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AS FIRES RAGE ON COLORADO’S WESTERN SLOPE, SOME WORRY ABOUT THE
REGION’S RADIOACTIVE HISTORY  
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Parker Yamasaki
August 21, 2025
The Colorado Sun
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_ The frequency and intensity of wildfires in the West adds another
variable to the equation, given the high concentration of uranium
mines, mills and disposal sites on the Western Slope and in the Four
Corners region. And: leakage from atom bomb tests _

A firefighter feels for heat while "cold trailing" the Turner Gulch
fire, in Colorado's Uncompahgre National Forest., Photo: Courtesy
Inciweb / The Colorado Sun

 

Six weeks into the Turner Gulch fire’s run on the Uncompahgre
National Forest, fire crews have corralled the nearly 32,000-acre fire
into 79% containment, bulldozing fuel breaks and dropping buckets of
water and setting small, controlled fires to hold their lines.

While the crews’ main focus is the future movement of flames, some
individuals are concerned about the region’s radioactive past.

Along the fire’s western edge is Niche Road — also known as 6 3/10
Road — a historic corridor between hundreds of uranium mines in the
Uravan Mineral Belt, the 1,500-square-mile uranium-rich chunk of
Colorado and Utah, and the Climax Mill in Grand Junction.

South and west of the road is Calamity Camp
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a mining camp founded in the early 1900s that the Bureau of Land
Management says contains “residual radiation at this site, because
of radioactive minerals in the area,” right above a set of
directions to the camp. Surrounding Calamity Camp is a cluster of
abandoned vanadium, radium and uranium mines, active from the 1910s
until the industry crashed in the 1980s.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of tons of tailings — the
fine, sand-like byproduct of crushed uranium ore — that
were famously “donated” to the city of Grand Junction
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in the 1940s to be used as construction material. (The material was
never officially given out to individual residents, but they weren’t
discouraged from taking it, either, and many residents stockpiled it
in their yards.) Building with tailings went on until the U.S.
Department of Energy realized, in 1969, that mixing radioactive dust
into the streets, sidewalks and housing foundations wasn’t a great
idea.

The government started to claw back the radioactive matter in 1970 and
hauled it to a containment cell on the side of Colorado 50, about 15
miles south of Grand Junction, and about 20 miles east of the Turner
Gulch fire.

Operating in an area awash in atomic-era infrastructure means taking
extra precautions during firefighting. Firefighters on the Turner
Gulch fire received letters documenting their potential exposure to
radioactive materials, “to support any future claim or change in
circumstances,” Stacey Colón, field manager for the BLM, told The
Colorado Sun.

The letters are “for them to hold on to for their records,” Colón
said.

So far, she added, the agency has been monitoring air quality; is
analyzing soil samples along Niche Road for Ra-226 and Ra-228,
isotopes found in the decay of Uranium and Thorium; and deploys a
dosimeter to measure accumulated exposure to radiation.

As of Wednesday, the BLM has not received the results from the soil
samples, and has requested additional dosimeters for workers on the
fire line. 

Burning hot and fast

Uranium mining has been notoriously relaxed when it comes to public
safety, and though the word “historic” is often used to describe
shuttered mines from Colorado’s peak mining days during the Cold
War, many communities are still dealing with the legacy of those
loosely regulated operations — from scattered tailings in Grand
Junction, to leaky Superfund sites
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the Cotter Mill outside of Cañon City.

The frequency and intensity of wildfires in the West adds another
variable to the equation, given the high concentration of uranium
mines, mills and disposal sites on the Western Slope and in the Four
Corners region.

About 23 miles southwest of the Turner Gulch fire, the Deer Creek
fire
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which ignited in Utah in July and crossed the Colorado border, burned
through a patch of former uranium mines near Paradox.

That fire ignited about 15 miles north of the recently approved
Velvet Wood Project in Utah
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the first uranium operation to get the go-ahead under the Trump
administration’s newly accelerated environmental review process for
unlocking oil and gas, uranium, coal and other critical minerals on
federal lands.

Before President Donald Trump’s declaration of a National Energy
Emergency
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the process required a lengthy public comment period that weighed
cultural and environmental concerns against the project’s stated
outcomes. The Velvet Wood project skipped that public comment period,
and the BLM was given a 14-day deadline to analyze the permit. They
approved it in 11.  

