New Sorrows on the River Dolores (click for full size version) from 
Andre & Alex Shoumatoff on Vimeo.

Slideshow by Craig Lapp.  Photos by Andre Shoumatoff.  

Music by Sun Ra - Nuclear War.    
Click here to here the song in it entity here on the Dispatches...
 

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       My old pal Paul Robinson has invited me and my son Andre to join him and two other mining activists on a four-day rafting trip down the Dolores River in southwestern Colorado, where a new uranium boom is taking off. Paul and I go back to Albuquerque, l992, where I was based for a year, while researching my book on the Southwest, Legends of the American Desert…  He is the research director of the Southwest Research and Information Center and has been advocating for thirty years for native people impacted by mining in the Southwest and, more recently, Siberia. He is encyclopedically knowledgeable about mining and is one of the most committed activists I know and is on the advisory board of my Web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com.  A very good guy.

      This is the third uranium boom in the Southwest, Paul tells
me. The first began in l944 with the mining of 11,000 pounds of
uranium-bearing ore  in Monument Valley, on the Utah-Arizona border and within Dinetah, the land of the Navajo. The ore was trucked to the Smelter Mountain Mill in Durango, Colorado, where it was processed into uranium oxide, or "yellowcake," then trucked down to Los Alamos and refined some more into fissionable U 205, which was used to make, among other things, Little Boy and Fat Man, the atom bombs that laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      After the war, uranium continued to be mined to build up the U.S.  nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Most of the mining took place in Dinetah, the Navajo Reservation, which was estimated in l975 to have 80 million pounds of uranium. From l945 to l968 more than thirteen million tons of uranium-bearing ore were mined on more than ninety thousand acres of tribal land. Dozens of the Navajo men who mined it died in the years that followed of leukemia and lung cancer, and birth defects plague their children and grandchildren. The carcinogenic mutations caused by radiation are hereditary. In Ukraine in the late nineties I met  some of the children of  Chernobyl, who had been born after the reactor's catastrophic meltdown in l986, seven and eight year olds with shaved heads and leukemia and thyroid cancer.  Twenty Navajo communities, and some 600  family compounds, or "outfits," scattered in the desert are contaminated, and windblown thorium 230 and radon 226, as well as non-radioactive arsenic, barium, and vanadium, spread from thousands of abandoned mines from this boom.

     By l970 the U.S. military had enough weapons-grade uranium stockpiled to make ten thousand warheads, enough to nuke the world many times over, and it stopped buying the mineral. That ended the first boom.  By then  the second boom—to fuel nuclear reactors—had taken off.

Most of the mining took place in the Grants Mineral belt, whose most prominent feature is Mount Taylor, sacred to the Navajo. By l957
(true?) 110 reactors were being powered by Grants Belt uranium.
 

      On July 19.1979, the worst radioactive spill in history, known as the Churchrock Incident, took place, when a dam burst on the Rio Puerco, releasing a hundred million gallons of water and eleven hundred tons of tailings from a uranium mine that contaminated the river for ninety miles downstream. It and the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania the same year dealt a body blow to nuclear power, but the boom lingered till l990.

       Now, after eighteen years of quiescence, there's a new, third boom, which at this point is still purely speculative.

It's fuelled by India and China's projected expansion of their nuclear power programs, which is supposed to open a big new market for uranium in the next ten years. The two countries are expected to build 100-150 new reactors, and they will need enriched uranium.  Investors from Australia and Canada have been staking  claims like mad in the Dolores River system, another historic uranium mining area. 5000 new claims were filed last year in Montrose County, which it flows through.  Uranium as of last Junary is $59—see www.uxc.com for current figures-- eight times what it was five years ago.The Bush administration is hastening to get in before it leaves power on January 20 next year,
the G.E.I.S., the generic environmental impact statement   that will
re-open mining in  Grants Mineral Belt, including on  Mount Taylor itself, which Paul says there is going to be a huge fight about. "The tribes are seeking protection of  Mount Taylor as Traditional Cultural Property, a proactive initiative against the potential development, and have won emergency protection status for it until April,2009, when they have to file the documents that will hopefully make the protection permanent."

