Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  He recalled: “My pilgrimage to the Saint-Joachim Valley, with its evocative memories of its successive masters, counts, kings, emperors, presidents, Fuhrer, and party general secretaries, of its generations of miners subjected to dangerous work, of its empires of silver, radium, and uranium, thus ended with a vision of a few fat gentlemen, full of illusions and hope, doing exercises stark naked in a swimming pool of radioactive water.”

  In the winter of 2007, I paid my own pilgrimage to St. Joachimsthal. The Radium Palace Hotel is still in business and now caters to elderly tourists seeking relief from arthritis or rheumatism. The hotel’s promotional brochures are printed in a variety of languages, including Arabic. Face-lifts, acupuncture, and Botox injections are offered as supplements to the hot radium baths. The place was almost deserted the night I stayed there. Its yawning ceilings, empty corridors, and chessboard floors were reminiscent of a royal mausoleum, or a set for a remake of The Shining.

  The next morning, I hiked up through the village and past the St. Joachim church to the head house of the Concord mine, the oldest of the sixteenth-century silver shafts, which had since been dug down a third of a mile. Almost all of the uranium is gone now, but there are three springs inside that still pump radioactive water to the Palace and other spa hotels in the village.

  The mine shaft is usually not open to the public, but I met with an engineer named Jiri Pihera who spoke a little English. He eventually agreed to take me down the lift to show me the chambers from which uranium had first been brought out to the world and the U.S. dollar had taken its name.

  Pihera handed me a lamped helmet and a rubber coat and took me into the elevator cage, which dropped us down to the twelfth and deepest level. The lift opened to a well-lit room full of cylindrical pumps, roaring in monotone fugue. “We have to pump a thousand liters a minute out of here, or else the place would flood,” Pihera told me over the racket. “From this basin, we pump the water to a second basin three hundred meters up. And then it flows three kilometers downhill to the spas.”

  He switched on his miner’s lamp and led me down a corridor that had been braced with giant metal bands. It was like walking through the rib cage of a fish. I had to duck in places to avoid banging my head against the supports. Though it had been cold outside and the mountains were frosted with snow, the air in the shaft was warm and torpid. The walls were sweating trickles of groundwater. We climbed a set of rickety wooden stairs and took several turns in the dark corridors. Flakes of gypsum twinkled in the light of Pihera’s lamp. After about a quarter mile, we came to a chamber lit with electric bulbs, with a large wooden vat in the middle. A sign in Czech proclaimed this to be a spring called Behounek.

  “This is the most important spring we have,” Pihera told me. It had been drilled more than forty years ago and turned out 150 gallons of radium-tinged water per minute. He scooped a double palmful of water out of the vat and slurped from it.

  “Drink,” he suggested. “It’s very good for your health. You don’t want any?” He looked disappointed. “People pay good money for this, you know.”

  We walked farther along through the tunnels. Cart tracks long out of service were embedded in the floor and dead electrical cables, wrapped in black rubber, striped the walls. A graffiti scrawl in white paint adorned one mine wall. Pihera translated it for me, somebody’s long-ago private joke: HERE WORKED A CUDDLY BEAR.

  It would have been impossible to calculate the number of miners who had worked St. Joachimsthal’s tunnels and drifts in its nearly five centuries of operation. Most of them had been chasing silver. Uranium had emerged from these wet European shafts as an accident, a sick ebony residue abandoned in the forest, its powers unsuspected. Only when science had focused its lens and seen the violence lurking in its guts was it considered treasure. A trash rock could now push the world.

  Pihera slowed his pace as we got closer to the man cage. He trained his light on the west wall and inspected it closely. It took him a few minutes to find what he was looking for.

  “Come here and look at this,” he told me. “We found this a while ago. There is almost none of this left.”

  He pointed to a small chip, jet black, embedded in the schist. It appeared to be the tip of a seam hiding inside the wall, which had somehow eluded being dug out and carted off.