 

It’s worth noting that the rush to reignite the uranium industry in
the U.S. is bipartisan. Last year President Joe Biden banned the
import of Russian uranium and unlocked $2.7 billion in federal funding
to expand domestic uranium enrichment. And earlier this year the
Colorado legislature passed a law
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as “clean,” opening it up to special grants and funding
opportunities. 

Meanwhile, Energy Fuels, the Lakewood-based mining company with a
focus on uranium and rare earth metals, has been quietly striking
deals
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firing up uranium production across the West, including a 1,000-acre
property on the Colorado-Utah border
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Gateway, the town closest to the Turner Gulch fire. 

Raising red flags

In 2009 the BLM requested an assessment of firefighter exposure to
“naturally occurring radioactive material,” nicknamed NORM, when
operating in and around abandoned uranium mines. 

The report assumes a maximum allowable exposure of 100 millirems of
radiation per year.

For reference, the expected dose of getting an X-ray is about 8
millirems, while naturally occurring “cosmic” and “soil”
radiation exposure constitutes about 30-35 millirems per year,
according to the assessment.

To assuage exposure fears, the report offers an equation in the form
of a radioactive word problem: 

You are at an abandoned uranium mine preparing to fight a fire and
measuring 0.04 mrem/hr on a Geiger Muller Tube Radiation Counter. Your
maximum yearly allowable exposure is 100 mrem/yr, so how many 12 hour
work days can you work at the site?

Answer: 208.3 days per year.

The BLM did not provide exact measurements from the Turner Gulch fire,
but Colón said readings were “at or below normal background
levels.”  

Even with what the agency considers “conservative conditions” laid
out in the report, “the inhalation dose of radionuclides will be
below the recommended exposure limit from radioactive sources,”
Kathleen DuBose, a program director for the interagency Federal
Wildland Firefighter Health and Wellbeing Program, said in an email to
The Colorado Sun.  

The report focuses on exposure near uranium mines specifically, the
majority of which are located on federal and tribal land. It does not
address hazards elsewhere along the nuclear supply chain, like
disposal sites, ore corridors or cities built on tailings. 

The disposal cells south of Grand Junction are covered with several
feet of clean soil and capped with a rock armament top, which would
prevent the fire from interacting with the materials, Branden
Ingersoll, spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Public Health
and the Environment, told The Colorado Sun. Chances of the Turner
Gulch fire coming into contact with these tailing specifically is
“extremely low,” Ingersoll said. 

In northwestern Colorado, the Lee fire
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68% contained as of Wednesday morning, grew quickly to 137,755 acres
in barely two weeks, spreading south from an initial lightning strike
Aug. 2, toward the site of underground nuclear detonations that took
place in 1973.

As part of the Plowshare Program
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initiative to explore alternate uses of nuclear energy beginning in
1957, a total of four nuclear bombs were detonated outside of Rulison,
about 10 miles southwest of Rifle, and on BLM lands 30 miles northwest
of Rifle. The goal was to use bombs to unlock natural gas stores. The
bombs did, in fact, unleash new stores — though none of it could be
sold on the market due to its radioactivity. 

Rob Prince, a retired senior lecturer of international studies at the
University of Denver, protested the blasts in the late 1960s and early
’70s. As the Lee Fire raged south, Prince contacted The Colorado Sun
with concerns about leakage at the sites, especially the Rio Blanco
site, where three bombs were exploded less than 10 miles from the
fire’s western perimeter.

“There is no radioactive contamination on the ground above the
former underground nuclear blast sites,” Ingersoll of CDPHE said.
“Following detonations, the Department of Energy monitored the area
above and sent probes into the blast zone, which confirmed that no
contamination was present on the surface and there were no impacts to
human health or the environment.”

_[PARKER YAMASAKI began her work covering arts and culture at The
Colorado Sun as a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow and Dow
Jones News Fund intern. She has freelanced for the Chicago Reader,
Newcity Chicago, and DARIA, among other publications, and had a short
stint as a culture editor at Iceland's only English-written newspaper
at the time, The Reykjavík Grapevine. Parker was born and raised in
California and has lived all over the Southwest.
[email protected]]_

* wildfires
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* Colorado
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* nuclear tests
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* U.S. nuclear testing
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* nuclear weapons
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* nuclear energy
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* nuclear waste
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* Uranium
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* uranium mining
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* underground testing
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* Climate Change
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* Climate Crisis
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