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November 3rd, 2015 
Awake Goy 
Print FriendlyAbove Photo: By Chris Huber.
Four million tons of radioactive waste are buried under a grassy field three miles southeast of Edgemont in far southwestern South Dakota.
North of Edgemont, two massive abandoned mines, the biggest measuring about a mile across, scar the range land.
They are the byproducts of a uranium mining boom, and because the waste is nine feet underground and the mines are too far from the roads to be seen, they’re largely forgotten. So, too, are the other ill effects of the uranium mining rush that took place a half-century ago.
Locals may remember the jobs, and the bustling processing plant. They perhaps never knew about the out-of-state tycoons who pulled millions in profits from the ground, and then left a big mess behind. And they tend to forget or overlook the abandoned mill waste, the workers sickened by dust and radiation, and the abandoned mines and possible environmental contamination.
Now those old buried memories are being stirred by two very different yet confluent developments: a proposal for a new method of uranium mining in the same area; and new federal studies of the environmental damage caused by the old mines.
Together, they form the latest chapters in a story that continues to unfold some six decades after it began amid the clamor and chaos of a yellowcake gold rush.
On a warm fall day, Oct. 5, 1954, in the Red Canyon region north of Edgemont, a woman stood in front of an advancing bulldozer.
But unlike most days in the history of the remote southwestern edge of the Black Hills, where dry plains meet pine-covered mountains and sandstone rocks jut among the grass and sage, all was not quiet. For three years, the natural beauty and stillness had been punctured by jackhammers, dynamite explosions and the roar of heavy machinery.
Uranium was the era’s new gold, and the rush was on.
Eugenia Chord, the woman in front of the bulldozer, had found some interlopers on her mining claim and told them to leave. They refused.
According to her, the dozer operator moved the machine’s blade back and forth menacingly as she stood in front of it. She held her ground.
That’s when, according to Chord, a man named James Mullen shouted an instruction to the dozer operator.
“Run over her!”
The operator refused. Chord said Mullen replaced the operator on the driver’s seat and drove the machine to within a ruler’s length of her body before one of the other men talked him down.
Such was life during the greed-fueled birth of uranium mining near Edgemont, according to a Rapid City Journal account of Chord’s testimony during a 1955 trial. She and her husband, Roy, sued Mullen for claim-jumping and won.
The rush began in 1951 and the boom lasted about 20 years. During those two decades, the town came to be dominated by a massive, Chicago-based holding company known as the Susquehanna Corporation and two of its subsidiaries, Mines Development and Susquehanna-Western.
The marriage between Susquehanna and Edgemont brought the town a temporary economic boost, but the divorce left it suffering economic, human health and environmental effects that still fester all these decades later.
It all began with atomic bombs, a discovery in a canyon wall, and a meeting between a young entrepreneur and a cunning financier.
Bombs and a bonanza
The Atomic Age exploded into being when the United States dropped its A-bombs on Japan in 1945.
Americans were impressed by the terrifyingly destructive power of the bombs and the seemingly boundless potential of atomic — later to be called “nuclear” — energy. In 1946, with the war over, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act and empowered a new civilian board, the Atomic Energy Commission, to oversee development of nuclear weapons and energy.
A nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union ensued and the commission clamored to find reliable domestic sources of uranium, the naturally occurring element that is the basic ingredient of nuclear bombs and reactors. Most of the uranium used in America’s atomic program up to that time had come from Africa.
A massive domestic mining effort was needed, because even a good deposit of ore might contain less than 1 percent uranium, and that uranium might consist of less than 1 percent of the U-235 isotope needed for nuclear bombs. At those ratios, millions of tons of ore had to be mined to make just one or two bombs.
To kick-start the mining industry, the Atomic Energy Commission established buying-stations near ore deposits, set guaranteed minimum prices for acceptable grades of ore, and offered incentives including a $10,000 bonus for the first 20 short tons from any newly discovered deposit.
Those actions birthed a sudden and lucrative uranium market, and prospectors scrambled over the rocky terrain of the West. Buying-stations were soon accepting hundreds of tons of ore daily.
In 1951, with the uranium craze already sweeping the West, Rapid City resident Jerry Brennan found a uranium deposit in the Edgemont area.
