Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West (review)

Eric Mogren begins Warm Sands with a historical review of uranium mining and processing. First, the discovery of a new mineral, carnotite, containing both uranium and vanadium, created a radium industry in southwestern Colorado during the early twentieth century. Radium was needed by the medical profession and the luminous paint industry, but the uranium and vanadium were largely discarded until the need for vanadium to harden steel for war materiel revived carnotite mining after 1938. The Metals Reserve Company (MRC) reconditioned a lead smelter at Durango, Colorado, to process carnotite ore and also acquired a vanadium mill at Monticello, Utah.

The MRC also provided the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) with tailings from the Durango mill and yellowcake from Monticello. But the MED selected as its primary supplier of Colorado Plateau uranium the U.S. Vanadium Corporation (USV), which had developed a process for recovering uranium from vanadium tailings at its mill in Uravan, Colorado. The MED also purchased tailings from other vanadium mills in Colorado and Utah to be treated at Uravan. So-called green sludge was processed into yellowcake at a plant built in Grand Junction, Colorado, by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which came into being in 1947.

Warm Sands explores the legacy of the tailings that were left at abandoned milling operations between 1947 and 1970, the years of the AEC's uranium procurement program. At first, vanadium mills were retrofitted to recover uranium from the Colorado Plateau carnotite ores. Bonuses paid by the AEC for new discoveries and high-grade ore created a huge prospecting boom, and mills were constructed all across the west. So much uranium was being found that the AEC announced it would purchase only uranium concentrate derived from ore reserves located prior to 1958. This all but ended uranium exploration, but the AEC's uranium procurement continued until 31 December 1970 (not 1971, as Mogren states), and, in its haste to develop a nuclear arsenal, it overlooked the health hazards faced by uranium miners and millers.

With regard to unlined tailings ponds at mills adjacent to the Colorado, San Miguel and Animas rivers in Colorado, mill operators undertook some remediation and monitoring stations were installed. While there were still the ever growing piles of tailings creating dust and emitting radon gas, the tailings contained less than 0.05 percent uranium oxide and the AEC considered them the responsibility of mill operators. Then, in the mid-1960s, Colorado public health officials learned that the Climax Uranium Company's mill near Grand Junction had been making tailings available to local building contractors, who were using the fine, clean sand residue for in-fill around new homes, businesses, and schools. Surveys indicated that nearly six thousand Grand Junction structures were contaminated. Other surveys revealed that tailings had been used in construction in mill towns elsewhere, and the hazard to public health soon drew national media attention.

On 19 January 1975, Congress abolished the AEC and created two new agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). (The latter was short-lived, becoming part of the Department of Energy in 1977.) Then, in 1978 Congress passed the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA), and this led to the beginning of the actual cleanup of tailings. When this work ended in 1998, twenty-one mill sites in nine states had been cleaned up, along with thousands of properties in mill towns.

Warm Sands documents all the studies and hearings, all the projects and players involved in the long cleanup struggle, though not always accurately. There is no map showing the sites that were cleaned up. In Mogren's extensive bibliography it is surprising not to see any mention of the Rocky Mountain Region of the National Archives in Denver, where the records of the Colorado Area Engineer's Office of the Manhattan Engineer District and many other pertinent documents are housed. Likewise, maps and reports of...