Part 1: Boom and Bust
In the boom years, things were different. There was a sense of patriotism in the air as prospectors fanned out across remote corners of the Colorado Plateau in search of uranium. They didn’t worry about the price of ore then. The Atomic Energy Commission had set up uranium-buying stations throughout the Southwest. The government snapped up the ore and poured it into a nuclear weapons program. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. had built about 30,000 nuclear warheads.
“We had more than enough for all the bombs that anybody could ever think of making. That was the beginning of the end of the government purchase,” said Paul Robinson of the Southwest Research and Information Center.
So the government shuttered its buying stations. The price of uranium was set by the international market...