As the global warming threat increases, nuclear energy enjoys a renaissance, but the industry’s own checkered past hints that nuke power will be neither easy nor cheap.
Also in this issue: The BLM’s decision to lease land for energy exploration in the watersheds of Grand Junction and Palisade, Colo., reveals the way oil and gas leasing works.
Navajos pay for industry’s mistakes
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Navajo Windfall.” Dr. Bruce Baird Struminger spends his workdays screening Navajo uranium workers who believe their jobs have made them sick. After four years, he can predict how most will react to getting a clean bill of health: “When we find out…
Endangered Species 101 — in poetry
Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson, father of sociobiology and a relentless biodiversity advocate, once estimated that human gluttony helps exterminate species at the rate of one every 20 minutes. The Dire Elegies laments the plight of North America’s endangered wildlife in poetic detail — but this is more than a disgruntled ode to dying species…
Destroyer of worlds
A group of scientists, a secret city and a weapon of unimaginable power: The story of the creation of the atomic bomb is straight out of a spy novel, but its impacts are all too real. After the weapon was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I…
A life of brutal grace
Montana writer Swain Wolfe’s memoir, The Boy Who Invented Skiing, might be more aptly titled The Writer on His Way to Being An Alchemical Cartographer. Wolfe’s writing maps transformations, in a style both gritty and magical. Wolfe was born in the hardscrabble West of the late 1930s. His boyhood was spent in the Colorado Springs…
‘Big Daddy Drought’ will be a complicated matter
I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s story, “The Tamarisk Hunter.” (HCN, 6/26/06: The Tamarisk Hunter) It was a good piece of science fiction and intriguing thinking as well. But I need to make a correction to Greg Hanscom’s thinking in his editorial. The Upper Basin states are NOT obligated to deliver an average of 7.5 million acre-feet of…
States crack down on illegal immigrants
Congress punts until after the elections; states turn ‘nativist’
The rural West’s pragmatic booster
Name Larry Swanson Vocation Economist and demographer Age 55 Home Base Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Missoula, Mont. Known for Hair-raising presentations about dramatic shifts in Mountain West demography and economics. He says “We can’t successfully adapt to change without a fuller understanding of it. Good people with good information make good decisions.” Larry…
The Fourth Wave
Can the West’s uranium towns rise once more?
Navajo Windfall
Uranium companies anticipate tomorrow’s profits, while yesterday’s workers await compensation
The Hot West
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “The Fourth Wave,” in a special issue about the West’s resurgent uranium economy. THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE MINING AND MILLING In 1983, mining ceased at Kennecott Energy’s Sweetwater open-pit uranium mine (at right) near Rawlins, Wyo. Uranium ore from traditional open-pit or…
Retooling a Leviathan
The challenges of keeping an aging nuclear infrastructure alive
Waste disposal the industry’s Achilles’ heel
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Retooling a Leviathan.” The first nuclear reactor in the United States went online at Shippingport, Pa., in 1956. Since then, the nation’s nuclear power industry has generated at least a few hundred tons of spent fuel per year. The highly radioactive waste…
Reborn
The West casts a wary eye on the latest nuclear craze
HCN’s secret past
In the interest of full disclosure, I must make a confession: High Country News owes its existence, in part, to the nuclear industry. I learned of this a couple of years ago at a High Country News board meeting in Jackson, Wyo. I was sharing a rustic cabin at the Murie Center with Tom Bell,…
Dear friends
BIKERS, FILMMAKERS, ENGINEERS, CHEESEMAKERS Billie Stanton, editorial writer for the Tucson Citizen, left a business card in our door on a recent weekend: “I was here; you were gone. But keep up the good work.” Sorry we missed you, Billie. Filmmaker Dave Gardner and his daughter, Stephanie, of Colorado Springs, Colo., stopped by as part…
Two weeks in the West
“They’ve had so many C’s I can’t keep track anymore.” — John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation, commenting to Greenwire on the Interior Department’s announcement that it will add “community” to the “Four C’s” touted by former Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Environmentalists have widely criticized Norton for making a mockery of the original four:…
The green Republican: back from the dead?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It looks as though the Endangered Species Act is not going to be eviscerated this year. Neither will the National Environmental Policy Act. On second thought, the government will not sell off millions of acres of the public domain for as little as a thousand dollars an acre. For the nonce, at…
The anatomy of an energy lease
How a city’s watershed was opened for natural gas development
Underworld
It was August 1997, and I stood beside a manhole cover at Ninth Avenue and F Street in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., with a small gathering of police detectives, firefighters, and city workers. Cones diverted traffic around us. Frank Garcia, a hazardous-materials technician, knelt and ran a tube through one of the silver-dollar-sized…
When can the BLM say ‘no’?
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “The anatomy of an energy lease.” If a BLM or Forest Service management plan OKs an area for leasing, BLM officials say they have little power to prevent drilling. “The bar (for withholding land from leasing) is…
Heard around the West
OREGON Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently visited a factory that makes luxury recreational vehicles, those behemoths that look like city buses and sport monikers like Inspire, Allure and Intrigue. In a press release, Country Coach Inc. president Jay Howard said he was pleased with the secretary’s support for his company’s high-end mobile homes, and added…
Anti-government attack has many fronts
Out-of-state activists mastermind assault on government spending and judiciary