“We wanted to put a spike right through the heart of this project and this does it,” said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, R, praising the Interior Department’s Sept. 7 rejection of the Skull Valley Goshute Tribe’s plan to store spent nuclear fuel rods on its reservation. The site, southwest of Salt Lake City, would have […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inOctober 2, 2006: From the ground up
News from the gas fields
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “From the ground up.” The paper: Roughneck is a two-year-old monthly covering oil and gas in Sublette County, Wyo., the top natural gas producing county in the U.S. Local media scene: Two local weeklies, including the Pinedale Roundup, cover community news; Roughneck’s […]
Posted inWotr
Subdivision and me
As we signed the papers, I knew I was a hypocrite. But every time we watched the setting sun make the red and beige sandstone glow from within, every time my dog lit out after a jackrabbit it was never going to catch, and every time I found a new potsherd in an unexpected place, […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Two weeks in the West
“The farmers respect the law. (But in Sun Valley) people get mad and call their lawyers. This is typical America, the land of greed, where people just take, take, take.” —David Murphy, an Idaho water-rights cop, who is ticked off at wealthy owners of vacation homes for illegally taking water from rivers and streams to […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Energy Colonizes the West
Since 1982, the federal government has offered more than 225 million acres of public and private land for lease to gas and oil companies. In the Western states, there are approximately 35 million acres of active leases, nearly half of which are in Wyoming. New Mexico, Colorado and Montana each contain more than 4 million […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Unpaved with good intentions
New easements keep farmland in production despite spiraling property values
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
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 […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
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 […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
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 […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Retooling a Leviathan
The challenges of keeping an aging nuclear infrastructure alive
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
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 […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Reborn
The West casts a wary eye on the latest nuclear craze
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The anatomy of an energy lease
How a city’s watershed was opened for natural gas development
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
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 […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
The Fourth Wave
Can the West’s uranium towns rise once more?
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Navajo Windfall
Uranium companies anticipate tomorrow’s profits, while yesterday’s workers await compensation
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Clearing a path for power
Plans for power lines and pipelines would make it easier to tap the West’s energy boom
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Safety first
NAME Steve Ficklin VOCATION Petroleum Engineering Technician AGE 54 HOME BASE Silt, Colorado KNOWN FOR Keeping drill rigs from blowing up HOBBIES Working brainteaser math problems, fishing, hunting, camping. HE SAYS “Each hole is different. No two wells are identical.” Steve Ficklin doesn’t talk a lot. As he drives along a dirt road outside the […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
How we lost our ranch to gas drilling
Our cattle, our dreams and our ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling. As one who has lived through the experience, I can say that […]
Posted inWotr
How we lost our ranch to gas drilling
Our cattle, our dreams and our ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling. As one who has lived through the experience, I can say that […]