  “The last piece of uranium in the Jachymov mining district,” he announced with a smile, using the Czech name for the town.

  I ran my thumb over the exposed chip. It was thin, about an inch tall; the size of the edge of a U.S. quarter.

  Charlie Steen’s mansion on the hill is now a steak restaurant called the Sunset Grill. A sign out front reads MILLION DOLLAR view! DINNERS FROM $13.95. His uranium mill closed down in 1984, and the U.S. Department of Energy is still trying to decide how best to contain the radioactive wastes that may be leaking into the nearby Colorado River. The current plan is to load the toxic gravel onto railroad cars for burial at a site thirty miles away, a ten-year project estimated to cost $400 million, which is about a quarter as much as the value of all the uranium produced in the United States through 1964 when adjusted for inflation.

  Thousands of uranium mine shafts pockmark the desert, and the rangers at Canyonlands and Arches national parks warn visitors to avoid them. The entrance to the Hidden Splendor mine is littered with boulders; the switchbacking road up the side of the cliff has nearly washed away from fifty seasons of rain. Moab shifted its economy to tourism and stopped calling itself the Uranium Capital of the U.S.A. three decades ago. The access roads blasted into the slickrock are now the delight of four-wheel-drive owners and mountain bikers, who can venture deep into the otherworldly landscape of sandstone spires and fragrant juniper. One of the most striking of the uranium roads is the Shafer Trail, which zigzags nearly fifteen hundred feet from the top of a giant mesa. It had been carved there by six young men from Moab trying to reach an enticing claim. They raised $50,000 from their friends, jackhammered and dynamited their way down the cliff, and built another road halfway up another cliff to the rich Shinarump formation where the Geiger readings had been so promising. They drilled into the cliff and found only sandstone.

  “Nobody ever got a pound of ore out of there,” Bob Mohler, the only living member of the road crew, told me with a laugh ten years ago. The Shafer Trail is today the most visited man-made attraction in Canyonlands National Park, aside from petroglyphs made on the cliffs by the long-vanished Anasazi Indians.

  Nick Murphy, who led the construction team, died in 1996 of Parkinson’s disease and not cancer. He never regretted his time searching for uranium. “It has actually been progress,” he once told an interviewer. “I can’t look at it any other way, because I do think it’s the future of your whole damn world if you want to put it that way. It is your next energy source. It is progress. It has got to be.”

  Charlie Steen sold his interest in the Mi Vida mine in 1962 and moved to a horse-ranching spread outside Reno, Nevada. A series of bad investments wiped out his fortune, and he was forced to declare bankruptcy after the IRS confiscated his remaining assets for back taxes. The power was shut off in the Reno home. He complained to a reporter, “We’re sitting in the middle of all this luxury—my wife, four sons, and I—eating canned beans and stale bread just like we did in that tar-paper shack seventeen years ago before we struck it rich.”

  Steen decided to go back to the place where he had been happiest—out in the mineral fields, hoping to chance upon the next lode of riches that would turn everything around. In 1971, while drilling for copper in the Deep Springs Valley of California, he was hit on the head by a wrench attached to the drill pipe. It put him in a coma for more than a month, and he woke up with almost no command of language. For a time, the only words he could pronounce were gold and silver. His recovery was slow, but he never lost hope that he would one day recoup his lost fortune from an old gold-mining claim he had managed to hold on to in the mountains to the west of Boulder, Colorado, a place called the Cash Mine at G
old Hill. “It’s not a matter of thinking I’ll make another big find. It’s knowing it,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune.

  His sons began to squabble among themselves for control of the remaining money, as well as the gold claim. Mark and Andrew Steen filed lawsuits against each other and no longer speak. In an unrelated affair, a grandson named Charles Augustus Steen III pleaded guilty to extortion in a San Diego court for purportedly demanding $2.5 million from the widow of Theodor Geisel, the children’s author better known as Dr. Seuss. In his correspondence with Audrey Geisel, Steen was said to have mailed one of his paintings, which depicted the Cat in the Hat having sex with a blond woman, who was herself giving oral pleasure to the Grinch. The grandson of the Uranium King received three years probation and was required to complete a course in anger management.

