Nuclear Fuel Town Not Even a Dot on Map : Colorado: Soon, bulldozers will scrape Uravan off the face of the Earth. Why? Those radioactive tailings.

This town supplied the uranium that produced the bombs that ended World War II and fueled the Cold War nuclear arsenal. But the three generations that grew up here remember it only as a great place to live.

Soon, bulldozers will scrape the former community of 1,000 off the face of the Earth. Road maps no longer show it. ZIP code 81436 has been reassigned.

Sure, kids used to play in the radioactive tailings from the uranium mines at the remote sandstone-rimmed spot on the San Miguel River. But now, despite what the state considers hazardous, all that lingers in the air is regret and new meaning to the phrase, “You can’t go home again.”

“It’s real sad for me. I can’t feature it without those houses. I think we were the first family to move there (in 1936),” said Shirley Vancil. Three of her four children were born there.

Phil Espinoza, who moved to Uravan in 1957 after service in the Navy, called it “a beautiful home with down-to-earth people. Most kids go home to see their hometown. Our kids can’t do that anymore.”

Debby Ackerson Jackson experiences that deprivation first-hand. “Even after we left, we knew we could go back,” she said. “Now it’s like they’re trying to make it extinct.” Jackson was born in Uravan in 1954--one of several hundred born in the Union Carbide mill town.

The last residents left in the late 1980s, half a century after Vancil’s family settled here. Today, some former Uravan residents and others are lobbying to save bits and pieces of the ghost town. The old boardinghouse may qualify as a national historic site.

But the recreation hall-church, the commissary, the clinic and the mill buildings are being knocked down. Already gone are the houses of A, B and C blocks, their gardens and fruit trees.

The state of Colorado is requiring UMETCO, the Union Carbide subsidiary responsible for the old company town, to clean it up, said Don Simpson, the state employee responsible for radiation control. That means trucking its low-level radioactive tailings to the rim above Uravan and burying it.

Billions of dollars already have been spent moving radioactive tailings away from former mining centers across the country. Some of those tailings may be brought here.

Dr. Geno Saccamanno, a pathologist in Grand Junction who has studied uranium-related cancer cases for four decades, said much of the tailing removal was unnecessary.

Saccamanno said work in uranium mines was deadly, particularly because most miners smoked. But most of Uravan’s population was employed by the mill, not in the mines. Studies found normal cancer rates among the Uravan population.

Simpson said state and federal agencies had no choice on Uravan. “The international community says there is no safe level for exposure to radioactivity,” he said.

“Every time I read about them removing the tailings, I think it’s a waste of time. We don’t glow in the dark, and we used to jump and roll in the tailings. We’d get a mouthful. Even if they’d told us not to, we’d have done it anyway.”

“My mom used tailings in her garden and we had the best garden in town. She grew 1,000 varieties of irises,” Jackson added.

Simpson said it is hard to underestimate the fear the word radioactivity generates.

Tourists who drive down 60 miles on the winding road through narrow Unaweep Canyon from Grand Junction sometimes stop here to ask cleanup crews if everyone who lived here died.

The story of the uranium on 180,000-square-mile Colorado Plateau started with the Ute Indians. They used the soft, yellow carnotite ore found on the surface to paint their faces.

Authorized visitors enter with escorts. Step into some of the remaining buildings and it’s like entering the Twilight Zone. A bottle labeled “yellow cake” sat on the counter of one dark and empty building.

Prospectors began scouring the earth for uranium at the turn of the century after Marie Curie discovered radium in uranium ore samples. Madame Curie herself visited the region to look at samples. For a time, it was worth $120,000 an ounce.

The market later collapsed. Uravan itself was set up primarily to mine vanadium, used in the manufacture of steel. The town’s name is a combination of uranium and vanadium.

Vanadium tailings became an important source of uranium for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Robert Sullenberger helped build a uranium-processing mill for the U.S. Army across the river from the vanadium mill.

Sullenberger has no regrets about his involvement.

“It saved a lot of lives,” he said. “I recall some Japanese tourists stopping outside Uravan. I restrained myself from telling them this is where the bombs came from that we dropped on your country.”

Though it was one of the most secret operations in U.S. history, Uravan’s own remoteness made most security measures superfluous.

The town got a scare once when an errant B-17 was mistaken for a Japanese bomber.

The biggest security breach was when game wardens burst in driving a green Plymouth in search of mill employees shooting deer out of season.

The Cold War triggered a frantic search for uranium. Ten thousand people, on foot, Jeeps and by helicopters, tramped the Colorado Plateau.

Uravan boomed again.

Its facilities included a clinic, two swimming pools, a baseball field, commissary and grade school. The company provided a doctor.

“It was a good place to grow up and I thought the company was good to us,” Jackson said. “On Saturday nights, we roller-skated, and Sunday morning, they turned it (the building) into a church. It was a good place to raise kids.

“I wish I could raise mine here.”

More than 100 former residents showed up at an annual reunion this year.

Vancil said, “We didn’t need a radio because the ones who moved to Uravan were so friendly. We’d all congregate in our yards. We would play until 9 p.m. and then we’d get into bed.”

The uranium market crashed in 1981 after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island cooled the nation’s hunger for nuclear power. Other countries were producing uranium cheaper.

Without jobs, most residents had left by 1984.