Wednesday, November 7, 2012

"Where Adventure Begins"

Canyonlands National Park
Moab, Utah, the largest community in eastern Utah, may be only an hour from Naturita, but it sure does not feel like that. Between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, Moab is known for outdoor recreation, not mineral extraction.

Arches National Park

It wasn't always that way, though. During the early 1950s, just as the nuclear arms race was beginning to heat up, Moab, a sleepy farming town became, quite literally overnight, one of the Uranium Capitals of the World. Prospectors flooded in from the east, holding a Geiger counter in one hand and a small informational booklet from the Atomic Energy Commission on how to find uranium in the other. Moab was, just as it is today, a place "Where Adventure Begins."

Charlie Steen
To meet the demand of all these prospectors (as well as the enormous amount of uranium he was extracting from his own mine), Charlie Steen, the man who turned Moab into a Uranium Captial of the World, worked with the Atomic Energy Commission to build a uranium mill outside of town on the banks of the Colorado River. That mill, closed 1984, is now at the center of a decades long effort to clean up the byproduct material, or tailings, from the uranium mill's operations.

URECO Mill in Moab, Utah (Taken in 1988)
EnergySolutions, a Salt Lake City based company involved in both the cleanup and disposal of radioactive materials is responsible for this project. Here is a video from EnergySolutions documenting what they, as of 2010, have done in terms of removing the mill tailings from along the Colorado River. It's a fairly comprehensive, albeit biased, account of their part in the Department of Energy's effort to finish cleaning up the Moab area.

That and the music is catchy.

Even if it is completely inappropriate for the setting.



No comments:

Post a Comment