Charles Steen - The Uranium Boom

The Uranium Boom

Down on his luck, Steen read in the December 1949 issue of The Engineering and Mining Journal that the United States federal government had issued incentives for domestic uranium prospectors. Under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had the authority to withdraw lands from the private sector in order to examine them as possible sites for uranium mining. During World War II, the Manhattan Project had received most of its uranium from foreign sources in Canada and the Belgian Congo. However, it had also received some from vanadium miners in the American Southwest, where uranium was often a by-product of mining (uranium was not, before the atomic bomb, a valuable metal). There was a concern that the United States would not have enough domestic supply of uranium for its nuclear weapons program.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Atomic Energy Commission established itself as the only legal buyer of uranium in the U.S., and artificially manipulated prices to reflect their current uranium needs. By raising the price of uranium, they created an incentive for prospectors in the Four Corners region.

Despite the fact that his three sons, Johnny, Andy and Charles Jr., were all less than four years old, and his wife was expecting, Steen borrowed $1,000 from his mother and headed for the Colorado Plateau, determined to strike it rich.

Steen could not afford the standard radiation-detecting equipment used by uranium prospectors - the Geiger counter. Instead, he used a secondhand diamond drill rig and his geologic training for his prospecting. At the time, each prospector had his own idiosyncratic theory on where to find uranium. The uranium industry was composed primarily of individual prospectors and geologists who would attempt to find a large deposit and either mine it for themselves or mine it for a large company (such as Union Carbide) who would then transport the ore from the mine to the uranium mill where it could be converted into yellowcake. Steen's theory on uranium deposits was that they would collect in anticlinal structures in the same manner as oil, which others on the Plateau dismissed as "Steen's Folly."

His family moved into a small trailer at Dove Creek, Colorado, and then later into a tarpaper shack near Cisco, Utah. Steen fed his family on poached venison and cereal, in a highly marginalized state of existence, for two years.