        Most mining ventures never get to the actual mining stage.
You mine the investors, and that's  what is happening on the Dolores.
When actual mining does happen,  it's a savage process, disemboweling the earth and stripping it of its minerals, poisoning ecosystems, animals, local people, and water systems. As the saying goes, we get the mine, you get the shaft. Paul and his colleagues are hoping it isn't going to get to this stage, and this trip is going to be a reconnoitering expedition and a floating strategizing session to figure out the best ways to keep it from getting there.  They'll be taking hundreds of photographs of old mines and slag heaps, in preparation taking water samples below them. Some five hundred tons of stockpiled uranium-enriched broken rock are stockpiled on mesas above the Dolores river, and the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Pat Mulroy, is raising concerns about "measurable quantities" of uranium that have leached into the Colorado River, the region's primary source of drinking water, from old mines around Moab, including the Uravan Belt, the Lisbon Valley, and the Henry Mountains, all of which drain into the Colorado.
 
 
 

     I haven't seen Andre, the oldest of my five sons,  in over a year, although he manages DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com and we talk and e- mail all the time. He lives in Park City with his girlfriend Carrie and they're getting married in October.  He designs web sites and has his own garage in Heber City where he tears down old Land Cruisers and converts them to biodiesel, so they can run on grease from MacDonald's and other businesses that he and the other people in the cooperative he co-founded go around and collect and process into fuel.
      It takes three planes to get from Montreal to Salt Lake City, but at four in the afternoon I finally make it. Andre picks me up at the airport in his red Toyota pick-up. He's a big guy, six-five, and is sporting a goatee and looking quite the Latino, which is not surprising since his mom (to whom I was married from l977 to l987) is Brazilian. We drive down to Moab and by the time we cross into Colorado it's dark. Paul is waiting for us in a B&B in La Sal. We wake as the sun is coming up over Mt. Peale, at 12,721 ft. the highest peak of the La Sal range, which still have snow on them. "Wake up boy," I say to myself, “the world is still here, and it needs your help."

       In the morning we drive down to Gateway, where we'll be taking out in four days. The Dolores here winds and riffles through a spectacular valley floor with a long thin monument called the Palisades looming over it. A brand-new adobe Santa Fe- style resort has been opened by John. S. Hendricks, the founder of the Discovery Channel. It's apparently his wife's baby.

      We leave Andre's pick-up there and drive up to Slickrock, ninety miles upstream, where we rendezvous with our  three  other expedition members,  who are inflating and loading our two rafts. On the way we pass through the gorgeous green Paradox Valley, where there are plans to build a uranium mill. Then we leave the Dolores drainage and enter the Uncompahgre Valley, which sounds  Spanish, but it's  Ute. The Uncompahgre were one of the Ute's seventeen nomadic bands, the ones who moved around this area. The Dolores was named by the early Spanish explorers, maybe Dominguez and Escalante, who were seeking a new route from Santa Fe  to the missions in California in 1776, or more likely it was Juan Maria Antonio Rivera, who followed the river ten years earlier; who called it  Rio De Nuestra Senora de las Dolores, the River of Our Lady of sorrows, which was shortened to the River of Sorrows. I've brought along my Guitalele to cheer up anybody in case they get down in the dumps. But nobody does. You'd have to be in really sorry shape to get depressed in the magical red rock canyons we will be flowing through for the next four days. I had no idea there was suck spectacular slickrock desert in Colorado. The Dolores is one of the prime pristine runs in the Southwest.

      We pass through Uravan, a company town of the American Vanadium Company built in l936 (Uravan is a contraction of vanadium and
uranium) that is now a ghost town and a superfund cleanup site.
Vanadium is an essential alloy of steel, and its extraction  produced small amounts of uranium, some of it also used to make Manhattan Project's  three atom bombs. We continue on up to Naturita, where vanadium was also mined and milled and some of the scenes in Selma and Louise were filmed. The place is funky in the extreme, with thousands of wrecked cars and a colony of bearded, toothless retirees who look like old prospectors living in trailers. Andre is a serious afficionado of seventies music, even though he was not born in '78, and he has some has some choice tunes on his Ipod. We listen to Sun Ra's jazzy black power rant, Nuclear War, and Gil Scott Heron's The Revolution Will Not be Televised.

      The other rafters are Travis Stills, the managing attorney for the Energy Minerals Law Center, a small ngo in Durango; Mark Seis one, of his board members, who is a sociology professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango; and Mike Black, a crusty white pony-tailed river guide who has rafted  the Grand Canyon so many times that the combined distance he figures is the same as if he had gone around the world. Mike is a veteran of the Animas River diversion battle and is an activist as well as the guy we are all counting on getting us down to Gateway in one piece.

