The future of nuclear power in America is back on the table, with all its vast insinuation, as global warming revive the search for energy sources that make less greenhouse gas. But in this miserable corner of western Colorado one of the first places in the world that uranium, nuclear energy’s prime fuel, was always dug from the ground in industrial scale the debate is both simpler and more complex. A suggestion for a new mill to process uranium ore, which would guide to the opening of long-shuttered mines in Colorado and Utah, has brought worldwide and local concerns into collision jobs, health, class-awareness and historical memory among them in ways that suggest, if the pattern here holds, a bitter national discuss to come.
Telluride, the rich ski town an hour away by car and a universe apart in conditions of money and clout, has emerge as a main base of resistance to the proposed mill, called Pinon Ridge, which would be the first new uranium processing ability in the United States in more than 25 years if it is accepted by Colorado regulators next month. To inhabitants here like Michelle Mathews, the fact that a lot of opponents of the mill hail from Telluride is a crucial strike beside their arguments. “People from Telluride don’t have any business around here,” said Ms. Mathews, 31, who workings as a school janitor and ardently ropes the idea of bringing back uranium jobs. “Not everybody needs to drive to Telluride to clean hotel rooms.”
Here in Naturita and the cluster of small communities in and around the Paradox Valley, where the mill could be built, people disagree not just about the knowledge of the mill, but about whether uranium, laid down here in tufts of volcanic ash more than 100 million years ago, was a approval or a curse. Minerals found in relationship with uranium, especially vanadium, which is used in harden steel, spark the initial real rush in the 1930s; uranium for bombs and power then followed in a stutter pattern of boom and bust into the 1980s, when the nation’s nuclear energy program frequently went into mothballs.
Telluride, the rich ski town an hour away by car and a universe apart in conditions of money and clout, has emerge as a main base of resistance to the proposed mill, called Pinon Ridge, which would be the first new uranium processing ability in the United States in more than 25 years if it is accepted by Colorado regulators next month. To inhabitants here like Michelle Mathews, the fact that a lot of opponents of the mill hail from Telluride is a crucial strike beside their arguments. “People from Telluride don’t have any business around here,” said Ms. Mathews, 31, who workings as a school janitor and ardently ropes the idea of bringing back uranium jobs. “Not everybody needs to drive to Telluride to clean hotel rooms.”
Here in Naturita and the cluster of small communities in and around the Paradox Valley, where the mill could be built, people disagree not just about the knowledge of the mill, but about whether uranium, laid down here in tufts of volcanic ash more than 100 million years ago, was a approval or a curse. Minerals found in relationship with uranium, especially vanadium, which is used in harden steel, spark the initial real rush in the 1930s; uranium for bombs and power then followed in a stutter pattern of boom and bust into the 1980s, when the nation’s nuclear energy program frequently went into mothballs.
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