Tailings pile makes waves Uranium mine tailings piled on the banks of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, will stay put if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and Atlas Minerals Co. get their way. In a draft environmental impact statement released in January, the federal agency says reclaiming the tailings mountain on site – as the […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
Nuclear waste deal challenged
Idaho’s Republican Governor Phil Batt abused his executive power when he signed a nuclear waste deal with the federal government last October, according to Democratic state Sen. Clint Stennett of Ketchum. In January, Stennett introduced legislation to nullify the deal that will allow over 1,000 shipments of nuclear waste into the state over the next […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
The Diamond Bar saga goes on – and on
For five years, 15 livestock watering tanks planned for the Diamond Bar grazing allotment in New Mexico symbolized a fight over cows in America’s oldest wilderness (HCN, 5/2/94). Now it appears that the stock tanks may never be built. In a precedent-setting decision in February, Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas’ office ruled that congressional […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Subterranean terror
SUBTERRANEAN TERROR “I thought if only I could get out, I’m going to get a whole new perspective on my life, because I’ve faced death square in the face.” * Dennis Workman, who was trapped in a mine for 56 hours This January, a young Utah man plunged 600 feet down a mine shaft on […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Federal negligence turns ordinary Montanans hostile
NOXON, Mont. – Until last spring, few people had heard of Noxon, Mont., a sleepy town in the morning shadows of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness. That changed after the Oklahoma City bombing and the media frenzy around citizen militias, including the Militia of Montana (MOM) based in Noxon. Now, most folks who have heard of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Miners seek jackpot
MINERS SEEK JACKPOT Despite the depressed market for uranium, Green Mountain Mining Venture hopes to hit a jackpot in south central Wyoming. The companies spearheading the operation, U.S. Energy and Kennecott Energy, have asked the Bureau of Land Management for permission to construct, operate and reclaim the Jackpot uranium mine on public land. The mine […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
American Ground Zero
AMERICAN GROUND ZERO “My profession, which is in my soul, is to document things,” says photographer Carole Gallagher. For seven years, she worked on American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, a book that documents the aftermath of nuclear testing in Utah and the West’s “culture of cancer” through photography and oral history. In an […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
At Hanford, the real estate is hot
To become a Yakima Nation warrior, a young man had to run from the top of Rattlesnake Mountain to the Columbia River and back to the mountain top. That meant dropping 2,400 feet to the valley floor, sprinting 10 miles to the water, and then returning to climb this rise, which looks like a crumpled […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Amid the lovely the lethal remains
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, At Hanford, the real estate is hot. During the four decades the Hanford Nuclear Reservation produced weapons-grade plutonium, it laced eastern Washington’s soil, water and air with radioactive sludge that may never disappear. Recently, Hanford also became synonymous with human radiation experiments that make […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hanford’s prime cuts
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, At Hanford, the real estate is hot. Four pieces of Hanford will likely spur the most contention as prospective landlords jocky for control. The Hanford Reach encompasses the last 51 undammed miles of the Columbia River and is a significant spawning area for endangered […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
For further reading
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, At Hanford, the real estate is hot. Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World’s Largest Atomic Complex, by Paul Loeb, 1986, New Society Publishers. Loeb looks at the nation’s largest nuclear weapons complex through the eyes of the people working there and details […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hanford: Boomtown of the atomic frontier
At the beginning of World War II, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr told American scientists that “to get the fissionable materials necessary to make a bomb, you’re going to have to turn the whole country into a factory.” He exaggerated, of course. The factory took up counties, not countries. The Hanford Engineering Works in a […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Judge says counties aren’t supreme
In a blow to the county supremacy movement in Nevada, a federal court charged an Elk County resident with trespassing and ordered him to remove his cattle from a national forest. The court said Cliff Gardner illegally moved livestock onto the Humboldt National Forest in May 1994 despite repeated Forest Service requests that he apply […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Round two for a grazing bill
Three months after a coalition of environmentalists, hunters and anglers shot down his grazing bill, Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico has resurrected it (HCN, 8/21/95). The new version is 60 pages leaner and ensures public-lands access for fishing, hunting, and other recreational uses. Ranchers like the new bill and its emphasis on cooperation […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Changing times force agency to swim upstream
Three lobbyists in suits strode down the marbled halls of the Senate office building one day last fall. Their mission: to convince the Northwest’s congressional delegation to fight a bill requested by the Bonneville Power Administration. The bill would exempt three runs of imperiled Snake River salmon from federal protection. The men turned into a […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
BPA: Making amends for a destructive past
Note: this article appears in the print edition as a sidebar to another news article, “Changing times force agency to swim upstream.” The Bonneville Power Administration was born out of the Depression. Talk of taming the wild Columbia River and its tributaries began in the 1920s, but Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t authorize the […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
1995: Did toxic stew cook the goose?
BUTTE, Mont. – For 342 migrating snow geese, the infamous Berkeley Pit became their final stop. The birds were first discovered Nov. 14, their carcasses floating in the toxic waters of the shut down, open-pit copper mine. The initial body count at this federal Superfund site was 149; the total rose when officials realized the […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Proposed gold mine stirs up a rural Washington county
For 15 years, Roger Jackson has raised hay and grain, sheep and goats on his spread in northeastern Washington’s Okanogan County. Then last June, Jackson learned that Battle Mountain Gold Co. planned to operate an open-pit gold mine six miles from his farm, on Buckhorn Mountain in Okanogan National Forest. Worse, Jackson learned that the […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes
Just before dawn on Oct. 24, police officers from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe in Fort Hall, Idaho, parked a patrol car across railroad tracks at the border of the reservation. Then they waited. Hours later, the engineer of a train hauling six casks of radioactive nuclear waste from Navy ships spotted the car and slowed to […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…
Note: this article appears in the print edition as a sidebar to the news story titled “Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes.” The continuing question of where to bury nuclear waste has high stakes for the West. Federal officials have focused on permanent burial of the waste in two locations: Yucca Mountain, Nev., for commercial […]