Uranium Frenzy in the West

Commentary: Abandoned archaeological ruins like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in the Southwest increasingly look like haunting hints of our own possible fate as global warming continues to bake the already arid West.

By Chip Ward

June 19, 2008

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[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt]

This has been energy crisis week at Tomdispatch (with a brief pit stop at America's mega-bases in Iraq, built with control of the oil heartlands of the planet in mind). First, Michael Klare asked why the Pentagon's garrisoning of the global gas station had anything to do with American security. Then John Feffer wondered whether, when it came to that lethal combo of soaring energy prices, soaring food prices, and extreme weather, we were all now North Koreans. Today, Chip Ward takes up the energy crisis in America's increasingly arid western backyard.

A few years ago, Ward wrote for Tomdispatch about various plans to dump radioactive waste, including 40 years worth of "spent fuel rods" from nuclear reactors, in his Utah backyard. People who lived downwind were alarmed. They had been exposed to radioactive fallout during the era of atomic testing in the 1950s and feared more of the same—cancer for "downwinders" and obfuscation and denial from federal regulators. Since Ward wrote his account, local activists have successfully blocked the projects. Score one for the little guys.

Last year Ward, who was the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, retired. (His goodby-to-all-that Tomdispatch essay, "What They Didn't Teach Us in Library School," on his experiences with homeless library users is now being made into a Hollywood movie by actor/director Emilio Estevez.) Ward moved to a remote corner of southern Utah, so imagine his surprise, after years of resisting the back end of the nuclear energy cycle, to run smack into the cycle's front end: uranium mining.

For most of us, this is a stealth story, but those living in the arid lands of the West are experiencing a killer-case of déjà vu. After all, 50 years ago, the uranium boom that provided the raw material for America's nuclear arsenal, and its first generation of nuclear power plants, left sickness, death, and environmental destruction in its wake. Back then, "the peaceful atom" was being plugged as a miracle answer to any problem. Energy "too cheap to meter"? You bet. Harbors constructed by detonating atomic bombs? Sure thing. That was, of course, before nuclear power, possibly the most subsidized and capital-intensive energy source on Earth, gave us an intractable radioactive waste problem and filled us with fears of meltdowns and cancer.

Today, nuclear power is experiencing a "revival"—as a visionary solution to a global warming crisis caused, in part, by carbon-dioxide spewing coal-fired power plants. But let Ward take up the story of the latest round of "uranium frenzy" in his usual energetic manner. Tom Engelhardt

Uranium Frenzy in the West
Abandoned archaeological ruins like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in the Southwest increasingly look like haunting hints of our own possible fate as global warming continues to bake the already arid West.
By Chip Ward

In the American West, we take global warming personally. Like those polar bears desperately hunting for dwindling ice flows, we feel we're on the frontlines of the new weather regime.

The West is drying up. For example, canyon-hugging conservationists and jet-boating gear-heads have argued for several years about whether to "drain" Lake Powell, the 200 mile-long reservoir that once drowned the redrock Eden which was Glen Canyon. But a funny thing happened on the way to debate—Mother Nature drained it herself. Almost. The Utah reservoir is now reduced by half and the prospects of it ever reaching "full pool" again are less than dim. A recent Natural Resources Defense Council report suggests that Lake Mead, an even bigger reservoir downstream that feeds Las Vegas and Southern California, may be emptied by 2050.

Many desert denizens now view abandoned archaeological ruins like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in the Southwest as more than the remnants of a collapsed, long-lost Anasazi civilization. They increasingly look like haunting hints of our own possible fate as global warming continues to bake the already arid West.

Ghost towns are nothing new in our boom-n'-bust history, of course, but imagine some future tour guide ushering visitors through the awesome ruins of Las Vegas's Circus-Circus, the Bellagio, or the Luxor Hotel. "They didn't understand the limits of the landscape that enfolded them," she might say, while holding up a golf-ball excavated from the ruins for the crowd to see. "When drought pushed them across the threshold, they didn't see it coming, they couldn't cope, and it all fell apart."

Here we go again… Unfortunately, it's not only the heat that's hitting us hard out here. One of the "solutions" to the crisis of climate chaos is about to kick the citizens of the West right in our collective gut before we even have a chance to go down for the count from heat exhaustion. Nuclear power—once touted as a "solution" to other problems and recently resurrected—is now being pushed hard as an alternative to carbon-dioxide emitting coal for keeping the lights on. And, unfortunately for us, its raw material, uranium, is right in our backyard.

So we in states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana are poised for a mining boom reminiscent of the one in the 1950s when the nuclear age began. Then, the West's uranium mines provided the raw material for our metastasizing Cold War nuclear arsenal and the nation's first generation of nuclear reactors. (You remember Three Mile Island, don't you?) Back then, radioactive ore was often dug out by impoverished Navajo miners desperate for jobs. Many of them later sickened and died from exposure to radioactivity.

After uranium has been turned into "yellowcake," fit for further processing into reactor fuel, and then used to power a nuclear reactor, it is supposed to return to our Western landscapes in the form of "spent" nuclear fuel—something that is lethally dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Our arid landscapes, we are told, are ideal for waste that must be kept isolated and dry for at least a thousand years.

In other words, we get it at both ends of the nuclear energy cycle—and the drier we get, the more appealing we look. First, they dig a hole and take it out; then, they dig another and return it to the ground in far more dangerous shape. Lurking between the mines and the waste dumps are processing mills—and, of course, we have them, too. Even as debris from toxic slag piles in the old mines and mills of the West is still blowing in the wind or leaching into our watersheds, new slag heaps are taking shape in the fevered dreams of the next generation of speculators.

By now you may have heard about Yucca Mountain, the multi-billion dollar facility under construction in Nevada. Yucca was supposed to be the designated repository for the nuclear energy industry's waste. It has been plagued, however, by faulty science, enormous cost overruns, fierce opposition from local "downwinders," and the problem of transporting all that dangerous nuclear waste across the nation. After years of local resistance and a torrent of bad press, the Yucca project has finally been stalled and, now a distant threat to public health and environmental integrity, is about to be overtaken by a far more clear and present danger—a new uranium boom in the arid lands of the West.

A temporary town for a thousand uranium miners is already under construction at Ticaboo in southern Utah. It will remind old-timers here of the now popular tourist destination of Moab, which was essentially a trailer-park city for miners in the 1950s and Ground Zero for the first episode of what local historians label "uranium frenzy."

The newest uranium frenzy has opened with a PR campaign to convince a wary public that nuclear power should be an acceptable, if desperate, last-ditch option to stem the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It has convinced some former skeptics to take a second look at the potential value of non-carbon-dioxide emitting nuclear reactors. But, as Christian Parenti reports in The Nation, the debate about reviving and expanding nuclear power is quickly becoming moot in the United States, if not globally.

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