“It was while he was studying Indian pictographs on the walls of Craven Canyon,” reads a 1950s story by U.S. News & World Report, referring to an Edgemont-area formation, “that he noticed some exposed sandstone with the greenish-yellow stain that resembled uranium-bearing carnotite.”
The article noted: “Mr. Brennan staked claims and the rush was on.”
More finds followed and sparked a wide-scale “frenzied hunt,” further reports said. At first, individual prospectors found ore deposits in canyon walls and used tools as rudimentary as pick axes and wheelbarrows to mine it.
Prospectors could stake claims on government land for small fees, and they could seek claims on private land. Mining laws dictated that landowners could negotiate for compensation, but if they didn’t own all the mineral rights under their land, they could not deny access to miners. That created a tense environment.
“I think there was probably some guns drawn a few times,” said lifelong Edgemont-area rancher Donald Spencer, now 79.
For some lucky landowners, a uranium strike meant a sudden path to solvency. Spencer estimates his grandfather made $50,000 from mining royalties after barely scratching out a living since homesteading in 1904.
Mill rumors grow with ore piles
The first miners in the Edgemont area shipped their ore 500 miles by rail to a buying-station in Colorado. In late 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission contracted with a private company to open a buying-station in Edgemont.
According to a 1953 Rapid City Journal story, the price paid for Edgemont-area ore averaged $30 per ton. By 1954, newspapers were reporting that a stockpile of 30,000 tons had accumulated. That pile would have been worth $900,000 at the average price, or nearly $8 million in inflation-adjusted 2015 value.
With so much ore on the ground and so much more underground, Edgemont became a candidate for a mill to extract uranium from the ore and process it into yellowcake for nuclear bombs.
In 1954, southwestern South Dakota and northeast Wyoming were abuzz with rumors that a multimillion-dollar mill would be built in the area. Communities rumored to be in the hunt included Edgemont, and Moorcroft and Newcastle in Wyoming.
Behind the scenes, miners, entrepreneurs, politicians and community boosters scrambled to influence the federal government’s site-selection process. Newspapers serving the communities published derogatory stories about rival towns.
The prize was a mill that would cost $2.5 million to build and create an estimated 50 to 100 full-time jobs.
Finally, during the early spring of 1955, word leaked out: The Atomic Energy Commission had selected Mines Development of Colorado — a company unknown to most locals — to build a mill. And the location would be Edgemont.
News of the town’s selection was greeted with soaring rhetoric.
L.S. Curtis, president of the Edgemont Chamber of Commerce, was quoted as saying, “Every man, woman and child in town will benefit.”
Edgemont’s city leaders staged a “U Day” celebration to coincide with the mill’s groundbreaking on June 24, 1955. Gov. Joe Foss delivered the keynote address.
“Edgemont may well become the Pittsburgh of the Atomic Age,” the governor was quoted as saying, referring to that city’s steel industry.
Foss, who had been a World War II flying ace and later became president of the National Rifle Association and commissioner of the American Football League, also manned an Allis-Chalmers tractor-loader and took the first scoop of dirt at the mill site, near the confluence of the Cheyenne River and Cottonwood Creek east of town.
Corporation in a hat
The residual glow from U Day began to wear off as locals noticed that construction wasn’t starting. Work finally began in August, about two months after the groundbreaking.
Construction was one-fourth finished in January 1956 when the work halted and 40 or so men left the job site. Gordon A. Steele, an automobile dealer in Hot Springs, heard about it and sent a letter to then-Sen. Karl Mundt, R-S.D., claiming that “the guy who is building the mill wouldn’t sign any more checks.”
That “guy” was Allen Gray, a 30-something former instructor at the Colorado School of Mines whose Mines Development company was chosen by the federal government to build and operate the mill. (The Steele letter and other letters to and from Mundt were made available for this report by the Karl E. Mundt Historical & Educational Foundation Archives in Madison.)
Art Ludwig, an Edgemont miner who submitted an unsuccessful mill bid, fired off his own letter to Mundt, alleging that Mines Development was “an organization which had its office in Allen Gray’s hat, until long after the contract was let, and which for many months was a corporation on paper with little or no money.”
Ludwig claimed a construction company had spent $200,000 of its own money to begin building the mill and had not received the expected reimbursement from Mines Development, which Ludwig heard was “in no position to make it.”
