LA SAL, Utah — The clicking of the Geiger counter is music to the ears of Bill Hemphill.
“When it’s really going off like that you know you’re in your good uranium,” Hemphill said as he looked at the needle moving back and forth across the meter.
The counter finds radioactive material like uranium in the La Sal Complex — 32 miles southeast of Moab and a few hundred feet underground.
READ: Tons of radioactive waste from Europe arrived in Utah last year
The mine has been opened and closed and opened again over the years. The price of uranium has increased recently, and so has uranium production in Utah.
“It's certainly very hot, right,” said Ian Lange, who studies the uranium and nuclear industries as an associate professor of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines. “Prices are high.”
The mining and processing of uranium have ignited old concerns.
In the video below, Ute tribe representative discusses the sacred connection to the land:
Earlier this year, Manuel Heart, the chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, testified before the U.S. Senate. He told senators about the tribal community of White Mesa, which sits besides a uranium mill. So do aquifers.
“The tribal community is afraid of drinking contaminated water and no one will consume it,” Heart told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
FIRE IN THE HOLE
The tools of mining in the La Sal Complex hasn’t changed much over the years.
The darkness of the mine is filled with the sounds of drills and, occasionally, the boom of explosives. The concussion is felt hundreds of yards away. It feels like a hard breeze coming in waves.
Southeast Utah was once the turbine of American uranium production. After the splitting of the atom, uranium was needed to build nuclear reactors and bombs. In the decades after World War II, U.S. uranium production was measured in millions of pounds annually. In 2022, the figure was just 194,000 pounds, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Hemphill first worked in the La Sal Complex in 1977. His father was a uranium miner there, too. Now two of Hemphill’s sons work in the mine.
Hemphill describes uranium mining as a physical and intellectual challenge.
“Drilling,” Hemphill said. “Looking for the ore, that’s the funnest part.”
Video below shows how multiple generations work in the mines:
The uranium appears in veins of yellow across the mine wall that must be pursued with the drills and explosives. Vanadium, which can be used in a variety of steel alloys, also is mined in the La Sal Complex.
Studies have found the first generation of uranium miners and mill workers suffered high rates of cancer. And some uranium sites still need to be cleaned-up across the Four Corners.
A company called Energy Fuels owns both the La Sal Complex and the White Mesa Uranium Mill about 70 miles to the south. Curtis Moore, the senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels says there’s better technologies, standards and government oversight to protect health and the environment than there was during the earlier iterations of uranium mining.
“Today,” Moore said, “we have a great understanding of what the hazards of uranium mining are and uranium milling.”
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report from June concluded it’s “unlikely” anyone would be harmed from the drinking water or breathing air in White Mesa. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality also has not recorded any abnormalities in the drinking water near the mill.
Malcolm Lehi, the tribal government representative for White Mesa, says concerns about the mill go beyond possible pollution.
“If it was up to me, I would shut it down,” Lehi said.
The Ute Mountain Utes have long contended the mill sits on a tribe burial site. The mine, too, the tribe says, sits on its ancestral lands.
“This uranium mine,” Lehi said, “long after we’re gone, it’s going to be there. No matter what. For thousands of years, it’s going to be there.”
“What they're doing to Mother Earth, drilling and taking off different minerals or whatever… thinking that it's going to [make] things better, but it's not.
“That's part of climate change that you're taking away from the heart of Mother Nature.”
Video below shares what else is in these mines:
Not all Native American feel the same way.
Taylor Buck grew up on the nearby Navajo reservation. She’s worked at the White Mesa Uranium Mill for 2 ½ years in the storeroom keeping track of equipment and parts.
“I have to convince people,” Buck said, “and talk to them like, ‘Oh, it’s a really safe place. You’ll see the radioactive sign, but it’s nothing to be scared of.’”
MARKET FACTORS
Meanwhile, another company has announced plans to restart a uranium mine – this one near the town of Ticaboo, Utah. In an agreement with Energy Fuels, it will truck its ore to the White Mesa mill for processing.
Lange, the Colorado School of Mines professor, attributes rising uranium prices to work developing modular nuclear reactors, moving away from fossil fuels, and the war in Ukraine has made it less desirable to import uranium from Russia. Yet lang still calls the market speculative.
Building nuclear power plants remains a long, expensive endeavor. New technologies have yet to change that.
“They come in over budget. They come in slower than they expected to,” Lange said, “and this is not just in the U.S., this is across Europe.”
“The uranium market is definitely not speculative,” Moore counters.
“I think we'll start to see some of the next generation of small modular reactors come online in the United States by the end of this decade,” he added.
DAYS OF ORE
Moore spoke at the White Mesa Uranium Mill. Behind him were piles of ore.
He likes to say, “This site is where nuclear energy starts.” The mill is not where the energy finishes, though.
The video below details how the uranium is processed:
At the mill, the ore undergoes a processing to turn it into the concentrated powder known as yellowcake. Then it will leave White Mesa and pass through a few more facilities, managed by other companies, before it becomes the kind of fuel that can power entire cities.
Yet Moore says uranium mining will never again be as robust as the 1950s and ‘60s. The La Sal Complex has 15 employees. The White Mesa Mill has 75.
“Those days are over,” Moore said of the uranium’s heyday. “We're never going to have an industry like that.”