Compounding the problem was the lack of talent in the uranium business, which had effectively gone to sleep. No sane graduate student of geology would have picked uranium as a specialty after 1985: It would have been like learning Morse code instead of Linux. The academic sciences made a decisive turn away from nuclear after Three Mile Island and the disarmament battles of the early Ronald Reagan years.
“I went to Cornell University to learn nuclear engineering,” said Joe McCourt, who is today the head of a uranium brokerage. “I wanted to make the world a better place, provide cheap energy for the masses, and that kind of thing. And then we just got vilified. Cornell ended the program and dismantled their reactor. And so now there’s a big generation gap in this field. We lost a generation.”
This meant that a lot of old uranium hands from the 1970s suddenly started getting phone calls at their retirement haciendas in Florida when the price started to rise. A number of them were persuaded to get back into the game. One of them was Bill McKnight, now seventy-one, who went back to work for Uranium Resources, a company he helped cofound more than three decades ago. Though he now works as the vice president for exploration, he favors a driller’s jumpsuit to a coat and tie. McKnight got his start hunting uranium on south Texas ranches in the 1960s and once processed yellowcake in a horse trough, using a kitchen-faucet water softener for an ion exchanger, until his employer at the time, Mobil Oil, told him to quit it. The utopian promise of uranium still excites him much more than petroleum.
“I want to do something that contributes to society,” he told me. “I served in the military for the same reason.”
His wizened visage did not make him stand out particularly at the 2007 Global Uranium Symposium at the Omni Hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas (this year’s theme: “Taking U into the Future”), where nearly every participant was older than fifty and the lunchtime speeches tended to open with jokes about bum knees and bald heads. But the energy inside the convention hall was palpable. “This is like a bunch of kids getting together to build a tree house,” one geologist told me. Anybody who knew anything about uranium was getting a nice salary and lots of attention.
The president of McKnight’s company, Dave Clark, cautioned everyone in the room about feeling overconfident. There was a time, he said, when people on Wall Street didn’t know how to spell uranium. Now that the times were good, it was well to recall the old prayer of an oilman: Please, please let there be another price spike and I promise this time I won’t fritter it away.
“All these guys are going to be coming in when the money’s good, and they’ll be gone when the money’s bad,” Clark said. “The market is going to obey the laws of gravity, and there’s going to be a change in perception. There is no shortage of uranium. No reactor is going to shut down for lack of it.”
He was restating a key precept in the energy trade: Nuclear plants are expensive to build, but cheap to fuel (it works the other way around with a coal facility). The cost of uranium is barely an afterthought for most utilities. And if the nuclear renaissance can become more fact than hype, an even more permanent thirst for the “bad-luck rock” will have been fixed in place.
“I’m sorry, but the genie’s out of the bottle,” said David Miller, the president of Strathmore Minerals. “I don’t see why we can’t use it to bring the poorer countries of the world up to a better standard for all mankind. You’re not going to do that with coal or solar. Nuclear power is a savior of the world.”
He then repeated a favorite maxim of the uranium business, one in play in the American West ever since the days of Charlie Steen and the fat government bonuses: “Coal was the fuel of the nineteenth century, oil was the fuel of the twentieth century, and nuclear will be the fuel of the twenty-first century.”
Much of this century’s uranium will eventually pass through the far southeastern corner of New Mexico. This is a state with abundant uranium reserves in the mountains near the town of Grants, two national laboratories, and a history with radioactivity that goes back to Los Alamos. More important, it is the home state of U.S. senator Pete Domenici, the former chairman of the Energy Committee and the self-described “chief nuclear apostle” of Congress, who lobbied heavily for the nuclear subsidies in Bush’s energy policy. He helped lure a consortium of some of the biggest utilities in the country into building a huge $1.5 billion enrichment plant near the petroleum town of Eunice, where tall yellow signs at all four highway entrances proclaim FRIENDLY PEOPLE, PROUD TOWN.