Ludwig followed with another letter to Mundt citing a report that Gray was searching for financial backers and was turned down by “Corn Exchange Bank, Hanover National Bank & Trust, New York Life Insurance, and the Prudential Life Ins. Co.”
Years later, a Denver Post profile of the babyfaced Gray did not specifically identify those firms but quoted Gray telling a similar story.
“I had been turned down four times by big companies, but I figured I’d give it one more try,” he told the Post.
That try was expended on J. Patrick Lannan, a Chicago financier in his early 50s. Lannan had amassed a fortune from investments in multiple companies and was an associate of the Kennedy family. After his death decades later, a pair of Chicago Tribune writers opined that Lannan made latter-day corporate raiders “look like Boy Scouts.”
In other words, Lannan knew a hot deal when he saw one, and this had all the makings. The ore was piling up at Edgemont and awaiting processing at the partially constructed mill, and the federal government stood ready to buy all the extracted uranium.
Lannan and Gray reached an agreement. The full terms did not emerge publicly, but it was soon reported that a holding company of which Lannan was a major stockholder, Chicago North Shore System Inc., took over Gray’s Mines Development for $2.5 million and retained Gray to run it from an office in Denver.
To the relief of observers in Edgemont, the deal allowed construction of the mill to restart after a 5-day stoppage. But it also meant Edgemont’s uranium industry would be dominated from the start by a Chicago-based holding company and its subsidiaries.
Within five months of the deal, Chicago North Shore’s name was changed to The Susquehanna Corporation; within two years, Lannan orchestrated a shareholder revolt and installed himself as Susquehanna’s president and CEO.
“Susquehanna” turned out to be an interesting name choice. Twenty-three years hence, the U.S. nuclear-power industry would suffer a catastrophic setback from the partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River.
An empire founded on Edgemont
The Edgemont mill was such a success that Susquehanna Corp. and its subsidiaries dove deeper into the mining business.
By 1962, Gray, the former college instructor who bet his future on a shaky bid to build the Edgemont mill, had risen to become a top executive in a Susquehanna empire that included uranium mills in Riverton, Wyo., and Falls City, Texas; several uranium mines containing an estimated $20 million worth of ore; a shale reserve and plant in California; a vanadium plant in Utah; and a limestone claim under development in Alaska.
The corporation reported total 1961 revenues of $26.1 million, which would be worth $210 million today after adjustments for inflation. And it all started with the Edgemont mill, which was owned and operated by Susquehanna Corp.’s subsidiary Mines Development. Another Susquehanna subsidiary, Susquehanna-Western, operated mines in the Edgemont area.
As Susquehanna Corp. centralized control of Edgemont’s uranium industry, other mining operators suffered. In 1958, local miner Roy Chord, who’d happily driven a car carrying Gray and Gov. Foss in a parade on the day of the mill groundbreaking in 1955, was now complaining that small-time miners were being squeezed out. He was careful not to publicly blame Susquehanna, which he needed to buy his ore. But he said the government had capped the mill’s production so that bigger miners filled the mill’s needs, with no need for additional ore from smaller producers, many of them local.
Gray, unlike Chord, did not have to tiptoe around the issue. While visiting the mill with Lannan and other Susquehanna executives in 1959, he declared to reporters that “the day of the Sunday uranium miner is now over.” Pick-axe and wheelbarrow mining had been replaced by exploratory drilling rigs, dynamite blasts and giant machines that ripped huge pits in the ground.
Gray predicted that the future of uranium lay in selling it to power producers. He cited Atomic Energy Commission statistics that projected U.S. electric power requirements would double by 1980 and half of the new demand would be met by atomic power plants.
In reality, 1980 found nuclear power accounting for only 11 percent of the country’s electrical generation.
As the 1980s dawned, Gray had long since been pushed out of Susquehanna Corp. by more of Lannan’s maneuvering. The country’s nuclear-power industry was reeling from the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. Edgemont was saddled with a shuttered mill and its associated waste piles and abandoned mines. And people in uranium towns throughout the West were taking stock of their health amid growing concerns about their exposure to radiation and lung-damaging mining and milling dust.
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/radioactive-legacy-part-1-of-special-report-a-yellowcake-gold-rush/
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