'A legacy of death'

By: The Editorial Board | GoDanRiver
Published: January 29, 2012

To the editor:

"It was like digging for buried treasure," 80-year-old DeVar Shumway said of mining uranium, according to a story in Utah’s Deseret News. To quote the article, Shumway and his family dug into the uranium-rich Colorado Plateau, emerging triumphantly with tons of ore to feed the insatiable Cold War nuclear appetite of the U.S. government.

Historians call it the "uranium frenzy," a time when the Cold War was hot and nothing — including the sacrifice of thousands of human lives — was too great a price to pay to stockpile the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

To quote the article further, "America may have won the Cold War, but a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Utah is left with a toxic legacy that has killed and sickened untold thousands of uranium miners and mill workers, contaminating water supplies for generations to come and infecting a stunning red rock landscape with millions of tons of radioactive mill tailings that will cost American taxpayers billions of dollars to remove and bury safely out of sight."

This is just a sample of this article that is worth reading in its entirety and it goes on to say that the toxic legacy will remain in Utah for future generations.

To read more, go to your web browser and type in the article title, "Uranium mining left a legacy of death."

BOB CLEARY

Cascade