Eunice is on a reddish plain overlying the northern shores of an underground sea of crude oil discovered in the 1920s and responsible for the thicket of pump jacks, tanks, and electric wires that cross the flat scrub, along with the yucca and the prairie grass. The rest of New Mexico refers to this region as Little Texas, and not generally with fondness. The air is scented with hydrogen sulfide, a by-product of the natural gas emissions that blow through town when the breeze is up. A quail pasture to the east of town will be the site of the new uranium enrichment plant, which had—not so long ago—been on the verge of becoming a nonstarter.
A front company known as Louisiana Energy Services, whose investors included Exelon, Duke Power, and Louisiana Power & Light, and also the European atomic giant Urenco, first had wanted to put this plant near the town of Homer in northern Louisiana, where the residents are mostly African American and the economy is moribund. High-wage jobs and tax revenues were promised. But environmental lawyers got involved and started filing suits. An official who prepared the site-selection study in the early 1990s later admitted under oath that he picked Homer because the houses appeared poor and dilapidated. After an eight-year court fight, during which charges of “environmental racism” were thrown around, the Sierra Club succeeded in getting the building permits revoked.
The consortium next tried Hartsville, Tennessee, where the project was again scotched in the face of local objection, bolstered by the intervention of former vice president Al Gore, who has not embraced nuclear power despite his personal crusade to stop climate change. “I can say with no hesitation that this facility is not in the best interest of Middle Tennessee,” he said in a statement. “The accumulation of hazardous waste may become a never-ending problem for local citizens.” That was strike two.
After eight years of frustration, the consortium finally secured permits to build near Eunice after Senator Domenici got involved. A few prominent citizens of Eunice (including a hairstylist, the county emergency coordinator, and the manager of the Pay-N-Save) were taken on an expenses-paid trip to Urenco’s plant in the Netherlands to see for themselves how the plant was nestled among the grain farms. One citizen was invited to speak to the Eunice Rotary Club and told stories about the Dutch people’s fondness for bicycles. There was no significant local opposition, even though the company has not released a detailed plan for permanent disposal of canisters full of depleted uranium gas. One of the proposed dump sites is located in a dusty field just over the border in Andrews County, Texas, where a company called Waste Control Specialists has been licensed to bury the historic reserves of spent ore from Shinkolobwe that had been used to make atomic bombs at a plant in Ohio (the Congo waste was still so radioactive it earned its own code name—K-65—and was noted for its singular strength).
“I am delighted and proud that the renaissance is in New Mexico,” Domenici said at the ground-breaking ceremony. He related how he had told the company “to stop putting up with all this guff and apply to build the facility in New Mexico.” The plant is located just barely inside the state; its east fence is less than a mile from the Texas border.
I was driven up to the plant’s security gate by a company spokesperson named Brenda Brooks. The poured-concrete barn shell of the Separations Building Module was directly in front of us, rising up from the desert floor as if a new mesa had pushed up overnight. This building will house the centrifuges, the same essential kind of enrichment technology that A. Q. Khan had stolen from the Dutch and sold to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
Everybody with access to the inner parts of the centrifuges at Eunice will have to acquire a top-secret “Q” clearance, said Brooks, and all of them will be working for a special subsidiary called Enrichment Technology of the United States and have limited contact with the rest of the construction team.
“A lot of countries would like to get their hands on this,” she told me.
“There’s a huge responsibility with having this technology, and we take that very seriously.”
There are only six other plants like this in the world today, and only one now operating on the North American continent. It has more business than it can handle.
To enter the tubular maze of the United States Enrichment Company outside Paducah, Kentucky, you must first submit to a criminal background check and be walked through a huge scanning machine at the front gate. Encircled by cornfields and down the road from a failed bedroom community called Future City, this plant houses what might be called the holy grail of uranium: the top-secret process that turns worthless powder into fuel pellets. I came here on a summer afternoon and was taken on a limited tour by the head of public relations, Georgann Lookofsky.
