The men must’ve strained as they pushed the ore carts out of the mines. Size of a Volkswagen. Canary yellow. Wrought iron. Add three tons of ore. Mostly waste rock: “Overburden.” Limestone, silicates, clays, shales. Vanadium, molybednum.
Speckled within the ore, accounting for half a percent of everything unearthed: uranium. Brilliant yellow. Fluorescent. Crackles like atomic fire beneath a Geiger counter.
Leetso to the Navajo. “Yellow Dirt.”
Mostly U-238. Extract and pulverize the precious dirt into a cornbread-like powder. “Yellowcake.” Throw that into a centrifuge and spin at 100,000 rpms until the heavier isotope is flung to the wall at 1,000 miles per hour, and what’s left behind is U-235. Less than one percent of one percent of the initial three tons.
One Tylenol-sized pellet replaces 149 gallons of oil.
It takes about 150 pounds to make a bomb.
A Navajo shepherd first discovered uranium in New Mexico, out near Grants: Patricio “Paddy” Martinez. Hired by a railroad and a mining company to scout for uranium for $400 a month. When he found high-grade ore on Haystack Mountain in 1950, Grants became a “yellowcake boomtown,” exploding from 2,200 to 50,000 residents within months and ushering in a Cold War-fueled uranium rush that wouldn’t burn out until the 1980s.
Paddy became famous, featured in Time, Life, and Reader’s Digest. The railroad paid him $250 a month until the day he died, as a gesture.
He was a law officer, medicine man, and father of fourteen children. His tombstone reads:
Pioneer Uranium Discoverer
Paddy Martinez
June 3, 1878 Aug. 25, 1969
One-hundred-and-fifty mines operated in the Grants Uranium District, spanning 100 miles from Gallup to the Pueblo of Laguna. All to satisfy a demand that exploded from zero to tens of millions of pounds per year as the arms race heated up. The District, which contained sixty percent of the country’s uranium, was valued at over $25 billion. Thousands of people, many of them Navajo, worked the mines.
Five hundred uranium mines now sit abandoned across the southwest. Two-hundred-and-sixty-one in New Mexico. Workers brought yellow cake home on their clothes, exposing their families. Mine tailings leached radioactive plumes into the water and radon into the air. At Church Rock, a mill in the Navajo Nation, a tailings dam breach caused the largest release of nuclear material in U.S. history.
Near the Homestake mill, residents compiled a death map of all their neighbors who died from cancer. The company declared a full cleanup unfeasible. They’ve been buying out every home in a 6,100-acre vicinity to create a containment zone.
It will have to survive a thousand years.
A few years back, the government began modernizing its nuclear arsenal. Last year, the president called to restart atomic testing. Tech companies want nuclear reactors to fuel an A.I. revolution.
Mining companies are looking to New Mexico, to Mount Taylor – Tsoodził to the Navajo. Formed by First Man from sacred matter and ashes of the fourth world.
“Yellow Dirt.”
Sacred matter.
Ashes of the fifth world.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
