Mining revival: a uranium boom for a wary West

"If it's a three-volume saga, we're now beginning Volume Two," says Sidney Himmel, CEO of Trigon. Companies are starting to move beyond the paperwork into looking at reactivating the old plants. "You go there and guess what, they are all stuck together with rust," he adds. Environmental and worker mishaps are rare now, says Mr. Himmel, and companies design for contingencies.

"The vast majority of the time ... things work out fine," he says. "How serious is the mining industry about these issues? I'd say more serious than ever."

At Denison's Pandora mine, pastel-colored electronics from the 1960s sit on dusty shelves. Such equipment, while old, remains valuable. Because of a shortage, Denison is building its own, less sophisticated, gamma probes.

Experienced people are also in short supply. "When an industry goes stale and stagnant for a period of time, people disappear," says Peter Farmer, CEO of Denison. "We've got two or three of these old pros, and we're training a bunch of the young people. But that takes time."

One of the old pros is Pandora's superintendent, Jim Fisher, who has been mining since 1966. "It's an exciting time for the entire area," he says. "A lot of people are being put back to work, and it's taking them out of lower paying jobs."

Some of the older locals who once worked the mines have mixed memories, however. J.R. Richardson of Moab mined uranium from 1956 to 1966, when his health began to decline. He recalls being regularly exposed to 80 parts per million of radon gas while underground, far above the legal limit of 1 ppm.

"The boss always knew a week in advance when the inspectors would come and would clean everything out," says Mr. Richardson, who adds that the industry has cleaned up a lot since then.

Mr. Fisher at Pandora notes the many safety features of modern mining operations, including ventilation fans, long drills that intermittently spray water to control dust, and careful record keeping of each miner's radiation exposure over time in accordance with federal rules. Inspectors from the Mining Safety and Health Administration come by once a quarter, unannounced, to check the records and conduct interviews.

Environmental concerns

The laws have also improved to safeguard the environment. Mine operators must post a bond to pay for cleanups – though bonds used in the past haven't always covered costs.

That's what happened with the former uranium mill in Moab. The company went belly up, but the bond was not nearly enough to deal with the mountain of riverside tailings. The pile, which sits in a floodplain and wasn't properly contained before the Department of Energy intervened, leaked and contaminated the river with uranium and ammonia. Meanwhile, plans to move the pile to a more stable location may drag out to as late as 2028 depending on funding.

While much cleanup work has been completed, dozens of old mines and mills have yet to been fully reclaimed, or adequately cleaned up, and several have been designated federal Superfund cleanup sites, according the World Information Service on Energy website.

The Navajo nation outlawed uranium production on its lands in 2005. The tribe says it suffered a higher rate of disease than in the general population after living in homes built with waste rock and tailings salvaged from unreclaimed mines and mills.

Environmentalists also worry about the impact of prospectors crisscrossing fragile lands. "There's some fantastic, beautiful landscapes down here and they have better uses than new roads for speculative mining," says Liz Thomas, field attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in Moab.

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