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There are many uranium widows in southwestern Colorado, and some of them keep radioactive rocks around the house, but probably only one has a photograph of her younger self drilling for ore in sandals, denim shorts, and a bra. Her name is Pat Mann, and she is eighty-one years old. "You'll have to accuse my attire," she said with a laugh, as she handed me the photo. Mann explained that she dressed like that on hot days in the nineteen-fifties, when she worked on her first husband's mining crew. "People say, 'That uranium will kill you!' Well, we'd drill into those veins and blow it up, and it'd be all over." I asked her about plans to build a mill nearby that would process uranium to be used for nuclear power generation. "I know we got a bunch of tree huggers and grass eaters," Mann said. "They seem to be against the mill. Most of them haven't lived with this stuff. I lived with it, and it hasn't bothered me."
Mann resides in a double-wide trailer in the remote town of Paradox. Around here, place names have the ring of parables: Calamity Mesa, Disappointment Creek, Starvation Point. The local history of uranium is long and often troubled, and the economy has been devastated since the Three Mile Island accident, in 1979, when Americans turned against nuclear power. Many old-time Colorado miners suffer from lung disease, and one former mill community, Uravan, was deemed so radioactive that everything in town--houses, streets, even the trees--had to be shredded and buried. And yet since 2007, when a company called Energy Fuels arrived with plans to build America's first new uranium mill in almost thirty years, the response in the Paradox region has been overwhelmingly positive.
For outsiders, this reaction is puzzling. "Why would somebody want to go into something that killed people in horrible ways?" one newcomer asked. Environmental organizations have filed lawsuits to block the project, which would also lead to renewed mining, and they've expressed frustration with signs of growing national openness toward nuclear power. American nuclear plants still produce twenty per cent of the nation's electricity, but a new reactor hasn't been licensed since 1996, and eighty-six per cent of the uranium used for fuel...