Milan: The Uranium Town Hiding in Plain Sight

Milan is a small village just beside Grants, New Mexico, sitting in the corridor that became the uranium capital of the United States during the Cold War. In nineteen fifty, a Navajo sheepherder named Paddy Martinez discovered uranium ore on the mesa northwest of Grants. Within a few years the Grants Mineral Belt was producing more uranium than anywhere else in the country, supplying the weapons program and the nuclear power industry simultaneously.

Milan grew as a worker community alongside the mines and mills. The boom lasted roughly three decades. By the nineteen eighties, falling uranium prices and environmental concerns had shuttered most operations, leaving behind a legacy of contaminated groundwater and hundreds of workers, many of them Navajo and Hispanic, who had labored in the mines without adequate radiation protection. The New Mexico Mining Museum in neighboring Grants tells this story in detail.