  Charlie’s wife, Minnie Lee, died in 1997 and left two of her sons a dollar each for what she called “ingratitude and dishonesty.” The lawsuits over the Cash Mine and what was left of the uranium fortune created a long and byzantine court battle. “It’s not a happy ending, I assure you,” said Mark Steen.

  “Everyone in this family has spent their lives pursuing this ‘pie in the sky,’ ” said Andrew Steen, to a reporter. “They became obsessed with this nebulous thing that never came to pass. That’s what happened to the Steen family, and it’s pretty damn tragic.”

  Charlie Steen, the Uranium King, spent his last years in an Alzheimer’s haze. He passed most of his days in front of the television set, not knowing which program was on and not caring. Steen died on New Year’s Day, 2006, and his body was cremated, his ashes mingled with his wife’s in their favorite silver champagne bucket. Their ashes were scattered together near the mouth of the Mi Vida mine—long since abandoned—which had produced twelve million pounds of uranium ore in the course of its life, enough to make at least eighteen atomic bombs.

  6

  THE RAINBOW SERPENT

  There is a flat-topped mountain in northern Australia that looks like a river barge tipping over into deep water. The sides are cracked JL and stained tangerine with iron. At the highest point, a cliff juts upward like the prow of a ship and contributes to the illusion that the whole mesa is on the verge of sinking into the forest of paperbark trees below. This cliff is called Mount Brockman, and it is considered a holy site to a local band of Aboriginals, whose religion is concerned, above all, with geography.

  They believe the earth was woven together out of the threads of musical notes—specifically, the songs of the Creators, who sang them in a preexistence called the Dreamtime. All the rivers, rocks, deserts, grasslands, and forests of Australia are pieces of frozen music. The songs did not just create the earth, they are the earth. The lyrics tell stories about ancestor beings who have the same virtues and failings as humans, similar to the gods of the ancient Greeks, who were also fond of seduction and betrayal. The songs usually have wild animals as characters and are sometimes laced with sex and violence. The most ghoulish details are for only the elders to know. To be trusted with the secret content of myths is a mark of power.

  The story associated with Mount Brockman might never have been made public were it not for a geologic quirk of the structure. Thirty years ago, under significant political pressure, the Aboriginals were compelled to explain what had happened in the Dreamtime.

  It is this: Mount Brockman is actually named Djidbidjidbi. The orange stains on the walls are not iron, but blood. A pond on the top is the opening to the dwelling place of a king brown snake, sometimes called Dadbe, who had retreated there to sleep. She was a cousin to a greater beast known as the Rainbow Serpent, who was responsible for creating the world. She is the giver and taker of life, and cannot be disturbed. Walking too close to the sandstone bluff is to risk upsetting the fragile truce between man and the spirits. If the serpent should ever rise, she would create a flood so large that the world would end.

  The cliff is indeed a remnant from a time out of mind. There is no disagreement on this point.

  Geologists say that approximately two hundred million years ago, the sandstone escarpment now known as Mount Brockman retreated from an original extension that had possibly touched the northern coast of Australia, some forty-three miles away. It withered away by degrees into its present shape, known as a Kombolgie Formation, with a layer of metamorphic sediment at its base. This mass was made up primarily of schist and muscovite and shot through with a matrix of cracks. A stream of acidic water started to flow beneath the fractured layer of sediments, carrying a liquor of dissolved heavy metals, and rose into the maze of Paleolithic fractures where the water evaporated and left behind patches of exposed uranium, which baked in the sunlight for millennia. The German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who passed near the site in 1847, reported: “I had a most disheartening, sickening view over a tremendously rocky country. A high land, composed of horizontal strata of sandstone, seemed to be literally ‘hashed,’ leaving the remaining blocks in fantastic figures of every shape and a green vegetation. . . .”