     The Dolores is a tributary of the Colorado 250 miles long, the first 200 of which flow through Colorado. It has a short running season, only till mid-June, when the water impounded by MacPhee dam, on the upper Dolores, is diverted for irrigation and to keep the water from flowing over the border to Utah. This is called upstreaming.
There is so much upstreaming on the Colorado and its tributaries that not a drop of water reaches its mouth in the Gulf of California any more. All the water that reaches the river is diverted, and its delta is dry sandbox.

     We are running the scenic midsection of the river, where there is no difficult whitewater, mostly Class 2 rapids and only a few class 3s. Travis has only recently gotten his raft and oars, and doesn't feel ready to take on the Class 5 (which means there is only one line, and you have to run it exactly right) Snaggletooth, upstream from our put-in, or the Class 4 (where there are several lines, none of them
easy) Stateline Rapids below Gateway. Most of our locomotion will be provided by Travis and Mike. The rest of us can sit back and relax and enjoy, grabbing a paddle only when necessary. The boys from Durango have brought along several cases of local brew.

      I make one more trip back down to Gateway with Travis's Nissan and come back with Paul and Mark. Paul explains that they should't even be thinking about mining more uranium when they haven't cleaned up the hundreds of mines from last two booms. When you mine uranium., you  get a combination if isotopes 234, 235, amd 238. 98% is 238. 235 is .7% the fissionable isotope that everybody wants. The yellowcake is 95% uranium oxide, which turned into gas with hexafluoride HF6,  can be enriched to increased the 235 fraction.  Enriching from .7% to 3.5 % gets you reactor grade, to 95%  weapons grade. This requires running the reactor process thirty times, which at the moment under ten enrichment plants in world are capable of doing. Three are in the U.S. and only new ones are being built in Eunice, New Mexico, and Holland.   Iran wants to build one, but the U.S. and Israel and their allies are adamantly against Iran having this capability.

      Before there is new mining, the secondary sources should be mined, Paul argues. Forty percent of the original uranium is in tailings and weapons stockpiles. The U.S. is keeping it off the market because it would depress its value, the way De Beers keeps billions of diamonds worth of diamonds off the market.  There is non-proliferation blending of non-weapons grade uranium that could be used for nuclear power, plus large deposits of uranium-bearing ore in  Austrailia, Saskatchewan, Kazakhstan, and Niger (which the Bush administration claimed was supplying Sadam with weapons-grade enriched uranium, but Niger is only capable of producing yellowcake). There are  400-450 reactors worldwide. The U.S.of  provides most  them, 106-9. They supply 20% of our power, France get the greatest amount of its power, 80%, from nuclear plants, and China and India are expected to build 100-150 new plants in the next decade.

        The nuclear power industry and its floggers, chief of whom is Dick Cheney, are trying to sell the myth that nuclear power is clean and green and the remedy to global warming, which they're suddenly concerned about, now that there's money to be made selling their machines and mining shares. "If you're serious about carbon emissions, you have to be serious about nuclear power," says nuclear energy executive Craig Nesbit. They're trying to usher in a nuclear renaissance, arguing that the tens of thousands  killed in coal mines and by emissions from coal-fired power plants are fifty times more than  all the victims of accidents at reactors. But as the letters were rearranged on one of the Fireside radio shows in the seventies, nuclear is unclear. Uranium from the old  tailing piles is seeping into rivers and aquifers. Fortunately, the cost of private power companies taking on new nuclear projects, with all the environmental impact studies that have to be filed, is prohibitive,  unless the government subsidizes them, which the Bush administration is making noises about doing, but is not going to be able to get together in its remaining five months in power.
 

     There is even a school of environmentalists that includes Patrick Moore, who passes himself off as cofounder of Greenpeace, although this is stretching it,  that's in favor of nuclear energy and sees mining more uranium as part of the solution to global warming. 
Currently 85% of the world's energy is supplied by fossil fuels. This is the main cause of global warming. But there is still the radiation from the mining and the spent fuel, which can be hazardous for ten thousand years. The solution for the nuclear waste disposal problem has still not been found. If it wasn't for its lethal toxicity and the high risk of exposure at the mining, generating (fine as long as there isn't a meltdown), and waste disposal stages, nuclear would be great.