Bob Merz was 20 years old when he first went to work for a uranium mining company, hauling ore from the mine to the mill. Two years later he went underground, mining uranium and radium found in hardened iron.

For the next twenty years, Merz mined all over the Southwest. He started out in mines near Slickrock, then moved to Blanding's Red and White Canyons. He worked above Gateway on John Brown Mesa and in a mine situated between the Green and Colorado Rivers. He also mined at the foot of the La Sal Mountains, in Long Park above Uravan and in Coal Bed Canyon southwest of Dove Creek. Grants, N.M. was the only place in the Southwest's uranium belt he didn't work as a miner, he said.

"Mainly I had jobs waiting if I wanted to change jobs," Merz said. "I had a reputation for being a hard worker, so any time I wanted to change I would. A lot of miners would take a paycheck and be off to the next mine. We called those 'tramp' miners. I wasn't exactly a tramp miner."

The Cotter Corporation, a subsidiary of General Atomics, has recently re-opened three uranium and vanadium mines in the Paradox Valley and plans to open another three, including one above the Uravan town site, this winter. The uranium is being sold to domestic nuclear power producers, a Cotter Corporation representative told The Telluride Watch. Vanadium is used to harden steel.

Last year, the three re-opened mines produced 21,000 tons of ore, with uranium accounting for one quarter of the total production. In 2005 with the additional mines opened, the company hopes to increase its production fourfold to 80,000 tons, a Cotter Corporation representative told the Rocky Mountain News.

In recent years, the price of uranium has jumped from around $7 per pound to more than $20 per pound, due to increased demand from the nuclear power industry and a depletion of uranium stockpiles worldwide. According to Forbes, the nuclear power industry, once left for dead, has plans to build new plants over the next several decades; General Electric and Westinghouse Electric plan to build as many as five new reactors by 2015, a dozen by 2020 and fifty by the middle of the century.

Vanadium prices have spiked as well, pushed by orders from Asian steel producers, leaping from $2 per pound to $10 per pound.

Locally, some have questioned the necessity of re-opening hard rock uranium mines where miners must go underground to mine the ore. Some techniques, including in situ leach mining, do not require sending people underground. In situ mining uses chemicals mixed with underground water to leach uranium from the surrounding ore. When pumped to the surface, the water evaporates and the uranium is left behind.

"In-situ leach mining was developed as an alternative to sending people underground, in an effort to reduce exposure both to radiation and silica dust," said Dr. Bruce Struminger, medical director of the Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program for Indian Health Services on the Navajo Reservation. The program, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, addresses the health needs of former Cold War uranium workers and helps them complete the medical testing needed for them to apply for "compassionate payments" from the federal government under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

THE RISKS

Unfortunately for the first generation of miners, including Merz and his colleagues, workers were not warned of the dangers of mining uranium. Now 76, Merz suffers from silicosis, or pulmonary fibrosis, a condition caused by silica dust lodging in the lungs and damaging the tissue. Most of his friends who mined uranium alongside him have already died from lung cancer, Merz said.

Though the mining companies conducted safety briefings, Merz does not remember them talking about the risk of the fine dust or the uranium and radon.

"The bigger mines had safety meetings before we went underground," Merz said. "But that was about it, telling us not to do this or to do that."

Mining company representatives told the miners that safety rules prohibited them from holding the steel end of a jackhammer in place with a hand, as they risked injuring their hands and fingers.

"It was ridiculous. You got this jackhammer with a steel end and you go up to the face to start drilling and you had to take your left hand and reach up and hold the steel, so it would rotate in one spot until you got your hole where you wanted it," said Merz. "It was impossible to get a hole started otherwise."

Merz does not remember the men wearing respirators, which would have prevented them from breathing the silica dust that gathered in the unventilated tunnels. Uranium is found in sandstone, which when disturbed disintegrates into silica, microscopic bits of ground glass. Miners without proper respiration devices breathe in the tiny particles. Moreover, the decaying uranium produces radon and radon daughters, radioactive particles that are known to damage lung tissue and cause lung cancer.

