, one of many.
Bill Barnes Sr.: They had what they called ball mills. It had big, about four-inch diameter balls, probably two or three hundred of these big rotating things. And they dumped the ore in there.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: In huge rotating cylinders, the minerals in the finely ground ore are dissolved with acid.
Alec Cowan: These mills are kind of like giant rotating gumball machines. When ore was placed inside, the balls would pulverize it into a fine sand. Workers would then separate the uranium from the other metals, or what were called tailings, through a somewhat complex chemical process involving big vats of acid, before the final product was dried in a furnace.
What you were left with was a fine powder affectionately called “yellowcake.”
This was uranium at its purest.
Bill Barnes Sr.: Some of the rocks that came in would be… probably 50 pound rocks. Several hundred tons of ore a day went through there.
ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: And thus, the labors of the plateau come to an end.
Alec Cowan: Life in Uravan was different from other uranium towns like Moab. Just over the state line, Moab was a base camp for independent miners to sell their uranium to the government. At first, they started showing up in tents, which eventually turned into houses and businesses, and the town quickly ballooned from just over 500 people to over 6,000.
But in Uravan, Union Carbide was in charge of everything. Like employee housing, for example.
Bill Barnes Sr.: That cost us $38.50 a month.
Alec Cowan: Bill says there's lots of preconceptions about what a company town is. Old mining songs from coal country. “16 Tons,” and “A Company Man.” But Uravan was different. Residents didn't feel like they were at the mercy of a corporation, because there was a lot to do in town.
Like the boarding house next to the mill.
Bill Barnes Sr.: If we worked overtime, we'd go to the boarding house. They had some of the best meals.
Howard Stephens: You could get a meal for… $1.50.
Alec Cowan: Mill Manager Howard Stephens again.
Howard Stephens: You had to get there early because the big guys would eat, would eat all they cooked the first time.
Alec Cowan: Across the street was the post office, and next to that, the center of Uravan life: the rec hall.
Caren Stephens: That rec center was the church, it was the library, it was the downstairs shooting range, it was the roller skating rink, it was the movie theater.
Alec Cowan: This is Caren Stephens — Howard's wife, and an original Uravanian.
Caren Stephens: I grew up there since I was five years old, and we played across the highway, up in the mountains, and we still had, you know, we had those little cave rocks, and our parents didn't worry about us.
Alec Cowan: Uranium was just a facet of everyday life in Uravan. Kids would play on discarded mine equipment next to growing piles of tailings, that fine white sand made of leftovers from the milling process.
And residents even put that sand to use.
Howard Stephens: People would take the tailings, because it was high in nutrients, and put it in their garden, and they could grow the best tomatoes in the world.
Everybody was proud of their gardens in Uravan.
Alec Cowan: Union Carbide eventually turned some of the town's power plant cooling tanks into public swimming pools. In fact, these were the only pools in the area. Kids from down south in Nucla and Naderita would drive the 20 or 30 miles up to Yerevan for a chance to swim in the hot desert summers.
Eva Fernandez: I swam in that swimming pool every summer and walked dirt roads where the trucks were hauling the ore down out of the mountains.
Alec Cowan: Eva Fernandez lives in Kansas today, but she grew up moving back and forth to Uravan. The school she attended was on the opposite side of town from the alphabetic residential blocks.
To get across town, there was a raised metal walkway that crossed the nearby San Miguel River.
Eva Fernandez: The walkways went like right up against the back of Union Carbide and over some of the cleaning tanks. It was like you were walking in trees.
We were blessed during that time. You didn't know what you were living around. That's for sure.
Alec Cowan: By the 1960s, Uravan had grown to 1,000 residents. All of them, with very few exceptions, worked for the same company.
After work, residents would buy groceries from a company store or take their kids to company doctors. Union Carbide brought in entertainment, like the Uravan Miners baseball team, and kept the rec hall fresh with new activities.
Put another way, it was almost impossible to live life in Uravan without the company's fingerprints on something. The only thing the company didn't provide was a police force. That defaulted to sheriffs down in Nucla.
But was all of this just to pacify residents? A distraction from the real reason they were here – making atomic bombs?
Howard Stephens: People knew that the United States needed to get ahead of Russia. That was our biggest competitor at the time on the race to see who could get the biggest, baddest bomb, which was a mistake from both countries. But that's the way it was. And yeah, there was a lot of pride there.
Alec Cowan: Did you feel any of that at the time, yourself?
Howard Stephens: Uh, of course, a small town, you know, small town, you have that, even today they have that there.
Alec Cowan: Pride aside, a lot of residents just didn't have a choice. Uranium was the only game in town, and at least the company made things feel more secure than the ramshackle gold rush elsewhere.
Eva Fernandez: I never really knew what it was.
And then come to find out it was uranium and ore substance, kind of like that, that they used on some of the bombs in the big wars.
It was a job, it was, it was raising your family, it was providing for your family, it was doing everything that you needed to do to survive.
Alec Cowan: By all the accounts I've heard, working for Union Carbide wasn't so bad either.
Bill Barnes Sr. and Howard Stephens again.
Bill Barnes Sr.: It's a beautiful area. We really didn't appreciate it, you know, when we was living out there. I made some good money out there. I loved my job.
Howard Stephens: It was better than most jobs, because you never had a desk to sit at all day long. And, uh, they had an appreciation for the employee and I think even more of an appreciation because during World War II, the country was 100 percent together… and uh we were building a bomb. It takes uranium to build a bomb.
Alec Cowan: But being in a company town would eventually have its drawbacks. Sure, Union Carbide did everything it could to make life in Uravan exciting and affordable. But year by year, a concern was growing.
