ERIC MOGREN
In 1776, friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante led a small expedition to locate an overland route from Spain’s northern frontier to its California missions. Winter, and poor planning, forced them to abandon their goal after a few weeks, and they barely survived their punishing retreat back to Santa Fe. Nevertheless, their journal of the ordeal was professional and detailed what royal and Catholic administrators valued—lands for settlement, Native Americans to baptize, landmarks and distances, and deposits of precious metals. In their failure, the Spaniards became the first Euro-Americans to explore and describe the intermountain region known as the Colorado Plateau.1 Visitors today can travel the friars’ route, but may conceptualize the landscape with two centuries of historical perspective. Eighteenth-century Spaniards saw opportunities for expanding imperial influence. Nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers honed their reclamation skills to green the deserts, and many of their communities survive where Escalante once imagined Catholic empire. Commercial development in the past century attracted millions more people to one of the harshest deserts in the world, and Native Americans still consider the plateau their physical and spiritual home. Today, bridges span the Colorado River, while Crossing of the Friars, the place near present-day Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, where the freezing and starving priests forded the Colorado River, is the launching point for tourist excursions down one of the most feared rivers in Spanish north America.
In the twentieth century, the plateau region also became the most important domestic source for America’s radioactive materials. Mining and milling mountains of uranium ore became a national priority that precluded romantic idylls rooted in agrarian aesthetics, Old World imperial dynamics, or religious ecstasy. Industry produced the uranium oxide “yellowcake” necessary to fabricate atomic weapons to defend the nation and to fuel a peaceful atomic-powered renaissance. Popular imagination transformed uranium miners and millers from industrial laborers into cultural icons of rugged individualism; uranium companies symbolized the triumph of American market enterprise over Communism. Uranium mining, and the atomic cultural assumptions that supported it, was also a celebration of another historical American virtue—our determination to force even the most hostile environments to yield to our will. The earlier, pastoral expectations of agricultural Colorado Plateau residents survived only when they supported, or at least did not interfere with, the new mining imperatives. Morality lay not in the farmers’ desire to make the desert bloom and sustain communities, but in national security imperatives and profits to be gained from exploiting mineral resources on behalf of people who lived beyond the plateau, with little regard for the harmful consequences of their actions.2
This commodification of radioactive ores triggered environmental and social changes that reverberate today. Mines and mills left a scarred and contaminated landscape. Millions of tons of mill tailings sit in massive quarantine facilities whose man-made, inorganic architecture contrasts with the surrounding natural horizons. Roads and industrial infrastructure that supported radioactive mining scarred fragile desert ecosystems. The uranium industry attracted thousands of workers and their families, changing many of the region’s remote settlements into bustling towns and cities. Today, ghosts of those times haunt communities touched by uranium mining’s boom-and-bust cycles. Many residents also live with the risks of the industry’s pollution, and aging workers remember friends and family members who died from diseases linked to their radioactive occupations. The uranium business, with all of its benefits and harms, was also exceptional in another way: at its height after World War II, it was a mining industry created, promoted, financed, and regulated by the federal government.
In 1789, about a decade after the priescts survived their harrowing trek, Martin Klaproth announced to the Prussian Academy of Science that he had isolated an unknown metal and named it after the Greek sky god. His classification was new, but hundreds of years earlier, Roman glassmakers used uranium compounds to tint tesserae yellow-green, and Native Americans used its yellow-orange oxides for decoration. Klaproth’s analysis triggered scientific curiosity about the metal, but it was industrial demand that gave uranium compounds their earliest commercial value.3 Europeans rediscovered Roman uranium glassmaking techniques during the 1830s, and by the turn of the century, glassworks produced luxurious yellow-green “Bohemian” decorative glassware. The ceramics industry used uranium compounds in glazes and slip paints. Uranium shaded calico dyes, and photographers occasionally substituted it for silver to produce red-brown “uranotype” prints. Around the turn of the century, steel foundries experimented with ferro-uranium alloys. Yet, despite these diverse commercial uses for uranium, it remained a scarce and relatively expensive additive used in small quantities.4
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most important source for uranium compounds was European pitchblende, an amorphous composition containing uranium in the form of uraninite. Pitchblende also occurred in the United States, but the costs of locating, extracting, sorting, and transporting domestic pitchblende to European refiners discouraged exploration and development of the rare deposits. The most significant early American source for rare metals was carnotite, a form of potassium vanadate. Carnotite deposits were more widespread than pitchblende in America, but it was even less marketable to European refiners because of its low uranium content. In addition, most known carnotite deposits were located in remote areas, especially deep within the American West where the high costs of extracting and transporting the low-grade ore rendered most of it unmarketable. A few U.S. mining companies attempted to make domestic carnotite profitable by building primitive reduction mills to concentrate the uranium and vanadium and thereby cut the exorbitant shipping costs. American Rare Metals, for example, the most successful American uranium company at the turn of the century, built a mill that ultimately produced about 15,000 tons of uranium concentrate before it closed in 1905. But despite miners’ optimism about the possibility of exploiting the nation’s vast reserves of low-grade domestic ore, American uranium production was insignificant compared with European output. By 1903 there was so little demand for domestically produced uranium that miners sold only 30 tons of uranium concentrates for $5,625; two years later total national uranium production was valued at a mere $375.5
It was medicine, not industry, that launched the first American radioactive mining boom. In 1896, Henri Becquerel proposed the idea that spontaneous decay of uranium atoms released energy and atomic particles. Two years later, Pierre and Marie Curie proved that radium, an exceptionally rare element that occurred in conjunction with uranium, accounted for much of the radioactivity of uranium compounds. Researchers also discovered, sometimes tragically, that radiation damaged living tissue, tending to destroy new and rapidly dividing cells more than mature ones. Because cancers arise from uncontrolled cell division, doctors found radium to be a nearly miraculous treatment for cancers that would otherwise require disfiguring surgery, if they could be treated at all. New radiotherapy applications generated overwhelming international demand for the few grams of radium that existed in the world.6 Radium prices surged, and by 1913, and with radium selling for between $60,000 and $80,000 per gram—roughly $2.25 million per ounce—the once-lackluster climate for American radioactive ores containing radium improved. Miners imagined reaping vast profits from their mountains of low-grade ores. The United States Bureau of Mines and industrial experts reinforced that dream when they reported that domestic carnotite deposits contained as much as 900 grams of radium, at the time among the most extensive estimated radium deposits in the world.7
The economic realities of the radium market, however, quickly tempered miners’ aspirations. Carnotite usually contained less than 2 percent uranium and yielded only about one part radium to three million parts uranium by weight. In other words, thousands of tons of carnotite yielded infinitesimal amounts of radium. Most carnotite was mined in remote areas, and the cost to extract and sort—often by hand—marketable grades of raw ore for the European refineries meant that miners sent only their finest output to the continent (sometimes as little as a few hundred pounds) and threw five times as much carnotite onto their tailings piles as they shipped overseas. Europeans paid up to $95 per ton for the best grades of American ore, but domestic extraction costs and transportation to the Continent were as much as $75. Those returns, combined with all the risks involved with shipping, made it barely worth the capital and effort. Europeans dominated the world radium market, produced the majority of the world’s radium, dictated prices to the American uranium industry, sold their radium to American medical institutions at exorbitant prices, and returned little profit to Colorado Plateau miners.8
Progressive era reformers found this de facto European radium monopoly intolerable and in 1913 campaigned to nationalize the struggling domestic radium industry. Progressives proposed government-sponsored domestic competition for the European radium producers that would conserve the nation’s radium reserves, produce radium economically from low-grade domestic ores in American refineries, and thereby lower its price to the nation’s hospitals, research institutions, and patients. Private mining companies disagreed, opposed the policy as socialistic, and waged a successful countercampaign to keep radium development in the private sector. Frustrated Progressives settled for a cooperative agreement between the Bureau of Mines and the privately owned National Radium Institute to research and develop efficient methods to extract radium from domestic ore. Although by the time it closed in 1917, the National Radium Institute produced 8.5 grams of radium at $37,000 per gram from America ores, about a third of the market price of radium, it was never more than a demonstration and experimental facility and was incapable of challenging European refiners’ market dominance. It was, however, an early federal experiment with public-private partnership to develop radioactive materials from domestic ores, a model that came to dominate the uranium industry a generation later.9
Yet, having derailed federal radium conservation, the private sector continued to struggle with the economic and technical challenges of developing its carnotite reserves. One approach was to concentrate the marketable elements of their ore near the mines, which in turn would cut transportation costs to European radium refiners and boost domestic profits. But even with stratospheric radium prices, the market landscape remained daunting. There were too few domestic reduction mills to process the most common grades of ore on the scale required to generate substantial radium profits, and there were too few American radium refineries for domestic producers to challenge the Europeans’ radium market dominance. Extraction and transportation costs of the most common ores, even to regional mills, were high, and increasing domestic milling capacity in the remote carnotite fields was a significant financial undertaking. Despite the difficult commercial climate, however, producers remained bullish. With access to vast quantities of low-grade uranium ore, these companies continued to envision their future as the world’s leading suppliers. A handful of American companies plunged forward, invested heavily to acquire and locate ore deposits, slowly expanded mill capacity, and steadily increased their output of marketable uranium concentrates.
