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Town ceases to exist after Superfund cleanup
Uravan once vital to security of United States
Herald Denver Bureau
Photo by JOE HANEL/Herald
The site of the former town of Uravan, 15 miles north of Naturita, was once a booming town until production ended in 1984 and a government cleanup of the site began.
Click image to enlarge
Courtesy of Union Carbide
This 1953 ad from Union Carbide touts the “Promise of a golden future” that yellow uranium ore from the Colorado Plateau will bring through its “atomic wonders.”
What it took
To clean up the former town of Uravan, the following work was done, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
- Demolition and removal of about 50 major mill facility structures and buildings, including the process systems and circuits, and removal of more than 260 buildings.
- Removal and cleanup of dispersed materials and contaminated soil from approximately 400 acres.
- Relocation of more than 3 million cubic yards of mill wastes and contaminated materials.
- Construction of waste and tailing repository covers, liquid evaporation and retention ponds, and permanent runoff control structures – using more than 1.7 million cubic yards of earthen materials.
- Construction of five double-lined ponds (totaling 40 acres) for the evaporation of hillside seepage, tailing-pile seepage and extracted groundwater.
- Construction and use of a new repository capable of disposing more than 1.8 million cubic yards of evaporative pond demolition debris and radioactive waste.
- Collection of more than 70 million gallons of hillside and tailing seepage, containing approximately 6,000 tons of contaminated inorganic compounds.
- Extraction of about 245 million gallons of contaminated liquids from the groundwater with the removal of about 14,500 tons of contaminated inorganic compounds.
- Removal of contaminated materials from the dumps.
Uranium Q&A
What is uranium?
Uranium is a heavy, naturally occurring rock. It is radioactive – its atoms shed neutrons, which, over millions of years, causes the atoms to decay into a series of other radioactive elements before they reach a stable state as lead. The decay elements include radon, a gas.
During radioactive decay, neutrons split the nuclei of some atoms, which releases a tremendous amount of energy and more neutrons, which split other atoms in a chain reaction. If a chunk of uranium is purified, enriched and shaped, it can be triggered into a controlled chain reaction inside a nuclear power plant. If it is enriched even more, it can be used for an uncontrolled chain reaction – a nuclear bomb.
What are the dangers of radioactivity?
Humans absorb radiation all the time from the sun, the soil and consumer products such as televisions. Uranium and the elements in its decay chain give off radiation that’s mostly dangerous if it’s ingested. The inhalation of radon gas has been linked to lung cancer. Uranium ore underground or in the open air emits radiation, but the most dangerous particles are blocked by clothing or human skin. Uranium also is a heavy metal and chemically toxic to people, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
However, the latest research from the National Academy of Sciences says there is no safe dose of radiation. Even the smallest dose leads to a small increase in the risk for cancer. One-quarter of Americans will get some form of cancer in their lifetimes – mostly for reasons unrelated to uranium mining.
What is a uranium mill?
Mills process raw uranium ore by crushing it and chemically dissolving it. The end result is yellowcake, a concentrated form of uranium dust. Yellowcake cannot be used in a power plant or bomb until it is enriched at a separate plant.
Could terrorists make a nuclear bomb out of Colorado uranium?
Uranium ore is commonly found in Colorado and around the world. Uranium ore and yellowcake mostly contain an isotope known as U-238. Some of the uranium needs to be enriched into U-235 to be used in nuclear reactors, and it needs to be nearly pure U-235 to be used in a nuclear bomb. An enrichment plant takes up many acres of land and consumes vast amounts of energy. It’s such an intensive process that experts say it takes the resources of a national government to pull it off. So a terrorist who possessed raw uranium ore would have only a radioactive, but otherwise worthless, rock.
– Joe Hanel
The town still appears on official Colorado maps. But 15 miles north of Naturita, there's no sign on the road and few clues this once was a hopping town with a community center, a soda fountain and a swimming pool. The childhood memories of many residents of Nucla and Naturita were made here.
All that's left now is a flat spot on the ground surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, overflown by sparrows and serenaded by crickets.
The only clue to the labors of the men and women who used to live here is the barbed wire that surrounds the whole site and the metal signs with the universal symbol for radiation, reading: "ANY AREA OR CONTAINER ON THIS PROPERTY MAY CONTAIN RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS."
Other than one office building across the San Miguel River, the rest is gone.
Uravan once was vital to national security. Standard Chemical founded the town as the Joe Jr. Camp, a center of radium mining and milling.
In World War II, the military moved in to scour the tailings piles for uranium to build the first atomic bombs.
The camp was so secret that a young man from Nucla, just 20 miles away, was stationed there, but he wasn't allowed to tell his family until after the war, said Marie Templeton of the Rimrocker Historical Society.
After the war, Uravan boomed until the 1980s as a company town run by United States Vanadium and later by Union Carbide.
Production ended in 1984, and Umetco - a local subsidiary of Union Carbide - began a government-supervised cleanup. The whole town became a federal Superfund site.
The cleanup formally ended last year, although monitoring continues.
jhanel@durangoherald.com'>jhanel@durangoherald.com
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