Episode 5: The Cost

In the 1970s, sooner or later, almost every strong young guy in Moab went to work at the Atlas Uranium Mill or one of the three hundred mines or the trucking companies providing ore to the mill.

The wages were two dollars and sixty-seven cents an hour, so how could you resist? Four of my neighbors in Castle Valley were working there, too, so we would carpool for the twenty-mile drive down the canyon of the Colorado River to town, where the mill sat hulking beside the river in a poisonous miasma that crept up the river several miles and floated into Moab.

I remember we five big men crammed into one friend's little Datsun pickup truck, sitting on top of one another, heads bent against the windshield so tight that none of us could walk when we finally got to the mill.

We thought it was hilarious in a gallows humor kind of a way.

I was lucky to find a spot with a construction contractor building a new part of the mill to process vanadium, so I didn't have to spend time around the howling ball mill where steel balls shattered the ore into powder, and I didn't have to go near the satanic fumes rising over the sulfuric acid leaching tanks.

Luckiest of all, I never had to don a hazmat suit to go inside and regrout the yellowcake hearth where the concentrate was finished for shipping to the nuclear weapons industry.

But we had it easy.

One guy's entire job was to stand outside with a hose all night, summer and winter, washing radioactive sludge down a drain where it went to the Colorado River.

He died of a brutal cancer in his thirties.

The sulfuric acid leach tanks had leaky wooden bottoms raised up on wooden pillars, and the gray sludge that accumulated underneath was the stickiest clay you can imagine.

Concentrated uranium ore and sulfuric acid.

It was a Hades on Earth where you had to crouch in the rain of leaking poison.

Somehow Native Americans were always the ones sent under there to spend their days shoveling it out.

The job that remains in my mind, though, was the fiberglass crew laying yard after yard of fiberglass cloth to protect the concrete spillways.

The workers had no respirators for the fumes and immediately lost their gloves when the resin began to cure, so they simply began spreading fiberglass resin with their bare hands.

I was horrified, and I told them they were poisoning themselves, and they proudly told me they had some stuff that took off the resin like magic.

It turned out to be acetone.

They were bathing in acetone at lunch and at the end of every day.

Nobody warned them.

All of them died young.

Shortly after I left the mill, the federal government stopped subsidizing the price of uranium, and Atlas unceremoniously shut down.

Within a week, all the mines, the trucking companies, and the mining supply houses shut down, too, leaving Moab with thirty percent unemployment overnight.

The company declared bankruptcy and walked away from sixteen million tons of radioactive tailings sitting on the bank of the Colorado River, the river that supplies drinking water to forty million people downstream.

The cleanup has cost the American taxpayer well over a billion dollars and twenty-five years, and it's still not done.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ensures the American people will keep underwriting the scheme.