Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West (review)

Two enduring themes of the American West are the boom-and-bust cycles of precious-metal mining and the federal government's controlling role in determining land use. These themes come together in Michael Amundson's absorbing study of how four mining towns developed and were eventually doomed (with enormous environmental consequences) by changing government priorities and the hazards of mining radioactive material.

Previously considered a useless byproduct of radium mining, in the 1930s uranium was identified by physicists as the best source of nuclear energy. The Manhattan Engineer District came to Uravan, a remote hamlet in southwest Colorado, to process uranium for the atomic bombs that ended World War II. The bombs suddenly transformed uranium "from worthless waste to a mineral on which national security depended," Amundson writes (p. 1). With the dawn of the Cold War, the federal government established a system of guaranteed prices to encourage private citizens to find uranium, which they could sell only to the federal government.

Echoing the California gold rush of a century before, thousands of people descended on the high plateaus of the Southwest armed with Geiger counters. The first major discovery outside of Uravan was made in 1950 when a Navajo named Paddy Martinez found uranium northwest of Grants, New Mexico. Claims at Moab, Utah, and Jeffrey City, an uninhabited area north of Rawlins, Wyoming, followed.

Amundson examines the four mining towns at the heart of the uranium boom. Uravan, Grants, Moab, and Jeffrey City shared economic dependence not only on the federal government, but also on big mining companies. Although the government encouraged individual prospectors to find uranium, only well-capitalized corporations could successfully mill the "yellowcakes," or processed uranium, that the Atomic Energy Commission required.

Amundson uses local newspapers, oral histories, and corporate materials to chronicle how the citizens struggled to establish schools and churches in communities overrun by tent cities and wild-eyed prospectors. Concentrating on maintaining law and order, the townsfolk had little appreciation for the health hazards of working around radioactive material. This was in keeping with prevailing attitudes: Amundson quotes a poll's finding that Americans trusted "science, the government, and God" to protect them from nuclear disaster. Economic complacency ended in the yellowcake towns in the late 1960s, as the government shifted the industry into a commercial setting where uranium could be purchased on the open market.

The towns were now subject to the vicissitudes of world uranium production, which included mines in Africa that could deeply undercut U.S. prices. The 1970s energy crisis coincided with the privatization of uranium sales, sending uranium prices soaring, followed by a "perfect storm" that hit the industry in 1979: the Three Mile Island accident, which devastated commercial nuclear power; the collapse of world uranium prices; and the rising concerns about environmental damage from uranium mining and high radiation.

So quickly came the collapse that Jeffrey City dropped from four thousand people in 1979 to three hundred in 1983. The population of Grants was halved and unemployment reached 30 percent even before Kerr-McGee shut the last uranium mill in 1985. The greatest devastation, however, occurred in Uravan, the place where it all began. The entire town was determined to be radioactive, and the residents dispersed. All but two buildings have since been removed; the heavy cost of burying the radioactive waste was shared, after lengthy litigation, by the federal government and Union Carbide.

As the first detailed account of uranium boomtowns, Yellowcake Towns provides important insights into how government policy affected both the land and the people in a remote corner of the West. In particular, the first half of the book shines with a strong narrative, but Amundson's writing in the second half is dry and often repetitious. Although clearly upset by what has happened to the mining communities, he fails to find a narrative...