METALS: The Uranium Boom

For years, the parched, mountainous wastelands of the Colorado Plateau were known for their scattering of dinosaur bones and the ruined homes of prehistoric cliff-dwelling Indians. But now the area is known for something far more important: uranium. At Uravan, Colo. last week, the U.S. Vanadium Corp., a subsidiary of Union Carbide & Carbon, gave a fillip to the wastelands’ glamorous new reputation and the boom under way. U.S. Vanadium opened the biggest uranium refining mill in the U.S.; by using a new process, it hopes to extract uranium from ores heretofore passed by. Spotted within a 200-mile radius of U.S. Vanadium’s property are seven other mills (see map) which produce virtually all U.S. uranium.

The new uranium boom is the latest in a long series of ups & downs for the Colorado Plateau. The deposits of uranium-bearing carnotite ores have long been known; Indians once painted themselves with brilliant reds and yellows extracted from the carnotite rock. It was first mined commercially 40 years ago for its radium content, and for a time the area turned out half the world’s supply of radium. (The uranium in the waste tailings from the mines was thrown away.) When richer radium-bearing ores were found in the Belgian Congo, the mines closed. Later, the area became a major producer of vanadium, also from carnotite, a metal used to harden steel. But not until World War II did its biggest boom develop. Tailings from radium and vanadium plants provided uranium for the first atom bombs.

The New Prospector. After war’s end, the Atomic Energy Commission gave uranium mining a big boost by a system of bonus payments. In one month, 1,133 prospectors checked in at AEC headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo. “For a while,” says a resident, “we were swamped with guys with Geiger counters and shovels. When you went up on the mesa they popped up behind every bit of sagebrush like Indians. But few did any good.”

The reason was that it was a new kind of mining, requiring a new kind of prospector. Trained geologists, equipped with gamma-ray logging units and other instruments, prospected the area by helicopter, horse and jeep. The number of uranium mines jumped from 15 to more than 200, their employment soared to 5,000. In 1951 alone, some $30 million of private capital was poured into the area, and uranium mining, though still wrapped in AEC secrecy, is thought to be Colorado’s biggest mining industry. The uranium that is transported through the streets of Grand Junction every day is estimated to equal 15,000 tons of coal in energy.

Waiting Game. But such towns as Grand Junction show few signs of booming like the West’s gold-mining towns of yore. Since most of the prospecting area is in the public domain, few have cashed in on leases or land sales. On top of that, uranium mining and processing is a hot and dirty job which promises few big bonanzas. “In most eight-hour days,” says one prospector, “it just isn’t possible to recover enough high-grade ore to pay your expenses. Maybe after you have moved 75 tons of rock your vein peters out and you have to drill around and start a new shaft. Then, after days of back-breaking work and futile drilling and blasting, you hit a pocket and in a few hours you take out enough to pay expenses for quite a while.”

One of the few men who have struck it rich in the uranium boom is Blair Burwell, a trained mining engineer. He set up a company in Grand Junction four years ago to provide drilling, exploration and consulting services, has since split his stock 100 for one and paid 20¢ a share, in effect a $20 dividend on the original stock. But he is an exception; most of the uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau are still waiting for the big chance. Said one: “It’s just like a virus. It gets in your blood and you can’t get it out.”