The outbreak of World War I briefly disrupted international trade for radium and threatened domestic carnotite production, but surging wartime medical and military radium consumption, especially for radium-based luminescent paint, boosted demand for American ore and seemed to confirm the most optimistic predictions about radium’s promising future. The warring nations also purchased vanadium and uranium to produce ferro-vanadium and ferro-uranium alloys. Domestic companies retrofitted their mill circuits to extract both uranium and vanadium, reprocessed old carnotite mine and mill tailings to extract vanadium, and bought or located new carnotite claims to meet the surging demand. Mining companies cooperated with local governments to improve public transportation infrastructure to facilitate increased production and the steadily growing population of mine and mill workers. With access to labor, capital, technology, vast quantities of raw material, and most important, a seemingly insatiable wartime demand for their product, Americans were finally poised to reap the carnotite profits that had eluded them for nearly two decades.10
Domestic producers invested heavily to modernize and expand their operations to provide radium for medical and industrial uses, and they anticipated long-term profitability, but their market dominance and wartime bounty proved fleeting. In 1922 Union Minière du Haute Katanga, a Belgian mining company, announced that it had found pitchblende reserves in Africa that were vastly superior to any in the world—as much as twenty-five times richer than Colorado Plateau ores—and built the refining capacity to process it. When the Belgians undercut radium prices by 30 percent, demand for American ore evaporated. A year later, new discoveries of vast pitchblende deposits in the Great Bear Lake region of northern Canada further undercut international radium prices. U.S. mining companies closed mines and mills. A handful of domestic firms continued to produce limited quantities of vanadium throughout the 1920s and the Depression years in order to meet European strategic military demand for the steel additive, but by end of the 1920s the nation’s first rare metal boom was effectively over.11
In 1939, refugee scientists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt confirming that uranium could fuel a new class of atomic weapons of unimaginable destructive power, and in August 1942, the federal government launched a secret program to build them. A fundamental challenge confronting Manhattan Project scientists was the shortage of uranium from which to extract enough fissionable isotope to conduct experiments and ultimately build the weapon. African and Canadian pitchblende was the most important wartime source for fissionable uranium—ultimately 90 percent of the uranium used to develop the first atomic weapons came from abroad.12 The government also worked with private industry to improve uranium prospecting and metallurgical research, to develop new methods to improve refining of uranium-bearing Colorado Plateau ores, and to encourage vanadium companies to reconfigure existing mills, and build new ones, to reprocess vanadium and radium mill tailings to extract uranium. National security drove a new strategic demand to locate, develop, and process domestic uranium reserves, and rare-metal producers again saw a promising future for their ores.
In August 1945, the United States launched the atomic era with blinding fireballs that destroyed two Japanese cities, and shortly afterward the Japanese surrendered. The national relief from the Allied victory, however, was tempered by lingering unease about the menacing mystery of the devastating weapon. The end of the war also occasioned, for the first time, political assessment of the secret technology. Civilian and military leaders reasoned that the destructiveness of atomic weapons—real and threatened—reduced the need for large, conventional armies and the likelihood of catastrophic future conflicts. Scientists, popular writers, and technocrats imagined war’s alternative—a peaceful, prosperous future made possible by atomic power. Their extravagant predictions that fission reactors would produce seemingly limitless energy gave the atom a more reassuring postwar image than the mushroom clouds and smoldering Japanese cities that dominated the public’s initial perceptions of the new technology. Utility companies and electrical equipment manufacturers, too, promoted visions of atomic-powered miracles—the potential of atomic energy, after all, promised their profits from both atomic technology and the electricity it generated. After a decade of depression followed by another world war, such utopian assurances resonated with Americans. In addition, there was growing consensus among civilian leaders that the federal government dominate the new technology to maintain the nation’s atomic supremacy and foster peaceful applications in a manner consistent with American political and social values.
Congress ended the wartime military monopoly of atomic technology and reaffirmed civilian control of military affairs in 1946 with the Atomic Energy Act. It placed management and promotion of the nation’s atomic program in the hands of the five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. Congress also created the bipartisan Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, or JCAE, to supervise the new agency and ease fears that legislators had ceded too much control of the nation’s atomic enterprise to the executive branch. The AEC used its vast discretionary authority to implement its increasingly divergent mandates to both control the nation’s atomic infrastructure and to encourage peaceful atomic applications. It had absolute authority to acquire fissionable materials, regulate the manufacturing of fuel for weapons and reactors, and oversee everyone who built, tested, and utilized atomic technology. It had the responsibility to ensure the safety of atomic industry employees at facilities regulated by the commission. The act, in short, created a government monopoly of the atom that gave the federal authorities historically unprecedented control of nearly every aspect of the new technology, including the uranium-mining industry.
Among the priorities for postwar strategists and civilian atomic power advocates was expanding domestic uranium production. Wartime consumption meant that little fissionable material was available after 1945 for further weapons fabrication and nonmilitary purposes. The perceived need to expand domestic uranium production compelled policy makers to embrace the traditional American faith in the marketplace as the framework in which to secure the nation’s uranium independence. They believed that uranium resources would best be developed to meet future military and civilian applications by the private sector working for profit, but without relinquishing comprehensive federal oversight. It was a creative amalgam of government control of atomic technology and private enterprise idealism.
The earliest steps in stimulating postwar uranium production came in 1948, when the AEC announced its ore-buying program. The commission offered financial incentives to miners, including substantial cash bonuses for the discovery and production of uranium ore from newly discovered deposits, price guarantees, government operation of two reduction mills on the Colorado Plateau, and haulage allowances for transporting ore from remote mines to the government’s buying stations. The commission also sponsored a uranium-prospecting program. Other federal agencies used their powers to promote private uranium development; the U.S. Geological Survey, for example, provided uranium prospectors with geological data. These inducements, however, attracted little interest from miners, because they generally rewarded the location and exploitation of high-grade uranium ores, rather than the predominately low grade ores commonly found in the American West. Consequently, the AEC’s initial commercial incentives did little to promote development of the most common domestic uranium ores, and even with price guarantees the miners were hard-pressed to compete with the bargain-basement prices of African and Canadian uranium.
As the Cold War intensified in 1949 and demand for domestic uranium became acute, the AEC expanded its incentive policies so that Colorado Plateau uranium ores could play the dominant role in the nation’s atomic future. Several factors underscored the new approach. The amount of uranium required for a renewed Cold War weapons program on the scale envisioned by strategic planners was more than they wished to import, and fear that our national security rested upon foreign uranium amplified the calls for increased domestic production. Additionally, stimulating demand for uranium for civilian atomic reactors could help create economies of scale favorable for the production of uranium from low-grade American sources. Most important, the tentative postwar AEC purchasing program resulted in a significant reassessment of domestic uranium resources. Wartime estimates of American uranium reserves understated the amount of domestic low-grade uranium ore that might be exploited under favorable economic conditions, and for the first time, policy makers envisioned that domestic uranium supplies could satisfy both the nation’s projected demand for atomic security and private atomic power. Consequently, in 1951 the AEC amended its purchase program for the most common grades of Colorado Plateau ores. It also provided extensive advice about prospecting, along with financial incentives for vanadium companies to reopen their mills and process local ores for their uranium content. The commission established a series of ore-purchasing stations to make it easier and more cost-effective for miners to deliver their output to buyers. It issued policy statements that reinforced the its preference for a government-controlled private uranium-mining and -processing industry designed to codify a predictable government purchasing strategy through the early 1960s, a move intended to reassure and stabilize a uranium-mining industry historically wracked by devastating market cycles. The government’s escalating demand for fissionable materials finally made domestic low-grade uranium ore marketable, and the postwar uranium boom that reshaped the American West began.13
The nation’s wartime uranium acquisition program was small and shrouded in secrecy, and the AEC’s immediate postwar uranium procurement activities attracted little interest from miners, and even less from the public. The uranium boom of the 1950s and 1960s, however, was different: for an insecure Cold War nation steeped in romantic nostalgia and seeking comfort in cultural myths, it resonated with significance. Uranium became a symbol of power in an uncertain and dangerous world. Mining in the undeveloped West echoed themes of muscular patriotism, rugged individualism, and frontier independence. And, of course, uranium mining promised government-guaranteed wealth. Public enthusiasm for the AEC’s purchasing program matched any of the mining booms in American history. Thousands of fortune hunters descended onto the harsh and sparsely populated uranium regions. Prospecting on the Colorado Plateau increased dramatically—a 20,000 ton uranium ore body made national headlines in 1950, but six years later prospectors had already located at least twenty-five deposits that exceeded 100,000 tons, and a few that were estimated to be a million tons. Lucky “uraniumaires” like Charlie Steen and Stella Dysart, whose colorful rags-to-riches stories fueled the “uranium fever,” became heroes of the new era. Agricultural communities such as Moab, Utah, and Grand Junction, Colorado, were reincarnated as classic American mining towns, and older radium and vanadium mill communities, such as Uravan, Colorado, and Monticello, Utah, were reborn. Trading in low-cost uranium stocks gave Americans the chance to participate in the boom without suffering mining’s hardships firsthand. Magazines offered “greenhorns” advice and outfitters sold them Geiger counters and army-surplus equipment. Hollywood made films and television episodes set in uranium country. Children practiced “duck and cover” atomic holocaust drills at school, but played with uranium-themed toys and games at home. The AEC’s preference for an orderly and managed development of domestic uranium resources was swept aside by the frenzied dash for the riches made possible by the federal government’s uranium program. In 1947, when the AEC began its procurement program, the domestic uranium industry was virtually non-existent—it produced only 67 tons of uranium oxide from two reconfigured vanadium mills. By the middle of the 1950s uranium was a $500 million industry.
Uranium excited the public’s imagination and drove unprecedented mining activity across the American West, but the overriding objective of the AEC’s procurement program was to produce concentrated uranium oxide, called yellowcake because of its canary color, which could be refined further to extract fissionable atoms for reactors and weapons. Yellowcake production required a massive expansion of milling capacity on the Colorado Plateau to process millions of tons of raw ore—by 1958, twenty-eight reduction mills were producing nearly 182,000 tons of uranium oxide. However, the construction costs for mills—up to $4 million each—added significantly to the costs of private uranium development. To stimulate mill construction, the AEC also subsidized the mills as another component of its uranium acquisition policy. A company interested in applying to the AEC for a mill license—often a company that already had significant projected ore production from its own mines—had to prove that it had the technical and financial capacity to operate the facility, and that there were sufficient ore supplies to support its construction. Once the company met these threshold conditions, the AEC contracted with it for the construction and operation of the mill. Since the AEC was the only customer for the mill’s output, the agency determined the price for the yellowcake, taking into consideration variables including the cost to purchase ore, along with transportation, milling, and amortization costs. It also regulated nearly every aspect of mill operations. This public-private partnership meant that uranium milling, like uranium mining, was virtually guaranteed to be profitable.