The plant had been built in semisecrecy on top of an old munitions factory in 1952, just as the mining fever was gearing up in Utah and Arizona. All of that uraniferous soil needed a place to be processed into weapons, and the original plant at Oak Ridge was overtaxed. The impoverished Ohio River Valley was eager for jobs, there was a lot of water, and it was far from the seditious influence of big cities. Most of America’s uranium entered this facility in railcars and left inside the shells of nuclear weapons.
The uranium was enriched through the same method pioneered at Oak Ridge, a method now considered hopelessly antiquated. Uranium hexafluoride gas is forced through a series of chambers webbed inside with wire-mesh screens that filter out the infinitesimally lighter atoms of U-235. (The gas is corrosive and is hard on industrial pipe material. Much trial and error had gone into making the screens, and it has never been disclosed exactly what they are made of. This was one of the closely held secrets of the atomic era and is still classified.) The entire facility is powered by a coal-burning plant in the nearby town of Joppa, Illinois, directly across the Ohio River, that provides a thousand megawatts, more than the entire electrical output of the nation of Yemen.
I was allowed to walk through the stadium-size room underneath the cascades where the exhale of the compressors drowned out every other sound. Each compressor consumes about as much power as a freight locomotive as it spins a ringed cylinder inside the conversion chambers on the second floor. The cylinder acts a bit like the blades of a blender, forcing the uranium gas against the screens to divorce its fissile component from the surrounding lifeless isotopes. There were lines painted on the floor showing where visitors were allowed to step. A sign said DO NOT CROSS BLUE Line. Oozing through the braiding of pipes above my head was the concentrate sought by ambitious nations, the most destructive fruit the earth could yield. This fuel leaves Paducah packed in kegs about the size of a hot-water heater, each of them weighing about two and a half tons.
There have been terrible mistakes made here. Uranium waste was burned out of the smokestacks at night—a substance called “midnight negatives”—and radioactivity has been found in the soil nearly a mile away. The Energy Department concluded that nearly sixteen hundred tons of atomic weapons parts, some of them contaminated with enriched uranium, had been scattered around the plant in various locations. The workers here were never told about the dangerous conditions until a 2000 investigation by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post.
The cleanup at Paducah will take an estimated seventy-five years, but the plant will have been shuttered long before that. The United States Enrichment Company is building a $1.7 billion replacement facility upriver in the town of Piketon, Ohio, and this one will run on the more modern method of centrifuges, the process favored by Pakistan and Iran. President John K. Welch assured his shareholders the plant will be the most efficient ever built.
“A renaissance is underway in the nuclear power industry, and the signs are everywhere,” he said.
Old schemes were being resurrected in obscure parts of the world. Geological maps that had been moldering away in ministry filing cabinets from Azerbaijan to Zambia were being pulled out and given a fresh look.
A lasting truism of the uranium trade is that the best place to find a new mine is next door to an old mine. Dead uranium zones were breathing again, and one of them was in the desert country of the American Southwest, where Charlie Steen had made and lost his fortune half a century before.
During the last boom days of the 1970s, a company called Energy Fuels Nuclear had run eight shafts in a high plateau of cliffs and sagebrush called the Arizona Strip, which lies several miles north of Grand Canyon National Park. Its claims went fallow after the market crashed and the company went bust. Now the remains were being eagerly picked over by a new wave of geologists and prospectors.
I went out to the strip to meet a friend, Walt Lombardo, who has a dark mop of hair and wire glasses and used to head a regional office of the Nevada Division of Minerals. He and his wife, Sandy, now own a bookstore specializing in earth science topics on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and I befriended them after they hosted a reading for me a few years ago. They have been closing their bookstore on the weekends to grab some of the more promising uranium spots still left for the taking. Walt took me walking down a streambed where rainwater had drained from the previous day’s storm; the water had painted a damp red streak on the sand.
