Moab: Uranium Capital of the World

In the early nineteen fifties, Moab was a drowsy farming settlement of roughly twelve hundred people huddled against the Colorado River where red sandstone walls rose like cathedral buttresses on every side. Arches National Monument was nearby, more or less ignored. Then the Cold War arrived, and everything changed.

The Atomic Energy Commission was desperate. The Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear device in nineteen forty-nine, and the United States needed uranium. The commission offered guaranteed minimum prices, ten-year purchase contracts, and a ten-thousand-dollar bonus for each new high-grade discovery, the equivalent of a lottery ticket, open to anyone with a Geiger counter and a willing back.

Charles Steen was a stubborn, unemployed oil geologist from Texas who had moved his wife and four sons into a tarpaper shack near Moab. Where other prospectors followed conventional geological wisdom and looked on the surface of sandstone domes, Steen drilled deeper into formations everyone else had written off. On July sixth, nineteen fifty-two, his Mi Vida mine, spanish for my life, hit a vein so rich it assayed up to eighty-seven percent uranium. The first six months of production shipped a million dollars worth of ore.

Moab went berserk. Population surged from twelve hundred to sixty-five hundred almost overnight. The town crowned itself the Uranium Capital of the World. The Atlas Uranium Mill processed ore from hundreds of producers across the Colorado Plateau, with employment in the regional uranium industry topping eight thousand workers. Steen built a hilltop mansion, bought a yacht, and threw parties. He later went spectacularly bankrupt.

The boom lasted roughly a decade. When the Atomic Energy Commission wound down its guaranteed purchase program in the early nineteen sixties, the economics collapsed. The Atlas Mill closed in nineteen eighty-four, leaving behind a pile of roughly twelve million tons of radioactive tailings sitting directly on the bank of the Colorado River. That pile is still being moved, slowly and expensively, by the Department of Energy, a cleanup that began in two thousand nine and will not finish until the twenty thirties. The canyon country that uranium built now draws millions of visitors to Arches National Park, created in nineteen seventy-one, and Canyonlands National Park, created in nineteen sixty-four.