The uranium boom, with all its passion, was also an incongruous blend of hope and fear. Uranium mining energized Americans’ faith in their technical superiority, patriotic ideals, and national character, and it produced the raw material of atomic weapons that safeguarded that vision. The atom also threatened Armageddon. Yet Americans chose to focus more on uranium’s utopian promise than its proven dangers, punctuated by smoldering Japanese cities and disfigured atomic survivors. The public uranium acquisition program, above all, reflected a deep-seated public trust in scientists and government technocrats to protect the nation from threats posed by the mysterious new energy. Too often, that faith was misplaced.14
The “nuclear fuel cycle” has several stages: mining; milling ore to produce yellowcake; enrichment to separate and concentrate fissionable isotopes; fuel fabrication for reactors, weapons, or other purposes; and disposal. Uranium mining and milling, the “front end” of the fuel cycle, is a mechanical and chemical process similar to extracting and processing any other metallic ore—it is destructive and causes significant environmental changes. Domestic mining and milling for radium and vanadium during the opening decades of the twentieth century generated local pollution from the small mines and milling operations. Laboratories and factories that refined and sold radium products contaminated numerous communities throughout the nation. The rapid mid-century expansion of uranium mining and processing, however, amplified the industry’s environmental impact. The boom eventually resulted in about 4,000 mines with documented production, though as many as 15,000 mine locations contained varying concentrations of uranium. At peak production, in 1961–1962, there were 925 active uranium mines.15 The majority were located in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming, with three-quarters of them on federal or tribal lands. Most of them were underground mines, though a few were open-pit operations. Collectively, mines that had significant historical production generated about 3 billion metric tons of waste.16
As with any mining operation, overburden material and unmarketable ore formed massive tailings piles. Unreclaimed uranium and other hazardous materials commonly associated with uranium, such as arsenic, copper, phosphate, molybdenum, and vanadium, leached from tailings piles into nearby watercourses or blew off the piles as dust deposits that contaminated neighboring lands and communities. At the mills, processing chemicals leached from tailings and fouled rivers. Exhaust fans ventilated rock dust, radioactive gases, and reduction wastes from mines and mills into the atmosphere; tailings piles exhaled radon gas. Open-pit mine operations, which generate roughly forty-five times more mine waste than underground operations, destroyed vast areas at the mine itself and under the tailings piles. Boomtowns, with all their requirements for domestic urban infrastructure, blossomed in fragile desert ecosystems. And when demand for uranium waned and the mines and mills closed, tailings piles eroded, machinery and infrastructure decayed, and the once-thriving towns lost their vitality.17
Underground, miners faced additional environmental hazards. Most uranium mines were small operations located in remote areas, thus increasing the difficulties of risk management and safety oversight; about 60 percent of mines during the peak production years employed fewer than fifteen miners, and only about 13 percent employed more than fifty miners.18 Risks typical of any mining operation were a constant part of their physically demanding and dangerous employment. Detonations filled the mines with dust and gas as miners blasted free the marketable ore. Mines were filled with machinery designed more for production than safety. Timbers and bolts stabilized walls and roofs, but collapses were a constant danger. Noise and engine exhaust underground added to the workday hardships. This hazardous work was done by thousands of white miners, many of them Mormon, and by a significant number of Native Americans, especially Navajos. In addition to these long-term regional residents, many miners and mill workers relocated to the Southwest seeking fresh opportunities. They were children of the Great Depression, and many were war veterans, all eager for well-paid physical labor that also served national interests. Uranium industry workers were usually conservative, nationalistic, vehemently anti-Communist, and often culturally and religiously insular, and they enthusiastically supported the nation’s atomic defense policies. They were also happy with incomes that supported their families and communities in a historically poor region. Most also shared a faith that the architects of the nation’s atomic policies were candid and accurate about the risks posed by the fast-growing uranium industry, and relied upon reassurances offered by federal atomic technocrats that their work was safe—or at least no more hazardous than any other mining.19
Uranium mining and processing, however, also generated hazards that were less obvious to uranium workers—radioactive contaminants. Drilling, blasting, crushing, and moving uranium ore released radioactive elements that became part of the atmosphere in the closed spaces of mines and mills. The cycle of radioactive uranium decay includes radon, an odorless and colorless gas. Radon atoms decay through a sequence of unstable elements, “radon daughters,” with half-lives ranging from 160 microseconds to twenty-two years. With each radon decay step, these elements emit energized subatomic particles and ionizing radiation as the atoms shed their original unstable atomic mass of 222 to reach the stable mass of 206. These radon daughters, composed of various isotopes of polonium, lead, and bismuth, tended to cling to suspended nongaseous atmospheric particles such as cigarette smoke, dust, diesel exhaust, and water vapor, and also settled onto food and drinking water within the enclosed spaces of the mines and mills. Consequently, as workers breathed contaminated air, smoked cigarettes, or ate food, the radon daughters attached to their nose, throat, and lung tissues. When a step in the radon decay cycle occurred inside a miner’s body, energized particles and ionizing radiation damaged nearby cells. The most common radon decay damage was to lung tissue, but another radon decay element, lead-210, with a half-life of twenty-two years, concentrated in human bones, where its slow decay damaged bone and marrow cells. Chronic cell damage from radioactive decay can eventually trigger malignancies, and uranium industry employees working in poorly ventilated mines and warehouses routinely received radiation doses that significantly increased their cancer risks.
Health physicists knew a great deal by the mid-twentieth century about the radiation risks in the uranium industry. Since the fifteenth century, European miners working in the Joachimsthal and Schneeberg mining districts, longtime sources for silver and pitchblende, had died from lung disease they called Bergkrankheit, or “mountain disease.” In the late nineteenth century, doctors confirmed it was lung cancer, and eventually linked it to occupational radiation exposure. Health surveys demonstrated that those miners had about a twenty-year life expectancy after entering the mines, and as many as 75 percent died from lung cancer.20 By the early twentieth century, European scientists had published extensively about the atmospheric hazards from radioactive materials in the confined spaces of mines. These studies were well known to American occupational hygiene and mine safety experts, and in the mid-1940s they had little doubt that radon significantly elevated lung cancer risk for miners, and that aggressive mechanical ventilation reduced the risk. European, Canadian, and African miners’ mortality rates declined dramatically when their mines improved ventilation.21
In 1948, occupational safety and radiology experts within the AEC warned their colleagues about potentially high radiation levels in American uranium mines. They recommended that the agency include mine safety regulations in ore purchase contracts, especially mine ventilation standards to reduce radon levels, and heath monitoring of miners. Although the Atomic Energy Act empowered the AEC to oversee the uranium industry, in this instance AEC administrators interpreted the act narrowly to conclude that it did not authorize the agency to regulate mine safety, and consequently the commission did not implement comprehensive mine safety recommendations. In addition, despite decades of research and evidence linking radon exposure to lung disease, the agency also suggested that the causation mechanism for cancer in uranium miners was not definitive enough to justify interfering with private mining operations. Uranium mine safety, according to the AEC, was a matter for the states to address, many of which had developed a patchwork of industry regulations for conventional mines that were enforced sporadically by understaffed state mine inspectorates. States were also wholly unprepared to regulate radiological hazards in the uranium industry.22
The possibility of health problems among the thousands of uranium miners, coupled with the AEC’s ambivalence about mine safety, spurred concerned state health officials and U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) scientists to investigate radiation hazards in the uranium mines and mills without AEC assistance. They also planned research into mine ventilation techniques and worked to define safe radon exposure levels for the uranium industry. The results of such studies, they hoped, would provide the persuasive evidence needed to develop comprehensive safety recommendations for the uranium industry. The investigators, however, faced challenges. Unlike AEC officials, Public Health Service scientists had no legal authority to enter private mines without the owners’ permission and, in order to gain admission to collect data, often had to agree not to inform miners of possible radon hazards. Medical consent forms for the health surveys could not mention health risks from mine radon. Because radon-induced lung cancer usually takes ten to fifteen years to develop, and the domestic uranium procurement program began in earnest only in the late 1940s, few miners would display symptoms until the late 1950s, further clouding the cancer causation issue. Miners, especially Navajos, were frequently transient laborers, worked in mines part-time, or simply disappeared for extended periods, making epidemiological research difficult. Nevertheless, despite mounting evidence of dangerously high radon levels in many mines, uranium companies maintained that their facilities were safe and resisted recommendations that they believed were too expensive and might interfere with production, and that the AEC did not require. Atmosphere safety guidelines proposed by health experts remained simply that—suggestions based on evidence—and they had no force unless a federal or state mine safety agency adopted them. Neither the uranium mining and milling companies nor the AEC enforced aggressive radon control protocols.23
Beginning in 1955, because of the AEC’s ongoing reluctance to regulate radiation hazards in mines and mills, states developed their own safety standards based on the growing body of scientific evidence about the environmental risks in the industry. New Mexico began implementing radon safety standards in 1958, followed two years later by Colorado and Utah. These efforts had mixed success. The prevailing climate of national security secrecy and preemptive federal control of atomic energy made it difficult for state regulators to coordinate with the AEC to develop and enforce safety standards. State mine inspection agencies often lacked the finances to effectively monitor radon risks and were usually understaffed for the sort of comprehensive oversight program on the scale required to manage the burgeoning uranium industry. By 1960, when the USPHS offered its findings to the governors of uranium mining states about the radon risks in their uranium mines, evidence from epidemiological studies demonstrated that uranium miners had a 450 percent greater chance of contracting lung cancer than other miners and that the number of mines with unacceptably high radon levels was increasing. Finally, in 1967, after nearly seventeen years of buck-passing by private companies and federal and state agencies about uranium mine safety, the Department of Labor established the first federal standards for radon exposure in uranium mines. Rather than look to the Atomic Energy Act or its regulatory framework for that authority, the Labor Department relied upon the New Deal–era Walsh-Healy Act, which granted the federal government power to regulate safety and health conditions in businesses that had government contracts.24