“Look there, you can see how those beds are plunging,” he said, pointing to the edge of a canyon wall showing a banner of sandstone layers trending downward. “You want to see those all over the area. We did some initial reconnaissance here and it looked good.”
The object of his hunt is a depression known as a breccia pipe, shown to be the occasional host of radioactivity. It is basically a geological trash hole—a hollow tube shaped like a carrot into which a hodgepodge of rocks and debris has tumbled during the last ten million years. The origin of these tubes is a mystery, but the most accepted theory is that they were carved by hot water erupting upward and then became clogged with limestone and other silica, which had eroded, leaving a cavity that caught rocks and other debris. Groundwater containing a soup of liquefied metals had flowed through a few of these old channels and left residue, which may or may not have included uranium.
Finding a breccia pipe requires thinking in several dimensions. You must first have some photographs of the area taken from an airplane. You then must study them for any signs of an oval depression in the ground, where soil might have settled a few feet into the mouth of one of the hidden tubes. Then you must take your jeep or truck out to that spot and look hard for trending that suggests gravitational pull, as though a hand from hell has yanked down on the earth’s surface—as if yanking a tablecloth through a knothole.
“You don’t look at a particular outcrop: you have to look at them all,” said Walt. “You have to see these beds dipping toward a common center.” One hopeful landscape is a small plain with buffalo grass but no sagebrush. The root system of sagebrush generally does not do well on top of a breccia pipe. Another trick: Always stake windmills. A rancher surely stuck it there because there was good water underneath, and water collects in breccia pipes.
The only way to tell a breccia pipe for certain is to pay a contractor up to $15,000 per day to drag an apparatus called a diamond drill out to the site. The drill looks a little like an oil derrick, and the physics are just the same: An ugly metal bit with edges made of industrial diamonds (the best cutting material in the world) is screwed onto the end of a hollow steel rod and rammed thirty-three feet into the sandstone. Then it must be hauled up, another rod screwed on, and then rammed down farther; more rods are added as the bit chews down to where the uranium might be layered. This yields a slim tube of rock called a core sample, which is about the circumferenc
e of an apricot and can be crushed and analyzed. Radioactivity is a prospector’s friend, as uranium announces itself louder than any other mineral. A small machine called a spectrometer can be lowered down into the drill hole to see what’s glowing.
But drilling into a breccia pipe is a gamble for any mining company, as only 1 in 8 pipes has captured any uranium at all, and only 1 in 150 bears it in rich enough quantities to justify the expense of digging for it. The debris inside the pipe is tough on the rods; breakages are routine. Roulette has much better odds. The Arizona Strip is nevertheless the scene of a small-scale uranium rush. A resurrected mine called Arizona One is already back in production, hammering rock that had last been touched twenty years ago. Claims to the local office of the Bureau of Land Management quadrupled in 2007, under company names such as Liberty Star, Lucky Irish, and U.S. Energy.
“These are small guys making the discoveries,” Walt told me. “The big companies have preconceived notions of what they’re looking for and they have no creativity. There is no room for the dreamer or the artist.”
Energy Fuels Nuclear had been out here first, armed with a team of cowboy geologists and a juicy contract to supply a reactor in Switzerland. The proprietor was a plug-shape restaurant owner from Rawlins, Wyoming, named Bob Adams, who had caught the fever after reading a newspaper story about Charlie Steen. Adams knew how to fly—he had been a bomber pilot in World War II—so he began making exploratory flights around the Wyoming outback. Before long, he found a radioactive anomaly on a dry plain some distance north of Rawlins, not far from the wagon ruts of the Oregon Trail, where wagon trains had passed a century ago. He secured the bankrolling for a mill from a group of Colorado investors, and soon a cluster of prefabricated trailers sprang up—named Jeffrey City for one of Adams’s early investors. The Denver Post called it an “atomic age frontier town.” By 1972, Adams had become rich enough to buy a coal company, and he started poking around for more uranium on the plateau of cliffs and sage plains called the Arizona Strip.
Tom Zoellner Page 32