According to Merz, some mines were "gassy" and the air was poor. Others had better ventilation from holes drilled to the surface, and some of the bigger mines used blower fans to blow in fresh air from above.

One mine near Slickrock had particularly bad air, he remembers. At noon when the miners came to the surface to eat their lunch, "we were dragging ourselves," he said. "We could barely take one step after the other." Merz thinks that they were exhausted from the radiation and the dust in the air. "The mine inspector shut us down until the mining company drilled some vent holes to help the air come in. But it still lacked good air."

Many times if a mine was too deep, the miners did not surface for lunch, but ate in the drifts, miners' lingo for tunnels.

Sometimes the drillers wore safety glasses, but they would get covered in mud while drilling, making the situation more dangerous because a miner could not see what he was doing.

"All they wanted was more footage underground, more tons and more footage in the drifts going to other ore deposits," said Merz. "An old mining saying goes, 'Track or no track, you got to go ahead.' In other words, get to work and the more you do the better."

Though Merz has not contracted lung cancer – a disease many of his fellow miners have succumbed to – when he was about 40 years old he was diagnosed with silicosis.

"The doctor said, 'Get out. If you stay you have two years to live,'" said Merz, who had gone to see a doctor because of shortness of breath and pain in his lungs and chest.

THE CHALLENGES

The risks of radiation aside, hard rock mining had other perils and challenges miners faced every day. Slab rocks regularly fell from the tunnel walls and when drilling, chunks of rock and mud often splattered in their faces. If not properly ventilated the underground air was difficult and hazardous to breath.

Even so, Merz and his fellow miners relished the "challenge."

"I never could work on a job without a good challenge to it," said Merz. "It was very heavy work, which a lot of us enjoyed because it made the muscles bulge and the stronger we got the more we could brag, I suppose."

He also appreciated being underground during the cold and snowy winter months. The mines could be breezy if well ventilated, "but mostly they stayed a nice working temperature," Merz said.

To extract the ore, miners used jackhammers to drill holes in the walls of a drift. Each hole was about six feet deep, and after thirty or so holes were drilled, the men packed them with dynamite or, even better, fertilizer pellets soaked in diesel fuel. The fertilizer fit well in the soft sponge rock.

Sometimes the men left the drift before setting off the explosives, but often times they didn't, backing out of the tunnel "just far enough that the explosion couldn't hurt us," Merz said. "You usually had to wait a spell because the explosive – the dynamite especially – put off a gas that gave you bad headaches."

He learned his trade the hard way, first hauling ore and then working as a mucker when he went underground. A mucker shoveled the ore dislodged after an explosion into carts that carried it out of the mine. Once in a while he helped the driller, and when "I got to know enough about drilling, I graduated from mucking to driller. Usually from there one stepped up to lead miner or shift boss, the one who oversaw the work in an individual mine."

Merz was promoted to shift boss, but didn't like that work as much. "It was easier to be a miner, instead of trying to tell other people how to mine."

LOOKING BACK

Wiser now to the serious risks involved in mining uranium, Merz is not sure he would go back under again.

"Not to the uranium mines, no," he said. "There is nothing but a young death to look forward to. I'm the oldest of the miners who worked during that time period who is still alive." After a pause, Merz said he would not work in a coal mine either. "They are famous for black lung. You are breathing in all that coal dust and getting caved in on. Uranium mines were safer that way. We had a lot of rocks fall, and slabs that fell, but not too many were hurt badly or killed."

Merz remembered a brother-in-law who owned and worked in a mine near Lake Powell. "Two weeks before he died he told me, 'I made my first fortune in the Whore Wind mine and that is the mine that killed me.'" The brother-in-law died soon after from lung cancer.

Even so, Merz sympathizes with the men in Dove Creek who have taken up hard rock mining again.