Between 1950 and 1968, the entities that had the most control over the uranium industry—mining companies and the AEC—made little effort to minimize radon exposure among uranium workers or even to inform them about the possible radiation dangers they faced. As late as 1981, the American Mining Congress, the mining industry’s official lobbying organization, still maintained that the necessity of ventilating uranium mines was not fully understood, despite nearly thirty years of American evidence and decades of European studies and practical experience linking radon exposure to fatal lung cancers. In some mines, the consequences of this safety failure were devastating. In the mines that had the highest radon concentrations, lung cancer mortality for miners was 50 percent by 1981. Another study completed in 1984 demonstrated a twelve-fold increase in mortality risk for uranium miners exposed to radon. The median age of Navajo uranium miners who died from lung cancer was nineteen years younger than the mortality age of nonminers in the community who died from lung cancers; among white miners, the radon-induced lung cancer mortality age was ten to fifteen years younger. By 1990, about 10 percent of uranium miners had died from lung cancer, a nearly 500 percent increase over lung cancer mortality among other miners.25
In 1979, uranium miners sued the United States for compensation in two class action lawsuits. Although the courts ultimately concluded that the doctrines of sovereign immunity and the discretionary functions of government agents under the Federal Tort Claims Act shielded the government from liability, the judges nevertheless found the miners’ claims to be supported by evidence of decades of deliberate decision making that discounted their welfare.26 They also agreed that the actions of the AEC and the USPHS reflected a national policy not to warn uranium miners of their employment risks. With the failure of adequate legal remedy for victims, their only recourse lay in the political process. Congress finally addressed the problem with the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which awarded up to $100,000 to uranium miners suffering from lung cancer or nonmalignant respiratory disease, provided they met threshold radiation exposure levels during their employment. While the legislation held out the promise of compensation, it also placed an extraordinary burden of proof on individual claimants. For many white miners, proving employment and radon exposure levels from boom-time employment decades earlier, in mines that kept poor or no records of radon levels, was challenging. For Navajo miners, many of whom never had occupational history records or legal proof of relationship status for next-of-kin claimants, the evidentiary hurdles were often insurmountable.27
The federal government, which legally dominated the uranium industry, failed to enforce mine safety regulations during the uranium boom years, or even adequately warn and educate miners about the radiation risk they faced, and as a direct result miners died. In the end, there was little evidence to support long-standing assumptions that mine safety protocols would compromise production, undermine national security, or impair the development of atomic power. It was, in short, a human disaster that could have been prevented. AEC policy makers, in particular, weighed miners’ lives against the demand for domestic uranium and concluded that mine safety was less important than production. American uranium independence came at the cost of hundreds of deaths and was, as Judge William Copple wrote in his Begay v. United States opinion, “a tragedy of the atomic age.”28
One of the earliest environmental problems from the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle that garnered widespread national attention was water pollution from uranium reduction mills. Mine wastewaters and tailings runoff contained metallic and radiological contaminants that found their way into surface waters and aquifers near the mines, but the chief source for water pollution from the uranium industry was milling. Mill tailings, around 99 percent of the original volume of ore delivered to the mill, contained nearly all their nonuranium radioactive materials, as well as chemicals used in the reduction process. Usually, tailings left the mills as semiliquid effluent called slime. In the early days of the uranium boom, mills occasionally discharged slime directly into rivers. More commonly, mills stored the viscous waste in containment ponds, where the liquids evaporated or soaked into the soil, leaving behind fine solid particulates. Uranium companies frequently relied upon the drying tailings to create their own dikes for the liquid effluent ponds, but with no structural support, containment dams occasionally failed, spilling chemical and radiological containments into local waterways.29 Once dry, the sandy tailings were unstable and eroded easily from rain and wind. Spring runoff and changes in watercourses occasionally undercut the tailings that were located near rivers, causing tailings to collapse into the flowing water; a handful of mills even relied on seasonal runoff to help rid themselves of their tailings burden. Some mill tailings were located in remote areas away from densely populated communities, but others were located near urban centers such as Grand Junction and Durango, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, where a massive mill tailings pile could be seen from the steps of the state capitol.30
Beginning in the early 1950s, U.S. Public Health Service officials conducted tests of mill contamination of western rivers to determine the extent of water pollution from the uranium industry. Water samples taken below four mills located near rivers showed radium levels between 20 and 130 times greater than river samples taken above the mills. In-depth investigations of algae, fauna, and streambed materials downstream from eight uranium mills were even more alarming. Unlike the water samples, which were “snapshots” of moving water, the more comprehensive streambed analysis showed a cumulative radium contamination between 60 and 100 times greater than normal background levels, as well as the presence of chemicals used in the milling process.31 One USPHS bioassay of the Animus River below the mill at Durango, Colorado, showed that the chemical and radiological contamination was so extensive that the lead investigator characterized it as a “biological desert” for fifty miles downstream from the mill—where nearly 30,000 people relied upon the Animas for domestic and agricultural water.32
Yet, despite evidence pointing to chemical and radiological pollution levels in surface waters, experts remained uncertain as to what levels of radiological contamination posed a health threat. Biologists with the National Committee for Radiation Protection, for example, considered the pollution a possible long-term threat and urged a cautious approach to determining safe exposure levels. The AEC, on the other hand, maintained that its power to control uranium ore entering reduction mills did not require regulation of “unimportant” radioactive materials, such as radium, that could not be used for nuclear fuel. The nation’s atomic agency instead deferred oversight responsibility for mill tailings to other federal and state agencies. As was the case with mines, however, state and federal public health agencies were unprepared to manage water contamination generated by the uranium industry.33
In 1954, after a revision of the Atomic Energy Act designed to promote civilian atomic power, and in response to mounting pressure from state public health and environmental protection agencies and the overwhelming success of the AEC’s uranium acquisition program that eased concerns that regulation might impede uranium production, the commission began to address the issues of mill water pollution. It was a slow conversion. Federal and state public health experts wanted the agency to exercise its considerable power to curtail mill water pollution. But the AEC’s competing mandates to both promote and regulate the uranium industry led it to sympathize more with the industry than with cautious experts who urged greater agency control over polluters. Finally, in 1959, after considerable state and national political criticism and public outrage over the agency’s halfhearted regulatory actions, the AEC ordered millers to assure that concentrations of radioactive materials in wastewaters be brought within “permissible limits.” In 1960, the agency also reversed its long-standing position that it did not have jurisdiction over radium, the most potentially hazardous radionuclide in the tailings. It now concluded that it could enforce radiological pollution standards at operating mills that it licensed, because tailings were an integral part of mill operations and were consequently subject to mill licensing requirements. Over the next few years, operating mills undertook abatement programs that significantly lowered radiation contamination of local watersheds.34
Although the AEC eventually undertook measures to require its mill licensees to reduce pollution from operating mills, tailings from closed uranium mills continued to contaminate watercourses. Once again, jurisdictional disputes between federal and state agencies amplified the environmental impacts of uranium tailings. The AEC maintained that once a uranium mill closed and the agency no longer issued an operating license for the facility, it had no responsibility or authority to manage mill tailings. In 1965, the agency also reasserted its long-standing claim that uranium tailings contained so little uranium after ore processing that they did not constitute an unreasonable environmental risk and, consequently, tailings did not require agency oversight.35 State health and environmental officials recognized the irony: the AEC had already conceded that tailings from operating mills were a sufficient environmental threat to force millers to manage their tailings to reduce pollution, but the agency now claimed that those same tailings at closed facilities were not sufficiently hazardous for the agency to regulate them directly. Instead, the agency favored control of the abandoned tailings by some other, preferably state, entity. Federal authorities conceded that while tailings were sometimes a public nuisance because of blowing dust, they were not a greater environmental threat than effluent from other types of ore processing and could be handled and regulated in a similar fashion. As one AEC official put it, managing the tailings at abandoned mills was “a matter of good housekeeping prudence [. . .] but aesthetics [were] not within [AEC] jurisdiction.”36
In contrast to the atomic agency’s short-term assessment of radiation hazards from abandoned tailings, federal and state public health authorities remained concerned about potential harms from long-term exposure to tailings and the likelihood that radiological contaminants would eventually erode from the piles and pose a threat to downstream water users.37 The AEC’s reluctance to address tailings threats also ignited a national controversy among a public increasingly sensitized to such dangers by the environmental movement of the 1960s. Reporter Terry Drinkwater captured the mood when he reported on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite: “If nothing is done to cover up or remove these tailings, and if government health officials are right, then another generation may well look at these radioactive man made mountains as monuments to the carelessness of this generation, man’s carelessness in the early years of the nuclear age.” Senator Edmund S. Muskie convened a Senate subcommittee hearing on the matter of abandoned tailings in 1966, and testimony revealed that only one tailings pile generated by thirty-four mills in the western states had been adequately stabilized to limit water and wind erosion.38
By late 1966, public criticism, pressure from western lawmakers, and a growing body of evidence about tailings risks prompted uranium states’ environmental and health agencies to move ahead with their own uranium tailings management policies. Regulations promulgated by Colorado, for example, required millers to submit plans to state regulators for stabilization of their tailings at their closed mills, including controlling tailings erosion, limiting public access to the piles, preventing tailings runoff from flowing into local waterways, and generally maintaining the piles to limit radiological contamination of local environments. Other western states quickly followed suit. It was, in one sense, a victory for the AEC, which had successfully shifted the regulatory burden for tailings at closed facilities onto states. Yet the new state regulatory schemes validated the states’ environmentally cautious approach to long-term radiation contamination. The new assertive state position about tailings also reflected a growing public skepticism about the AEC’s commitment to radiation safety within the uranium industry, skepticism that influenced subsequent policy debates about management of the nation’s atomic trash.
The new regulatory structure and the resolution of water pollution concerns originating from the historically careless management of uranium tailings reduced environmental hazards. AEC licensing requirements for active mills, coupled with state regulations for tailings at inactive mill sites, forced the uranium industry to stabilize or relocate tailings piles away from nearby watercourses. State-mandated monitoring programs kept careful watch on water contamination. Radioactive wastes that had so concerned environmental and health safety experts seemed, finally, to have been contained and the tailings crisis resolved.
