Colorado's boom and bust cycle - now it's uranium (again!)

the last big boom, oil shale on colorado's western slope, pushed the towns of parachute and rifle into unprecedented growth, straining all public services... the inevitable bust left today's deserted housing developments and a large tab to be picked up by colorado taxpayers... as a colorado native, i have seen first-hand the remnants of this disgusting rape-it-and-leave-it methodology of the so-called "extractive industries" all over the state... gee... now, here we go again...

Soaring demand with restricted supply is the classic formula for a seller's market, and the major uranium-producing nations -- Canada, Australia, Russia and the United States -- are all moving to reactivate mines that were closed after the uranium bust of the 1980s.

The point has not been lost on the veteran miners who live on the hardscrabble high desert country where southern Colorado and Utah meet.

This region, a scattered collection of dusty villages separated by endless stretches of two-lane mountain roads, is known to geologists as the Uravan Mineral Belt. Both uranium and another industrial mineral, vanadium, are found in the red cliffs that tower 1,000 feet above the valley of the San Miguel River.

Even before it supplied the Manhattan Project and the World War II bombs, the Uravan played a key role in nuclear history. Nobel Laureate Marie Curie came to Colorado to collect radium for her pioneering experiments. When this town was incorporated in 1904, it proudly took the name "Nucla" to reflect its role in the new science of nuclear physics. During the boom years, Nucla had a Uranium Cafe and a movie theater called the Uranium Drive In.

[...]

"There could be hundreds of mines operating around here in a year or two," says Ernie Anderson, a veteran mining industry geologist.

[...]

Like many miners, Chiles [Clifford Chiles, whose family has been mining uranium in Colorado for decades] complains that regulatory and environmental restrictions make uranium mining a much tougher business than it used to be.

[...]

"The problem with a boom is, you get a bust on the backside," Chiles says, reflecting a common viewpoint. "Yeah, you make money if everything goes okay. But if it ends, that puts a lot of hurting on people."

One thing the locals are not worried about is the potential health or environmental risk from mining radioactive fuel. "There is nobody here who is anti-uranium," said Roger Culver, editor of the San Miguel Basin Forum, Nucla's newspaper.

The more serious question for Nucla and the neighboring towns is whether they are being lulled into one more cycle of boom and bust. "All the global indicators tell us that uranium demand and prices are going to keep rising steadily," says Cotter, the Energy Department analyst. "And that's what we're telling our miners. But of course, they've heard it all before."

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