People were getting sick…
That's after the break.
Pt. 3: Overabundance
Alec Cowan: The mythos of the American West has always been some kind of control. Wrangling of a wild frontier. Cutting down great forests to build cities… strong arming rivers into new directions, and blasting caverns deep into the earth.
By solving the mysteries of uranium, scientists finally had control over the most destructive force the world has ever seen. It was truly a final frontier, and the optimism around the uranium boom felt like the dawn of something incredible.
Michael Amundson: There had been thoughts that we're all going to have nuclear cars, we're going to have nuclear airplanes, we're going to have nuclear trains, we're going to have nuclear power, there's going to be all of this demand.
Alec Cowan: In the wake of World War II, there were only two uranium mills supplying the government's stockpile. But by the 1950s, that increased to 23 mills, and the government was bringing in thousands of tons of uranium. millions of pounds.
With so much ore in hand, officials needed something else to use it for. And not only that but countries like Britain, Canada, and the Soviet Union were developing the next generation of atomic bombs, which were magnitudes stronger than the first models.
So while countries wanted defense, they also wanted de escalation. And so in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood in front of the United Nations and gave a speech that would reverberate through history.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower: My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreement. Not wars among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their own way of life.
Alec Cowan: Over 25 minutes, Eisenhower laments the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In particular, He cautions against what we know today as mutually assured destruction, the total decimation of any and all sides in a war. Instead, he called for a pivot from atoms of destruction to atoms for peace.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower: To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma.
To devote its entire heart and mind. To find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.
Alec Cowan: This pivot eventually led to nuclear power and fueled the dreams of an advanced atomic future. But of course, few of those dreams became reality.
The technology needed to harness chain reactions like nuclear fission and nuclear fusion just wasn't developing fast enough. And so the uranium industry began to hit a wall.
Michael Amundson: They need very little of it for weapons. By 1956, we are in oversupply. There's too much uranium.
Alec Cowan: You're familiar with the concept of a monopoly, when you can only buy from one person or company.
But there's another concept called monopsony, and that's when you can only sell to one person. In just 10 years, the U.S. government was drowning in uranium. And if you're a uranium miner, what do you do when you signed a contract, but your only buyer says they don't need any more? This is when the uranium bubble started to burst.
Michael Amundson: There's a great quote I read in this uranium magazine, which was an industry magazine. If you have your contract in 57, you're in habit. Got it in 58, you're too late. Which, you know, it just shows you how, how quickly those things change.
Alec Cowan: A boom and bust cycle would go on for the next 20 years.
When scientists developed nuclear power and began building plants and cement towers across the country, the industry once again found a buoy to keep things afloat. But then those hit capacity too.
So uranium just became too unreliable. The good stuff was all mined, and there wasn't much left for it to be used for anyway.
Towns like Moab quickly pivoted, which is fortunate when you have Arches and Canyonlands National Parks right next door. And Uravan was somewhat shielded as well.
Michael Amundson: It never boomed and never busted as much as other places because it's not a free market. Right. It's, it's the company, it's a company down controlled by Union Carbide.
Alec Cowan: But that's when an even bigger problem appeared.
Michael Amundson: The town was built around the processing plant and the processing plant had environmental problems associated with hauling uranium and processing it into yellow cake. Plus, the town's basically built on it.
Alec Cowan: People started getting sick with lung cancer.
The earliest miners in the 1950s had the worst of it. They were deep underground, using Geiger counters to guide their way. All the while, they were breathing in uranium dust and radioactive radon gas, which they'd trapped in their lungs. But then that ore was taken elsewhere, hauled in the trucks that drove through town, crushed into tailings the residents put in their buildings and gardens.
Of course it would be. This was the uranium heartland of the country. Uranium was the water you swam in.
Eva Fernandez again.
Eva Fernandez: The grass was always green. I never look back at my time living in Uravan as a young child as being sinister. There was nothing really sinister about it. It was just a normal neighborhood.
Alec Cowan: As the uranium industry was in constant flux, it became harder for Union Carbide to justify keeping Uravan open. And with the health risks mounting, it was clear something had to change.
But residents had no idea just what it would come to.
Michael Amundson: They're really starting to look at, at Uravan and saying, oh boy, this, this is going to be, this could be a problem. And Uravan’s going to be in danger.
Alec Cowan: As the Cold War dragged on, the national attitude toward uranium did a 180. And those who mined it were left in the literal dust.
Caren Stephens: We would start to hear little rumors that they were going to start laying people off, but not everybody was sure why. And then all of a sudden, um, I think there was an announcement that came out.
I don't know if they went from building to building, but told us that we, you know, they were going to shut down Uravan.
Alec Cowan: Do you remember kind of hearing the news that the town was basically going to be demolished and buried underground?
Alec Cowan: That's next on Boom Town: A Uranium Story.
——
Boom Town: A Uranium Story is reported, written, produced, and scored by me, Alec Cowan. This guitar you're hearing now is played and recorded by my dad, Ron Hayes. And up next is episode three, In the Air.
Caren Stephens: Years later, people started thinking, you gotta get this cancer from this. Did my kids have nosebleeds from this?
Tandie Van Sell Morgan: I don't sound like a hick or whatever, but I think it was totally unnecessary. ‘Everybody's gonna die of radiation poisoning, we gotta shut it down.’
Dr. John Boice: Uranium is everywhere. It's ubiquitous.
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)
Uranium Boom (1956 movie)
The Petrified River (1957)
Copyright Alec Cowan 2024