But water pollution was only one of the environmental threats posed by the uranium mills. Crushing machines filled the air with pulverized rock dust and radioactive materials; yellowcake containing uranium and other radioactive trace elements and chemical contaminants dusted mills’ packaging rooms. Mills often vented their buildings to the outdoors, elevating the concentrations of chemical and radioactive contaminants in the mills’ immediate vicinity. Radon gas exhaled from decaying radium in tailings escaped into the atmosphere, and the dry tailings had for years blown from the piles and coated nearby communities with a fine dust that environmental and health experts feared might result in harmful radiation exposure. Although decades of evidence had established that radon in enclosed spaces, such as poorly ventilated mines or mills, elevated the risk of cancer and death, few in the AEC or industry were concerned about atmospheric radon emissions. The agency assumed that radon would quickly dilute in the atmosphere and therefore posed little atmospheric radiation risk beyond the immediate vicinity of the tailings. Consequently, the agency declined to take aggressive action to compel the uranium industry to reduce atmospheric radon and chemical pollution, and the uranium industry was reluctant to voluntarily undertake what might prove to be costly mitigation measures for a problem that may not exist.
In the communities surrounding the mines and mills, residents were not convinced by reassurances that radiation hazards beyond the tailings piles were minimal. Public and industrial health experts, as usual, urged a cautious approach that included extensive air monitoring near the mills to determine atmospheric radon levels. By 1969, such research confirmed initial assumptions that the radon from tailings piles posed a minimal atmospheric threat to local communities. The studies also revealed that no significant public radiation exposure had resulted from the radon exhaled from tailings piles: the worst fears about atmospheric radon pollution, while grounded in legitimate concern about chronic radon exposure in closed spaces, were unwarranted when radon was diluted in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, the atomic agency’s earlier experience with public criticism and state pressure to manage tailings prompted it to use its licensing power to encourage millers to keep the tailings dust from blowing off-site, not because it was a health hazard but because the agency considered limiting dust to be good public relations.39
By the mid-1960s, ongoing water and atmospheric monitoring demonstrated that the uranium industry had significantly reduced its chemical and radiological pollution. The AEC’s Peter Morris confidently testified before the Senate in 1966, “We find it difficult to conceive of any mechanism whereby the radioactive material which is now so widely disbursed could become so concentrated as to exceed current applicable standards for protection.”40 Less than a year later, however, state and federal health officials discovered that just such a mechanism was ongoing and had existed for over a decade.
As tailings accumulated at mills, new state and federal regulations made the uranium industry even more conscious of the need to manage its bulky wastes. One solution was to encourage alternative uses for tailings, especially for construction. Tailings were an ideal building material because milling pulverized ore into a uniform, sandy consistency in preparation for chemical processing; and there were tens of thousands of tons if it available to meet the construction demands of growing uranium boomtowns. Millers were happy to give their tailings away, and local contractors used the material as backfill against building foundations and for streets, sidewalks, and railroad beds. The fact that most tailings were slightly acidic also made them ideal soil additives for gardeners and farmers. The Federal Water Pollution Control Agency even encouraged construction with tailings, believing that disbursing tailings underground would isolate the waste from the atmosphere, prevent them from eroding and contaminating waterways, and generally reduce environmental risks.41 Thus repurposed, tailings became a serious source of radiological contamination in several uranium communities.42
The experience of Grand Junction, Colorado, exemplifies the health risks from the indiscriminant use of tailings. Beginning in 1956, the Climax Uranium Company permitted builders to take its tailings for free. Over the following decade, as much as 300,000 tons of tailings went into highway and road construction, sidewalks, sewer projects, and residential and commercial structures. In January 1966, investigators from the Colorado Department of Health and the U.S. Public Health Service stumbled upon the then-routine practice of releasing tailings into the Grand Junction community. They also immediately recognized the possibility of health threats from elevated radon and gamma radiation levels in contaminated structures. Their fears were confirmed when preliminary monitoring over the following months established that radon levels were significantly higher than background in their small sample of polluted structures. Citing that research, in the summer of 1966, Colorado ordered an immediate halt to the distribution of tailings for construction.43
Further state testing through 1967 confirmed that tailings were a widespread problem in Grand Junction. Colorado public health officials sought technical and financial assistance from the federal government to conduct a comprehensive inventory of contaminated structures. The AEC rejected the request, asserting that the radon from construction tailings posed no greater threat than naturally occurring radon and therefore was not a significant health risk. The agency agreed that it had the authority to oversee tailings at the mills, because it determined that tailings were an integral part of milling operations subject to the agency’s licensing power. But once tailings were removed from the mill and transferred to third parties, such as builders and home owners, the agency asserted, the tailings were no longer within its jurisdiction. Tailings contamination beyond the mills, the AEC maintained, was a state responsibility. Once again, the irony was not lost on Colorado health officials and politicians. The allegation that radon inside buildings reflected background levels relied on scant data about interior radon levels—data that could best have been generated by federal authorities who resisted thorough investigation of the issue. Moreover, it seemed illogical that tailings in the possession of mills and on mill property were hazardous enough to justify forcing the uranium industry to prevent tailings escaping from the mills’ properties into the environment, but once the tailings were deliberately distributed off-site throughout the community, they were not sufficiently dangerous to warrant oversight by the nation’s leading atomic experts. Disappointed but undeterred, Colorado public health officials proceeded as best they could on their own with their survey of the contaminated city. The ongoing state investigation revealed that tailings contamination was far more widespread than originally estimated and that radon levels in some buildings approached those of poorly ventilated mines. By 1971, 2,870 structures in Grand Junction were identified as contaminated, and other mill towns and cities discovered that they, too, had polluted buildings.44
While governments disagreed about responsibility for remedial action, few public health officials doubted the potential hazards of radon in closed living spaces. It was also quickly becoming apparent that decontamination would be expensive. Property owners demanded financial assistance because most believed that the atomic agency’s programs had caused the pollution problem and that it was the federal government’s responsibility to solve it. The growing scope of the indoor tailings pollution also attracted nationwide public attention as residents of the affected communities, their political leaders, and much of the national public questioned the AEC’s position that the federal government bore no responsibility for the problem. Popular media often sensationalized the pollution, but for years Grand Junction remained emblematic of the risks that ordinary people, not only uranium industry workers, faced as a consequence of the nation’s drive for uranium independence. By the early 1970s, the issue of indoor tailings pollution was rapidly eroding public faith in the AEC to such a degree that even its own employees began to question openly the agency’s position. Critics argued that it was unfair that residents should shoulder a disproportionate share of the harms associated with the nation’s drive for uranium independence. The states’ struggles to understand the nature and extent of the pollution, and the AEC’s reluctance to cooperate with state managers, reinforced the federal agency’s image as out of step with the environmental risks of the uranium industry.45
In February 1972, Colorado politicians introduced identical bills in the U.S. House and Senate to support decontamination of Grand Junction. The following summer, the final version of the law allocated $5 million for the program, with the federal government shouldering 75 percent of the costs, and the states expected to cover the remainder. Perhaps more important, the states and the AEC defined their separate governmental responsibilities: the AEC would provide scientific and technological expertise, while the states coordinated the on-the-ground work and interaction with claimants. The new law soundly rejected the traditional AEC position that it had no responsibility for the contamination, and, instead, the federal government assumed the primary financial and technical—and, many believed, moral—obligations for the pollution that the community demanded.46
AEC staff concluded that with the new legislation and the Grand Junction cleanup under way, public hostility toward the agency would ease. But the agency underestimated the depth of public suspicion it faced, especially among western lawmakers and the western public. Now that Colorado politicians had succeeded in securing funding for Grand Junction, other states, most forcefully Utah, pressed their own demands in Washington to cope with tailings pollution in their communities. In November 1977, western politicians introduced four House bills intended to force the federal government to solve the problems of tailings once for all: tailings were to be managed with the goal of long-term environmental safety, and the federal government would pay for the majority of cleanup costs. Collectively, these bills, combined with the earlier Grand Junction remedial action legislation, were a forceful reproach to the historically sweeping authority of the federal government in matters of atomic energy. The proposals, hearings, and ongoing research also revealed that the AEC’s preferred approach to tailings pollution management—state action—was untenable in practice. Remedial action for the growing number of contaminated properties, as well as for the tailings piles themselves, was far beyond the states’ expertise and financial capability. As of 1978, twenty-five states had assumed some responsibility for tailings oversight, but standards varied from state to state and were sometimes less stringent than what public health experts considered safe. It was clear that the scope of the tailings contamination and the technical expertise that remedial action demanded were so great that it could best be managed by comprehensive national legislation. During the summer of 1978, tailings remedial legislation supporters labored to reconcile the separate bills into a single proposal, and in the hectic closing days of the Ninety-Fifth Congress, Congress passed the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act.47
Supporters of UMTRCA routinely characterized the law as a matter of equity—uranium production benefited the entire nation, but the harms fell on local residents. The act directed the Department of Energy to undertake remedial action at twenty-four inactive uranium tailings sites and nearly 5,200 vicinity properties, and encouraged federal, state, tribal, and industry cooperation. It also mandated interagency cooperation within the federal government. The federal government agreed to pay 90 percent of the remedial costs, with the states paying the balance. No provision was made for tailings at active mills, reflecting congressional intent that the uranium industry should shoulder remedial costs whenever possible. The law’s drafters also took pains to prevent UMTRCA from becoming a model for future environmental remedial action, stressing the unique historical and environmental circumstances of the tailings contamination. In addition, the law mandated that remedial action achieve a permanent solution to the tailings problem that would require no, or at least minimal, ongoing maintenance. For active mills, it directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to develop tailings disposal standards that would be enforced through the mill-licensing process. It was a challenging mandate: roughly 39 million cubic yards of tailings and abandoned and contaminated buildings and equipment covered some 3,900 acres, and thirteen sites required removal of tailings to off-site internment locations. All plans also had to comply with the National Environmental Protection Act.