  Mount Brockman remained unexplored by white men until 1969, when a two-seater aircraft passed just north of the mesa’s highest point. The pilot and a technician were doing a radiometric survey for a company called Noranda Aluminum, Inc. When the plane banked away from the mesa, the spectrometer registered a massive spike in gamma radiation. Later, a team of geologists hacked its way in for a closer look and found what would then become the richest lode of uranium ever found in the Southern Hemisphere, an Australian version of Shinkolobwe.

  Today, there is a chain of terraced pits at the foot of the holy Mount Brockman: a mining colony that produces 8 percent of the world’s uranium. I was taken around the Ranger Mine on a warm summer afternoon in January by a friendly public affairs official named Amanda Buckley.

  “We’re producing a commodity, just like coal,” she told me. “Except this is just gray dirt. And at the end of the process we get dark green powder.”

  She showed me the giant pit where the pitchblende ore is blasted out, a fleet of haul trucks to move it out, a crushing plant to grind it into a fine sand, a series of leaching tanks to dissolve the sand into a watery state called pregnant liquor, a centrifuge to dry it, a giant oven to oxidize it, and a warehouse in which the finished yellowcake powder is sealed into drums painted red and loaded onto trucks going to the nearby city of Darwin for transfer onto oceangoing freighters and eventual use in nuclear reactors in Britain, South Korea, France, the United States, and Japan.

  Ranger really did look like any other hard-rock mine and mill in the world, except for two things. Each employee was wearing a piece of filter paper encased in plastic on the lapel of his jumpsuit to measure the level of alpha-ray exposure. And there was a wooden stock fence on the southern perimeter of the mine. Any employee who crossed the fence without permission was subject to immediate termination. That was protected ground, the beginnings of the absolute no-go zone that encircles Mount Brockman.

  Surrounding both the mine and the mountain is a domain called Kakadu National Park. Bigger than the state of Connecticut, it was chartered in 1977 as an awkward political compromise between conservative and liberal factions in Parliament. A holy mountain of the Aboriginals happened to be directly above (and was, itself, made of) a fortune in radioactive material. And it created a striking contradiction in land use: a working uranium mine in the middle of a national park.

  This could have happened only in Australia, a place whose relationship with uranium has been nothing short of tortured. No other country has examined it as thoroughly: debates in Parliament, in countless newspaper op-eds, in church forums and in songs on the radio, and in the roadblocks and protests that closed down mine roads and office buildings and electrified national dialogue in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. The policies that limited the country’s output have been relaxed in recent years, but Australia remains a lockbox of uranium. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s known reserves are estimated to lie here, mostly unexploited.

  Au
stralia uses no uranium itself. The annual harvest of nearly nine thousand tons, once loaded onto ships, is never seen again. There are no atomic weapons, no enrichment facilities, and only one small nuclear reactor barely worth mentioning: a one-kilowatt facility in a suburb of Sydney used only for research. For all practical purposes, it is a nuclear-free country.

  This has not mattered a bit. There was a time not so long ago when polls showed “uranium mining” was the top domestic policy issue, and almost no other topic had the power to start arguments and even fistfights throughout the country. Australians had serious questions about this particular mineral blessing, ranging from land use to fair taxation, foreign relations, environmental contamination, and possible nuclear war.

  There was also the matter of race, which was a subject most people would have preferred to ignore. It remains a sensitive topic in Australia, almost as much as it is in America. But the uranium at Mount Brockman touched directly on the white majority’s long and rocky history with the dark-skinned native people who had occupied the island continent for forty thousand years before the first shiploads of convicts arrived from Britain in the eighteenth century. The Aboriginals who wanted to save Mount Brockman tended to be viewed through the lens of a person’s political beliefs. They were seen either as antediluvian whiners who needed to join the modern world or as noble martyrs to “progress,” as embodied by all those uranium pyramids in the shadow of their holy site.