Uravan, Montrose County, Colorado 38.36832 -108.73649 Montrose Colorado USA http://www.geonames.org/5442625/uravan.html Geonames link for Uravan, Montrose County, Colorado 239 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uravan,_Colorado Wikipedia link for Uravan, Colorado A one-time mining town and a center for radium, vanadium, and uranium processing. It was a focal point of the uranium and vanadium mining booms that happened during and after World War II. Now, it is a Superfund cleanup site. The town began as the Joe Junior Mining Camp, named for the son of Standard Chemical’s chairman. Standard Chemical processed radium in a mill located in the mining settlement. According to oral history interviewee William Chenoweth, who was a geologist with the Atomic Energy Commision, Standard Chemical owned the mill until 1923, when cheaper and more plentiful radium mined in the Belgian Congo put the company out of the radium business. The United States Vanadium Company then operated the camp, building a mill to process vanadium from carnotite deposits for use in the steel industry until 1936. As uranium became vital for the war effort during World War II, Uravan became a center of uranium mining. According to Chenoweth, the plant at Uravan became the center of a pilot project to extract uranium from vanadium mill tailings and from “uranium sludge”. It remained a center of uranium mining until the 1970’s, providing uranium for weapons and for nuclear power. According to Vesta (Price) Fitzgerald, who lived in Uravan with her husband during the war, several Federal employees from Oakridge, Tennessee lived in Uravan at that time. She worked in a rooming house for the men. After the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, former employees in Uravan, including Price, received thank you letters from the government for their service. In her oral history interviews, Price also recalls that her grand children played in the uranium mill tailings piles and in retaining ponds for mill tailings waste. *Photograph titled "Housing in Uravan". 1955 public domain image taken by the US Department of Energy. yes yes https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/54Uranium Mining in Uravan Colorado, Intermountain Histories webpage