The law’s supporters had little to fear that UMTRCA would be a bellwether for future federal remedial pollution action—the law was hardly a model of environmental legislation. Passed in the closing days of the congressional session, it was hastily drafted, had internal inconsistencies that made the law difficult to implement, and involved a vast number of governmental agencies that generated bureaucratic congestion and delay. Imposing costly new environmental standards on operating facilities without killing the already-declining uranium industry proved nearly impossible. Historically, states had been the most responsive to environmental concerns, but the law’s dominance and the need to develop comprehensive remediation policies virtually eliminated state autonomy in managing uranium hazards. Conversely, reduced state participation weakened the states’ traditional enforcement mechanisms at a time when stakeholders had little confidence that the federal agencies would aggressively develop and enforce remedial standards and programs.
Yet, despite its shortcomings, UMTRCA was a milestone in the history of uranium mining in the United States. It was foremost a tangible improvement in the way the nation managed its uranium trash. It was also a political rebuke of the decades-long tradition of bureaucratic delay and denial and marked the first time that the federal government acknowledged its obligation to take the lead in resolving an environmental pollution problem that it had been instrumental in creating. It settled the long-standing intergovernmental legal disputes that had hampered efforts to study and manage uranium industry contamination. Perhaps above all, the law helped to end a governmental culture that placed domestic uranium production ahead of environmental and health concerns. Since the end of World War II, the government had campaigned to convince Americans of the benefits and safety of the nation’s atomic pursuits. UMTRCA was a moment when growing public skepticism about atomic goals was validated—when the nation finally admitted that those goals were achieved with baleful environmental and health consequences, and that those costs must be borne by the nation.48
The human and environmental damage caused by the uranium industry in the mid-twentieth century was rooted not in a failure of science and technology, but in the shortcomings of atomic technocrats and policy makers, most notably within the AEC, in adequately addressing the risks of an industry that they both nurtured and regulated.
The challenges of managing a hazardous industry considered essential to national security and future prosperity, whether it was producing radium for medicine or uranium for weapons and reactors, began with scientists’ and policy makers’ conceptualization of the resource. Once uranium was defined as necessary for the public good, policy development and implementation placed a premium on its acquisition at the expense of other imperatives. The unprecedented control the federal government exercised over the postwar uranium industry, combined with deferential oversight from Congress and the executive, resulted in a policy climate that discounted both short- and long-term environmental consequences of uranium production. Federal atomic bureaucrats, who had considerable scientific expertise and political sophistication, were motivated by national security and an atomic-powered utopian idyll and were consequently reluctant to acknowledge the environmental costs associated with achieving their goals. Secrecy prevailed within both the military and the civilian atomic bureaucracy, and when environmental concerns conflicted with national security and dreams of national prosperity, disputes were usually resolved in favor of aggressive uranium acquisition regardless of its environmental or health consequences.
Fearing that a labor backlash might imperil vital uranium production if the true extent of the risks were acknowledged, administrative watchdogs downplayed or dismissed environmental concerns raised by health and safety experts, both within and outside the atomic bureaucracy and industry, and remained hostile to criticism that they believed challenged the nation’s atomic priorities. Atomic technocrats’ actions, and inactions, intended to promote the national interest weighed uranium acquisition against the well-being of laborers, their communities, and regional ecosystems and found resource acquisition to be paramount. The Atomic Energy Commission was also shielded from tort liability for actions it undertook, or failures to regulate hazards, that resulted in civilian injuries or deaths.49 Consequently, risk analysis of the nation’s uranium program that appeared to challenge basic assumptions was discounted by those in the best positions to implement remedial action. Critics were marginalized and hazardous conditions were a hallmark of the uranium industry from the 1940s through the 1970s. Policy makers’ zeal to promote atomic energy exposed thousands of uranium industry workers, countless boomtown residents, and the regional environments to conditions that mining engineers, atomic scientists, occupational health and safety experts, the military, and AEC officials themselves knew, or had reason to know, elevated the risk of harm to human and environmental health.
Moreover, while such activities may have been legal under the terms of legislation crafted to incentivize uranium production, they raised serious moral questions. At a historical moment when few outside the atomic community understood the technology and its risks, deception and prevarication in the name of national security that threatened the environment and human life eventually eroded public confidence in the integrity of atomic policy makers. Above all, atomic technocrats were convinced that they knew better than anyone the risks associated with atomic technology, and they convinced the nation that they had fully anticipated and resolved radiation-related environmental dangers. On their optimistic balance sheet, their vision of an atomic future simply outweighed calls for a comprehensive recognition of risk and environmental stewardship. Over the sixty-year history of uranium mining in the West, that approach left a legacy of toxic mine scars, tainted water, remediation costs, dead miners, and legal obligations to former industry workers. Eventually, the nation’s uranium program, born in Cold War atomic attitudes that promoted acquisition at the expense of environmental quality, was confronted by a new and growing public appreciation that environmental issues were also issues of equity and social justice, and that the pursuit of national goals had to take into consideration the consequences of those actions for ecological and human health.
1. Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, The Domínguez-Escalante Journal: Their Expedition through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in 1776 (d. 1792), trans. Fray Angelico Chavez, ed. Ted J. Warner (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995); Herbert E. Bolton, Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1776 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1951, 1972). Despite historical and translation errors, Pageant remains the most comprehensive account of the Domínguez-Escalante expedition.
2. An example of this historical narrative of uranium mining is presented at the New Mexico Mining Museum, Grants, New Mexico. See, generally, Terre Ryan, This Ecstatic Nation: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
3. Earle R. Caley, “The Earliest Known Use of a Material Containing Uranium,” Isis 38:3–4 (February 48): 190–93; Herman Fleck, “A Series of Treatises on the Rare Metals,” Proceedings of the Colorado Scientific Society, vol. 11 (Denver: Colorado Scientific Society, 1916); L.O. Howard, “Development of Our Radium Bearing Ores,” Salt Lake Mining Review 15 (February 28, 1914); Herman Fleck and William G. Haldane, “A Study of the Uranium and Vanadium Belts of Southern Colorado,” Report of the Colorado State Bureau of Mines for the Years 1905–6 (Denver: Colorado State Bureau of Mines, 1907); Thomas M. McKee, “Early Discovery of Uranium Ore in Colorado,” Colorado Magazine 32 (July 1955); Larry L. Meyer, “The Time of Great Fever: U-Boom on the Colorado Plateau,” American Heritage 32 (June–July 1981); United States Vanadium Company, Mesa Miracle in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona (New York: United States Vanadium Company, Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, 1952); H.C. Hodge, J.N. Stannard, and J.B. Hursh, eds., Uranium, Plutonium, and Transplutonic Elements: Handbook of Experimental Toxicology, vol. 36 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1973), 5–12. Eugène-Melchior Péligot produced the first sample of metallic uranium in 1841. Joseph J. Katz and Eugene Rabinowitch, The Chemistry of Uranium (Part 1): The Element, Its Binary and Related Compounds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 122.
4. Donna Strahan, “Uranium in Glass, Glazes, and Enamels: History, Identification, and Handling,” Studies in Conservation 46:3 (2001): 181–95; Dan Kline and Ward Lloyd, eds., The History of Glass (London: Orbis, 1984), 174–75; Richard B. Moore and Karl L. Kithil, “A Preliminary Report on Uranium, Radium, and Vanadium,” United States Bureau of Mines Bulletin, No. 70 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 58; Richard B. Moore, “Uranium and Vanadium,” in The Mineral Industry: Its Statistics, Technology, and Trade during 1920, G.A. Rouch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), 708; McKee, “Early Discovery of Uranium Ore in Colorado,” 192; Francis L. Pittman, “The Direct Production of Uranium Steel” (MS thesis, Colorado School of Mines, 1914), 22; Carrington H. Bolton, “Index to the Literature of Uranium, 1789–1885,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Part I (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1886), 922; Salt Lake Mining Review (February 28, 1914), 14; J. Baxeres de Alzugaray, “Manufacture and Metallurgy of Ferro-vanadium, Mining World (June 24, 1905), 659.
5. United States Geological Survey, Mineral Resources of the United States (Washington, DC, 1901–11); Don Sorensen, “Wonder Mineral: Utah’s Uranium,” Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Summer 1963); Moore and Kithil, “A Preliminary Report on Uranium, Radium, and Vanadium”; Fleck and Haldane, “Study of Uranium and Vanadium Belts of Southern Colorado.”
6. “The Biological Effects of Radium,” Science 33 (June 30, 1911): 1001–5; Carroll Chase, “American Literature on Radium Therapy Prior to 1906,” American Journal of Roentgenology and Radium Therapy 8 (1921): 766–67. See, generally, Rober Abbe, “Subtle Power of Radium,” Transactions of the American Surgical Association 22 (1904); Louis Wickham and Paul Degrais, “Radium: Its Uses in Cancer and Other Diseases,” Contemporary 8 (August 1910): 174–88; Emile F. Krapf, “Recent Investigations on the Use of Radium for Malignant Diseases,” Radium 1 (May 1913): 10–13.
7. Kathleen Bruyn, Uranium Country (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1955), 42–43, 57.
8. Fleck, “A Series of Treatises on the Rare Metals,” 174–75; U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Mines and Mining, Radium Hearings on H.J. Res. 185 and 186, 63d Cong., 2d sess., January 19–28, 1914, 166; Charles L. Parsons, “Our Radium Resources,” Science 38 (October 31, 1931), 617.
9. Bruyn, Uranium Country, 41–59; Waren Bleeker, “Private or Governmental Radium Production,” Engineering Magazine 49 (April 1915): 102–3; Bleeker, “The Production of Radium in Colorado,” Science 42 (August 6, 1915): 184–85; Bleeker “On Extraction of Radium by the U.S. Bureau of Mines,” Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 8 (May 1916): 469–73; Charles H. Viol, “The Production of Radium,” Science 43 (June 2, 1916): 778–79; Viol, “Radium Production,” Science 49 (March 7, 1919): 227–28; Viol, “Radium Production,” Science 49 (June 13, 1919): 564–66; Herbert T. Wade, “Extracting Radium from American Ores,” Scientific American 114 (February 19, 1916), 194–95.
