Portside

Six weeks into the Turner Gulch fire’s run on the Uncompahgre National Forest, fire crews have corralled the nearly 32,000-acre fire into 79% containment, bulldozing fuel breaks and dropping buckets of water and setting small, controlled fires to hold their lines.

While the crews’ main focus is the future movement of flames, some individuals are concerned about the region’s radioactive past.

Along the fire’s western edge is Niche Road — also known as 6 3/10 Road — a historic corridor between hundreds of uranium mines in the Uravan Mineral Belt, the 1,500-square-mile uranium-rich chunk of Colorado and Utah, and the Climax Mill in Grand Junction.

South and west of the road is Calamity Camp, a mining camp founded in the early 1900s that the Bureau of Land Management says contains “residual radiation at this site, because of radioactive minerals in the area,” right above a set of directions to the camp. Surrounding Calamity Camp is a cluster of abandoned vanadium, radium and uranium mines, active from the 1910s until the industry crashed in the 1980s.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of tons of tailings — the fine, sand-like byproduct of crushed uranium ore — that were famously “donated” to the city of Grand Junction starting in the 1940s to be used as construction material. (The material was never officially given out to individual residents, but they weren’t discouraged from taking it, either, and many residents stockpiled it in their yards.) Building with tailings went on until the U.S. Department of Energy realized, in 1969, that mixing radioactive dust into the streets, sidewalks and housing foundations wasn’t a great idea.

The government started to claw back the radioactive matter in 1970 and hauled it to a containment cell on the side of Colorado 50, about 15 miles south of Grand Junction, and about 20 miles east of the Turner Gulch fire.

Operating in an area awash in atomic-era infrastructure means taking extra precautions during firefighting. Firefighters on the Turner Gulch fire received letters documenting their potential exposure to radioactive materials, “to support any future claim or change in circumstances,” Stacey Colón, field manager for the BLM, told The Colorado Sun.

The letters are “for them to hold on to for their records,” Colón said.

So far, she added, the agency has been monitoring air quality; is analyzing soil samples along Niche Road for Ra-226 and Ra-228, isotopes found in the decay of Uranium and Thorium; and deploys a dosimeter to measure accumulated exposure to radiation.

As of Wednesday, the BLM has not received the results from the soil samples, and has requested additional dosimeters for workers on the fire line. 

Burning hot and fast

Uranium mining has been notoriously relaxed when it comes to public safety, and though the word “historic” is often used to describe shuttered mines from Colorado’s peak mining days during the Cold War, many communities are still dealing with the legacy of those loosely regulated operations — from scattered tailings in Grand Junction, to leaky Superfund sites like the Cotter Mill outside of Cañon City.

The frequency and intensity of wildfires in the West adds another variable to the equation, given the high concentration of uranium mines, mills and disposal sites on the Western Slope and in the Four Corners region.

About 23 miles southwest of the Turner Gulch fire, the Deer Creek fire, which ignited in Utah in July and crossed the Colorado border, burned through a patch of former uranium mines near Paradox.

That fire ignited about 15 miles north of the recently approved Velvet Wood Project in Utah, the first uranium operation to get the go-ahead under the Trump administration’s newly accelerated environmental review process for unlocking oil and gas, uranium, coal and other critical minerals on federal lands.

Before President Donald Trump’s declaration of a National Energy Emergency, the process required a lengthy public comment period that weighed cultural and environmental concerns against the project’s stated outcomes. The Velvet Wood project skipped that public comment period, and the BLM was given a 14-day deadline to analyze the permit. They approved it in 11.  

It’s worth noting that the rush to reignite the uranium industry in the U.S. is bipartisan. Last year President Joe Biden banned the import of Russian uranium and unlocked $2.7 billion in federal funding to expand domestic uranium enrichment. And earlier this year the Colorado legislature passed a law declaring nuclear energy as “clean,” opening it up to special grants and funding opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Energy Fuels, the Lakewood-based mining company with a focus on uranium and rare earth metals, has been quietly striking deals and firing up uranium production across the West, including a 1,000-acre property on the Colorado-Utah border 4 miles southwest of Gateway, the town closest to the Turner Gulch fire. 

Raising red flags

In 2009 the BLM requested an assessment of firefighter exposure to “naturally occurring radioactive material,” nicknamed NORM, when operating in and around abandoned uranium mines. 

The report assumes a maximum allowable exposure of 100 millirems of radiation per year.

For reference, the expected dose of getting an X-ray is about 8 millirems, while naturally occurring “cosmic” and “soil” radiation exposure constitutes about 30-35 millirems per year, according to the assessment.

To assuage exposure fears, the report offers an equation in the form of a radioactive word problem: 

You are at an abandoned uranium mine preparing to fight a fire and measuring 0.04 mrem/hr on a Geiger Muller Tube Radiation Counter. Your maximum yearly allowable exposure is 100 mrem/yr, so how many 12 hour work days can you work at the site?

Answer: 208.3 days per year.

The BLM did not provide exact measurements from the Turner Gulch fire, but Colón said readings were “at or below normal background levels.”  

Even with what the agency considers “conservative conditions” laid out in the report, “the inhalation dose of radionuclides will be below the recommended exposure limit from radioactive sources,” Kathleen DuBose, a program director for the interagency Federal Wildland Firefighter Health and Wellbeing Program, said in an email to The Colorado Sun.  

The report focuses on exposure near uranium mines specifically, the majority of which are located on federal and tribal land. It does not address hazards elsewhere along the nuclear supply chain, like disposal sites, ore corridors or cities built on tailings. 

The disposal cells south of Grand Junction are covered with several feet of clean soil and capped with a rock armament top, which would prevent the fire from interacting with the materials, Branden Ingersoll, spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, told The Colorado Sun. Chances of the Turner Gulch fire coming into contact with these tailing specifically is “extremely low,” Ingersoll said. 

In northwestern Colorado, the Lee fire, 68% contained as of Wednesday morning, grew quickly to 137,755 acres in barely two weeks, spreading south from an initial lightning strike Aug. 2, toward the site of underground nuclear detonations that took place in 1973.

As part of the Plowshare Program, a government initiative to explore alternate uses of nuclear energy beginning in 1957, a total of four nuclear bombs were detonated outside of Rulison, about 10 miles southwest of Rifle, and on BLM lands 30 miles northwest of Rifle. The goal was to use bombs to unlock natural gas stores. The bombs did, in fact, unleash new stores — though none of it could be sold on the market due to its radioactivity. 

Rob Prince, a retired senior lecturer of international studies at the University of Denver, protested the blasts in the late 1960s and early ’70s. As the Lee Fire raged south, Prince contacted The Colorado Sun with concerns about leakage at the sites, especially the Rio Blanco site, where three bombs were exploded less than 10 miles from the fire’s western perimeter.

“There is no radioactive contamination on the ground above the former underground nuclear blast sites,” Ingersoll of CDPHE said. “Following detonations, the Department of Energy monitored the area above and sent probes into the blast zone, which confirmed that no contamination was present on the surface and there were no impacts to human health or the environment.”

[Parker Yamasaki began her work covering arts and culture at The Colorado Sun as a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow and Dow Jones News Fund intern. She has freelanced for the Chicago Reader, Newcity Chicago, and DARIA, among other publications, and had a short stint as a culture editor at Iceland's only English-written newspaper at the time, The Reykjavík Grapevine. Parker was born and raised in California and has lived all over the Southwest. parker@coloradosun.com]