After the Atlas mill closed in 1984, a roughly 16-million-ton mound of uranium mill tailings stood beside the Colorado River at Moab for another thirty-five years. Wind moved sand off it. River floods undercut its edge. The pile was the largest visible remnant of a Cold War boom that had turned a small desert settlement into a mining center, and then into a town that had to live with the waste it left behind.
The Cold War uranium boom built the mill and the town around it. In the late 1940s, the federal government wanted uranium for atomic weapons and later for nuclear power, and the Atomic Energy Commission offered a guaranteed price for domestic uranium. In 1952, a geologist named Charles Steen made the first big strike in the Big Indian district southeast of Moab. His Mi Vida mine was one of the richest uranium finds in the country. Within a year, Moab was crowded with prospectors, drillers, and investors. The town had been a farming and tourist stop on the Colorado River; it became a boomtown.
The mill came in 1956. Atlas Minerals built a processing plant just outside Moab, on a flat between the town and the river. Ore came from mines scattered across the surrounding desert. The mill crushed it, leached out uranium with chemical solutions, dried the concentrate, and sent it east. The fine mixture of ground rock, water, and reagents that remained went into a settling basin. For twenty-eight years, the operation continued. When the federal uranium contracts wound down in the 1960s, the mill found a smaller commercial market in nuclear fuel. By the early 1980s, that market had shrunk. The mill processed its last ore in 1984 and closed.
Closing did not end the problem. The tailings pile sat on a terrace above the Colorado River, uncovered and exposed to desert wind. It contained uranium that had not been removed, plus radium, thorium, ammonia, arsenic, and other metals. Rain moving through the pile carried some of that material into the shallow groundwater. High water in the Colorado, driven by spring runoff, periodically undercut the edge of the pile. For years, the site was a case study in how hard abandoned industrial waste can be.
A long removal
The federal government took over cleanup under the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978, which gave the Department of Energy authority to deal with inactive mill tailings sites. The chosen remedy for Moab was relocation. Beginning in 2009, rail cars filled with tailings left the riverside site and ran north to Crescent Junction, a remote siding along Interstate 70 in the desert. There, workers placed the tailings in an engineered cell with a lining and a cover designed to isolate them from rain, wind, and groundwater. A train moved tailings several times a week for roughly ten years. In late 2019, the last load was removed. The riverside pile was gone.
The removal did not make the site clean. Groundwater beneath the old mill remains affected. The Department of Energy still operates a treatment system that removes ammonia and uranium before water enters the Colorado River. Monitoring of the site and the river continues. The visible pile has been erased, but the industrial history remains in the water and in the town’s own sense of itself.
The shape of the town
The uranium boom left Moab with more than waste. It enlarged the town’s street grid, filled its motels with geologists and drillers, and confirmed that the desert could be an industry. When the mining economy failed, Moab turned toward tourists who came for Arches and Canyonlands. Some of the motels built for the boom now house visitors on the way to trails. Old mining roads reach into the backcountry, and old claims are reworked whenever uranium prices rise. The boom did not produce a single industry; it produced a town that fills with visitors, sprawls across the bench, and measures time in mineral cycles. The pile beside the Colorado River was only the most concrete leftover. Now that it is gone, the ground is bare, but the town remains a desert town built on what the uranium years started.