10. John S. MacArthur, “The Radium Industry and Reconstruction,” Engineering and Mining Journal 107 (April 5, 1919): 605–6; A.T. Parsons, “Radium, with Special Reference to Luminous Paint,” Journal of the Oil and Colour Chemists’ Association 12 (January 1929): 3; James E. Lounsbury, “Famous Pittsburgh Industries: The Standard Chemical Company of Pittsburgh, Pa.,” Crucible 22 (June 1938), 134; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Annual Report to the Secretary of the Interior for Fiscal Year 1918 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), 78; Charles H. Viol and Glenn D. Krammer, “The Application of Radium in Warfare,” Transactions of the American Electrochemical Society 32 (1918): 381–90.
11. Richard B. Moore, “Radium,” in Rouch, The Mineral Industry, 615–19; Frank L. Hess, “Radium, Uranium and Vanadium,” in Rouch, The Mineral Industry, 601; Viol, “Radium Production,” (March 7, 1919); MacArthur, “The Radium Industry and Reconstruction”; H.E. Bishop, “The Present Situation in the Radium Industry,” Science 57 (March 23, 1923): 341–45; Bishop, “Radium Ore in Africa,” Literary Digest 76 (January 13, 1923), 23; Camille Matignon, “The Manufacture of Radium,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1926), 233.
12. Jonathan E. Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
13. James R. Newman, “The Atomic Energy Industry: An Experiment in Hybridization,” Yale Law Journal 60 (December 1951); Harold P. Green and Alan Rosenthal, Government of the Atom (New York: Atherton Press, 1963); Frank G. Dawson, Nuclear Power: Development and Management of a Technology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); Mark Hertsgaard, Nuclear, Inc.: The Men and Money behind the Nuclear Power Industry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Richard S. Lewis, The Nuclear Power Rebellion (New York: Viking Press, 1972); Philip Mullenbach, Civilian Nuclear Power (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963); Morgan Thomas, Atomic Energy and Congress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956); James M. Jasper, “Nuclear Policy as Projection: How Policy Choices Can Create Their Own Justification,” in Governing the Atom: The Politics of Risk, ed. John Byrne and Steven M. Hoffman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996); Gerald H. Clarfield and William M. Wiecek, Nuclear America: Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1940–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); Richard O. Niehoff, “Organization and Administration of the United States Atomic Energy Commission,” Public Administration Review 8 (May 1948); United States Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Power and Private Enterprise: Hearings before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 81st Cong., 1st sess., 1949; United States Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Power and Private Enterprise (Joint Committee Print, 1952); United States Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Atomic Power Development and Private Enterprise, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1953.
14. Meyer, “The Time of Great Fever”; George Dannenbaum, Boom to Bust: Remembrances of the Grants, New Mexico, Uranium Boom (Albuquerque: Creative Designs, 1994); “Uranium Grows Up—Big Business Now,” U.S. News and World Report (April 6, 1956); “History’s Greatest Metal Hunt,” Life 38 (May 23, 1955); “Colorado Plateau Uranium Population Doubles in 2 Years,” Denver Post (February 6, 1955); Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining in the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002); Stephen I. Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998); Arthur R. Gomez, Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West, 1945–1970 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); Raymond W. Taylor and Samuel W. Taylor, Uranium Fever, or No Talk under $1 Million (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Perrin Stryker, “The Great Uranium Rush,” Fortune (August, 1954); Raye C. Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy: Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991); Maxine Newell, Charlie Steen’s Vi Vida (Moab, UT: Moab’s Printing Place, 1992); Jesse C. Johnson, “The Romance of Uranium Mining,” Science Digest 40 (September 1956); Burt Meyers, “Uranium Jackpot,” Engineering and Mining Journal 154 (September 1953); Elizabeth Pope, “The Richest Town in the U.S.A.,” McCall’s (December 1956).
15. Howard Ball, Cancer Factories: America’s Tragic Quest for Uranium Self-Sufficiency (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 37.
16. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Radiation and Indoor Air, Radiation Protection Division (6608J), Uranium Location Database Compilation, EPA 402-R-05–009 (August 2006).
17. See, generally, Homer Aschmann, “The Natural History of a Mine,” Economic Geography 46:2 (April 1970): 172–89.
18. Ball, Cancer Factories, 37.
19. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns; Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter Day Saints, 1830–1900 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); James H. McClintock, Mormon Settlement in Arizona (Whitefish, MT: Kesslinger, 2010); William S. Abruzzi, Dam That River (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993); Richard H. Jackson, ed., The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1980); William S. Abruzzi, “Ecology, Resource Redistribution, and Mormon Settlement in Northeastern Arizona,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 91:3 (September 1989): 642–55; D.W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55:2 (June 1965): 191–220; Milton R. Hunter, “The Mormons and the Colorado River,” American Historical Review 44:3 (April 1939): 549–55; Ruth M. Underhill, The Navajos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, The Navajo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Laura Gilpin, The Enduring Navajo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); John U. Terrell, The Navajos: The Past and Present of a Great People (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Library, 2000).
20. Robert N. Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and What We Don’t Know About Cancer (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 186.
21. Ball, Cancer Factories, 36. See, for example, Sigismund Peller, “Lung Cancer among Mine Workers in Joachimsthal,” Human Biology 11 (1939): 130–43; William C. Hueper, Occupational and Environmental Cancer of the Respiratory System (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1942), 435–56; William C. Hueper, Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1942); Egon Lorenz, “Radioactivity and Lung Cancer: A Critical Review of Lung Cancer in the Miners of Schneeberg and Joachimsthal,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 5 (August 1944): 1–15; E. Cook, “Ionizing Radiation,” in Environment, ed. W.W. Murdock (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1975), 304; J. Newell Stannard, Radioactivity and Health: A History (Oak Ridge, TN: Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 1988), 131–32; Radiation Exposure of Uranium Miners, Part One: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Research, Development, and Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967); Duncan Holaday, Chief, Occupational Health Field Station, Public Health Service, “Employee Radiation Hazards and Workmen’s Compensation,” Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 86th Cong., 1st Sess. (1959), 190.
22. Merril Eisenbud, An Environmental Odyssey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); Health Impact of Low-Level Radiation: Joint Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources and the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. (1979), 40–41; Ball, Cancer Factories, 47.
23. Sylvia Barnson v. United States, 630 F. Supp. 418 (1985), 420–21; Proctor, Cancer Wars, 44; Wilhelm C. Hueper, “Adventures of a Physician in Occupational Cancer: A Medical Cassandra’s Tale” (1976), unpublished autobiography, Hueper Papers, Series I, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD; John H. Begay v. United States, 591 F. Supp. 991 (D. AZ, 1984).
24. Duncan Holaday, Federal Radiation Council, Preliminary Staff Report, No. 8: Radiation Exposure of Miners, Part One (Washington, DC: Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 1967), 89.
25. Ball, Cancer Factories, 52–53.
26. Begay v. United States; Sylvia Barnson et. al v. United States, 531 F. Supp. 614 (1982); Barnson v. United States (1985). Begay was the Navajo miners’ litigation against the federal government and mining companies addressing conditions in uranium mines; the Barnson cases dealt with non-Indian miners.
27. Pub. L. 101–426, 4 STAT. 920; Public Law 101–426, 101st Congress, October 15, 1990. The act created three payment categories: $50,000 to Nevada Test Site “downwinders”; $75,000 for workers involved with atmospheric nuclear weapons testing; and $100,000 for uranium miners, millers, and ore transporters. As of the spring of 2013, 27,246 claims had been approved, and 10,348 denied, for total award payments of $1.8 billion. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, “Radiation Exposure Compensation System Claims to Date: Summary of Claims Received by 5/28/2013; All Claims,” http://www.justice.gov/civil/omp/omi/Tre_SysClaimsToDateSum.pdf.
28. Begay v. United States, 1013; Ball, Cancer Factories, 65–94.
29. The most serious containment dam failure occurred at the Kerr-McGee uranium mill at Shiprock, New Mexico, August 22–23, 1960, which released as much as 780,000 gallons of radioactive and toxic organic compounds into the San Juan River. The spill boosted radiation levels to about twenty times what the USPHS deemed permissible for drinking water. Further investigations of the riverbed revealed that the high radiation levels were not attributable to the spill alone, but reflected long-term seepage from the tailings impoundment ponds. At the time, thousands of people relied on the San Juan River for agricultural and domestic water. Other dam failures occurred at the Union Carbide mill at Green River, Utah, August 19, 1959; another Union Carbide mill at Maybell, Colorado, December 6, 1961; the Mines Development mill at Edgemont, South Dakota, June 11, 1962; the Climax mill at Grand Junction, Colorado, July 2, 1967; the Petrotomics mill, Shirley Basin, Wyoming, February 16, 1971; the Western Nuclear mill, Jeffrey City, Wyoming, March 23, 1971; another Kerr-McGee mill at Churchrock, New Mexico, April 1, 1976; the Homestake mill at Milan, New Mexico, February 1, 1977; the United Nuclear mill at Churchrock, New Mexico, July 16, 1979. U.S Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service (Region VIII, Denver, Colorado), Shiprock, New Mexico, Uranium Mill Accident of August 22, 1960, Colorado River Basin Water Quality Control Project (January 1963); U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Regulatory Guide 3.111.1, Rev. 1: Operation Inspection and Surveillance of Embankment Retention Systems for Uranium Mill Tailings (October 1980).
30. Robert C. Merritt, The Extractive Metallurgy of Uranium (Golden: Colorado School of Mines Research Institute, 1971); Katz and Rabinowitch, The Chemistry of Uranium (Part 1), 111–32; Thomas C. Hollocher and James J. MacKenzie, “Radiation Hazards Associated with Uranium Mill Operations,” in Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975); U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, Radioactive Water Pollution of the Colorado River Basin, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess., May 6, 1966.
31. “Transcript of Conference on Interstate Pollution of the Animas River, Colorado–New Mexico,” Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 29, 1958, New Mexico Environment Department; R.F. Poston, “Uranium Milling Waste Studies—Colorado and Utah” (unpublished memorandum), Western Gulf and Colorado Basin Office, U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) (March 19, 1951); E.C. Tsivoglou, A.F. Bartsch, D.L. Rushing, and D.A. Holiday, Report of Survey of Contamination of Surface Waters by Uranium Recovery Plants (Cincinnati, OH: USPHS, Robert A. Taft Sanitary Engineering Center, 1956).
