In my quest to more be skilled generally I’ve been working
on mapping skills by downloading interesting-sounding data layers from the
internet and trying to make something out of them. Most recently I made this map of Utah mines [1]:
A few parts of the map struck me:
- Fluorine-fluorite (coded ‘F’ in the data) and Uranium (coded
‘U’) are often mined in the same places, leading to the attribute table
commodity code ‘FU.’ This is funny.
- The sand and gravel pits follow the base of the Rockies and
length of I-15 quite nicely.
- Look at all those uranium mines. I was in one of those once.
I think the Cold War is interesting. It’s amazing that during my
lifetime but not in my memory Americans lived with the legitimate fear of nuclear war (it is not
amazing that we are re-living this fear).
That between 1947 and 1991 we were engaged in an arms race that produced nuclear warheads small enough for three to fit on a single
intercontinental ballistic missile and each capable of producing a 475 kiloton
explosion (that’s equivalent to 475,000 tons of TNT)[2]. The first nuclear bomb, dropped in 1945, was
almost 20 times heavier with a 15 kiloton yield[3]. The U.S has LOTS of nuclear weapons, which
required lots of uranium. While we’ve begun slimming down our stockpile of nuclear weapons, hundreds of
abandoned uranium mines in Utah currently bear witness to that crazy period of
time.
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| Look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? |
Abandoned mines are an environmental hazard but abandoned
places are also irresistible. Brent,
Karina, and I had planned for a day of mine exploration during our 2015 Spring
Break trip. I downloaded a list of
uranium mines and we set off to look at the closest mines… which turned out to
be active processing mills (read: do not trespass there). This was disappointing, but Plan B was to
drive the roads in the part of San Juan County with the highest density of
active mines in hopes of finding something abandoned. And it worked.
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| Speak friend and enter |
Uranium is a heavy metal that is found in rocks, soil, and
water. It’s way more common than silver
or gold. Uranium can move through the earth
with groundwater, driven by changes in oxygen availability that will keep the
uranium bound to water or bound to rocks[4].
Sandstone can be lousy with uranium because it is porous (so uranium-laden
water can move through it) and because most sandstone deposits were formed near or below ancient seas, where the oxygen availability fluctuated a lot. It wasn’t a coincidence that the cliffs we
were exploring had bands of red and green rock that showed when oxygen
was (red) and wasn’t (green) available millennia ago.
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| The grey rock coming out of the chute and below it is uranium ore |
When mining, the key is to find uranium-bearing rocks that have
enough concentrated uranium to make digging a tunnel, carrying the rocks out of
the ground, and transporting them to a refinery worthwhile. Then a refinery will need to see reason to crush,
heat, and spin the ore until it is enriched enough that it can make
atom-splitting chain reactions (the physics and chemistry, of course, are more
complicated, but that’s the gist of it)[5].
Uranium by itself isn’t very radioactive at all and wasn’t the real
threat while we were in the mines.
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| Tunnels |
Side note. I’m also think water law is interesting and it follows a lot of the rules of mining. Did you know that the General Mining Act
of 1872 still stands as the rules for how one claims and works a mine. 1. First to claim it owns it. 2. Mineral rights are separate from land
rights (you don’t own the minerals below your home). 3. You have to put in $100 of labor per year
to keep your claim valid.
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| Only slightly less magnificent than the Door of Durin |
The mines we explored were three separate claims with
interconnected tunnels established in the 1950’s. The ores in the mines were a
mix of uranium, vanadium, potassium, and sulphur; in practical terms, there were
a lot of yellow rocks[1]. Prior to the
Uranium Boom in Moab, mines extracted radium (for medicine) and vanadium (for
making iron steel stronger), both of which are found in the same places as
uranium[6]. We left the tunnels with
mild headaches, which might have been due to vanadium gas.
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| Note the white calcite and yellow salts |
The Uranium Boom (approximately 1952-1961) was wild. Staking lots of claims was profitable at that
time because the U.S. government paid a guaranteed price for uranium and the
Colorado Plateau had a lot to offer. But
as mentioned above, uranium isn’t uncommon and the market quickly became
saturated and the government stopped buying uranium. Most mines were abandoned by the 1970’s, leaving
behind structures, mining refuse, and any equipment that wasn’t worth the cost
of moving. Miles of underground tunnels
and heaps of uranium slag are just one facet of the unintended consequences
that came to Utah with the Cold War arms race, along with stockpiles of
neurotoxins in the West Desert and down-winder cancer deaths in southwestern
Utah.
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We wandered around a couple miles of underground tunnels
where we experienced true silence and darkness when we dared turn our headlamps
off. We found the remains of blasting
caps and earthmoving machinery. I
discovered that I feel very uneasy underground while Brent is emboldened. In the first tunnel he pushed ahead while I
was farther back, taking very cautious steps.
Karina was caught in between us, but I found the bravery to lightly skip
up to her, making sure not to take any heavy, earth-shaking steps. Given how quiet the tunnel was, I thought I
could use my inside voice to alert Brent to my fear and get him to come
back. I spent minutes saying, ‘Brent. Can you come back here?” in a volume that
doesn’t deserve an exclamation point and I got really frustrated that he never
came back. But I couldn’t yell for fear
I would cave in the whole tunnel.
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| My Fellowship of the Tunnels |
The tunnels all went deeper into the sandstone, but we had
to stop at the depth of the regional water table, below which the tunnels were
flooded. That is where we caught up to
Brent, who promised he had not been ignoring my quiet pleas. Some entrances required crawling into, which felt
intrepid. One entrance was quite large
and grand, like the Mines of Moria. It
was exciting to get a glimpse into the semi-recent past and to have it all to
ourselves. The threat of trolls and
Balrogs made it all the more interesting.
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| Ever intrepid Karina |
The uranium mines in the Four Corners Region still have tens
of thousands of pounds of uranium ore left, but the cost of extraction is more
than the price of the ore. Like
abandoned conventional weapon blast sites and missile launch pads (which I will
detail later), they show what Utah was like during the Cold War.
Sources:
[5] Rhodes, Richard. Making
of the Atomic Bomb. Simon &
Schuster, 2012.