32. Colorado Department of Public Health, Uranium Wastes and Colorado’s Environment, 2nd ed. (Denver: Colorado Department of Public Health, 1971); USPHS Technical Report W62–17 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert A. Taft Sanitary Engineering Center, 1962). Aleck Alexander to Division of Sanitary Engineering Services et al., memorandum, February 20, 1958, Box 4, Accession No. 90–62A-672, U.S. Public Health Service; and Murry Stein to James Harlan, June 22, 1959, Box 1, Accession No. 90–62A-121, U.S. Public Health Service, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, D.C. U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, Radioactive Water Pollution of the Colorado River Basin; Hollocher and MacKenzie, “Radiation Hazards Associated with Uranium Mill Operations.”
33. Joseph F. Hennessey to Glenn Seaborg et al., memorandum, June 9, 1966, Box 184, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Glenn Seaborg Collection, U.S. Department of Energy Archives, Germantown, MD.
34. Hollocher and MacKenzie, “Radiation Hazards Associated with Uranium Mill Operations”; H. Peter Metzger, The Atomic Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); Tsivoglou et al., Report of Survey of Contamination of Surface Waters by Uranium Recovery Plants; Colorado Department of Public Health, Uranium Wastes and Colorado’s Environment; “Transcript of Conference on Interstate Pollution of the Animas River, Colorado”; W.B. Harris et al., Environmental Hazards Associated with the Milling of Uranium Ore, HASL-40 (New York: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Health and Safety Laboratory, Operations Office, June 1958).
35. U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, Radioactive Water Pollution of the Colorado River Basin.
36. Ibid.; Colorado Department of Public Health, “Report on Control of Uranium Mill Tailings,” Occupational and Radiological Health Section, October 28, 1966, Box 9937, Colorado State Archives, Denver; R.E. Hollingsworth and Harold L. Price to Glenn Seaborg, memorandum, December 2, 1965 (AEC-R 18/32), Accession No. 9210120297, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
37. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Disposition and Control of Uranium Mill Tailings Piles in the Colorado River Basin (Denver: Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, Region VII, March 1966).
38. See, for example, “West Slope Studying Pollution by Uranium,” (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, December 14, 1965; “Uranium Mystery on the Colorado Basin,” New Republic 154 (March 5, 1966): 9; U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, Radioactive Water Pollution of the Colorado River Basin.
39. Betty L. Perkins, An Overview of the New Mexico Uranium Industry (Santa Fe: New Mexico Energy and Minerals Department, 1979); Ken Silver, “The Yellowed Archives of Yellowcake,” Public Health Reports 111 (March–April 1996); Richard Waxweiler et al., “Mortality Patterns among a Retrospective Cohort of Uranium Mill Workers,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth Midyear Topical Meeting of the Health Physics Society (Albuquerque, 1983); Ringholz, Uranium Frenzy; U.S. Public Health Service, Evaluation of Radon 222 near Uranium Tailings Piles, DER 69–1 (Rockville, MD: U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1969).
40. U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Senate Committee on Public Works, Radioactive Water Pollution in the Colorado River Basin, 20.
41. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Disposition and Control of Uranium Mill Tailings Piles in the Colorado River Basin, 8.
42. Congress, House, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Uranium Mill Tailings Control: H.R. 13382, H.R. 12938, H.R. 12535 and H.R. 13049, 95th Cong., 2nd sess., June 26–27, July 10, 17, 1978; “Landscaping (Industrial Strength),” Nuclear Energy (2nd Quarter, 1993), 9–11; J.M. Costello et al., “A Review of the Environmental Impact of Mining and Milling of Radioactive Ores, Upgrading Processes, and Fabrication of Nuclear Fuels,” in Nuclear Energy and the Environment, ed. Essam E. El-Hinnawi (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980); “Management of Inactive Uranium Mill Tailings,” Journal of Environmental Engineering 112 (June 1986); D. Lush et al., “An Assessment of the Long Term Interaction of Uranium Tailings with the Natural Environment,” Proceedings of the Seminar on Management, Stabilization, and Environmental Impact of Uranium Mill Tailings (Albuquerque: OCED Nuclear Energy Agency, July 1978).
43. U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Subcommittee on Raw Materials, Use of Uranium Mill Tailings for Construction Purposes, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., October 28–29, 1971; Colorado Department of Public Health, Uranium Wastes and Colorado’s Environment; Colorado Department of Public Health, “Report on Control of Uranium Mill Tailings”; Robert N. Snelling and Robert D. Seik, “Evaluation of Radon Film Badge” (Southwestern Radiological Health Laboratories, USPHS, and Colorado Department of Public Health, April 1968); Metzger, The Atomic Establishment, 171; Frank E. McGinley to Elton A. Youngberg, memorandum, November 16, 1971, Accession No. 9210120418, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Public Documents Reading Room, Washington, DC.
44. Tailings for Construction Hearing; Colorado Department of Public Health, Uranium Wastes and Colorado’s Environment; U.S. Public Health Service, Department of Health Education and Welfare, Evaluation of Radon 222 near Uranium Tailings Piles; H. Peter Metzger, “Dear Sir: Your House Is Built on Radioactive Uranium Waste,” New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1971; Stephen H. Greenleigh to Legal Files, memorandum, December 19, 1970, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Accession No. 9210120373, Public Documents Reading Room, Washington, DC. Other communities with significant tailings contamination include Durango, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah; Tuba City, New Mexico; and Canonsburg, Pennsylvania (the site of a radium-era uranium reduction mill that later also processed ore for the AEC). Ellen Wilson, “Some Like It Hot,” Environmental Action 17 (November–December 1985); Ralph Haurwitz, “Families Cry for Radiation Park Action,” Pittsburgh Press, October 26, 1980.
45. (Denver) Rocky Mountain News (September 1, 1966); Washington Daily News (September 1, 1966); J. Samuel Walker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 262; Robert Saile, “Radon Gas Found in Junction Homes,” Denver Post (December 19, 1969); (Grand Junction) Daily Sentinel (January 13, March 25, 26, 29, 1970); Roger Rapoport, “The Trouble with 90.5 Million Tons of Radioactive Tailings,” Los Angeles Times West Magazine (April 12, 1970); N. Wood, “America’s Most Radioactive City,” McCalls 97 (September 1970); Tom Rees, “Committee Recommends Uranium Tailings Action,” (Denver) Rocky Mountain News (September 22, 1971); “Radon? Sure. So What Else Is New? Ask the Folks in Grand Junction,” Nuclear Industry 18 (October–November 1971).
46. P.L. 92–314, Title II, 86 Stat. 222 (June 16, 1972); U.S Comptroller General, Report to Congress: Controlling the Radiation Hazard from Uranium Mill Tailings (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, May 1975); Denver Post (September 6, 1971); Renee Baruch and Madonna Ghandi, “Radioactive Waste: A Failure in Governmental Regulation,” Albany Law Review 37 (1972): 97–134.
47. U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Subcommittee on Raw Materials, S. 2566 and H.R. 11378: Uranium Mill Tailings in the State of Utah, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess., March 12, 1974; U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Uranium Mill Tailings Control: H.R. 13382, H.R. 12938, H.R. 12535, H.R. 13049; Congressional Quarterly, Weekly Report 36 (August 19, 1978); P.L. No. 95–604 (November 8, 1978), 92 Stat. 3021 et. seq., 42.
48. Jay B. Bell and Richard E. Turley, The Need for Remedial Action and Federal Participation in the Case of the Abandoned Vitro Uranium Mill Tailings Located in Salt Lake County, Utah (Salt Lake City: Office of the State Science Advisor, March 7, 1974), Utah State Records, Salt Lake City; U.S. Congress, JCAE, Subcommittee on Legislation, ERDA, Authorizing Legislation, Fiscal Year 1976, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., February 18 and 27, 1975; U.S. Congress, JCAE, Subcommittee on Raw Materials, S. 2566 and H.R. 11378; U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Uranium Mill Tailings Control: H.R. 13382, H.R. 12938, H.R 13049; U.S. Department of Energy, Inactive Uranium Mill Tailing Remedial Action Program: Salt Lake City (Vitro) Site Offsite Decontamination Program Survey; Compilation of Candidate Properties for Remedial Action (Albuquerque: UMTRCA Project Office, November 18, 1983); H. Peter Metzger, “AEC vs. The Public: The Case of the Uranium Tailings,” Science News 106 (July 13, 1974); “EPA Finds ‘Intolerable’ Radioactivity in Drinking Water near Uranium Mines,” Environmental Reporter 6 (August 22, 1974); “Report Says Radon Exposure Major Hazard in Living near Uranium Tailings Deposits,” Environmental Reporter 7 (May 7, 1976); “NRC Radon Impact Estimates ‘Grossly’ in Error, Says Oak Ridge Official,” Environmental Reporter 8 (November 2, 1977); Congressional Quarterly, Weekly Reports 36 (August 19, 1978); Chris Shuey, “Bringing Tailings under Control,” Workbook 10 (1985); Elizabeth V. Scott, “Unfinished Business: The Regulation of Uranium Mining and Milling,” University of Richmond Law Review 615 (1984); John D. Collins, “Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Reclamation in Wyoming: Ten Years after the Industry Collapsed,” Land and Water Law Review 26 (1991); Mary Boaz, “Retroactive Liability for Clean-Up of Hazardous Waste in Atlas v. United States: The Nuclear Industry’s Failed Attempt to Make the Government Pay,” Journal of Mineral Law and Policy 6 (1990–91).
49. See Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946. The “discretionary function” exception, one of twelve such exceptions to the act that limits the ability of private citizens to seek redress in federal courts for government action, invalidates “any claim based upon any act or omission of any employee of the Government, exercising due care, in the execution of a statute or regulation, whether or not such statute or regulation be valid, or based on the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or any employee of the government, whether or not the discretion involved be abused.”