Rural Colorado is dotted with towns that industry forgot.
“Uranium Drive-In,” a documentary showing this weekend at Durango Film: An Independent Film Festival, is the story of one such town, Naturita, where a population of 519 is struggling to hold on.
Director Suzan Beraza of Telluride opens the story in 2007. The public school is up for sale, there are no jobs, and an energy company’s offer to build a uranium mill excites a heartbreaking degree of hope among some townsfolk.
The proposed Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill, the first uranium mine to be built in America in 30 years, also elicits painful memories of what uranium mining did to the Paradox Valley, where Naturita lies, as well as the ire of environmentalists based in Telluride, a nearby resort town.
Until the mid-1980s, Naturita was home to a thriving uranium mine, the Cotter Mine. The film expertly juxtaposes modern assurances that mining will be different this time, because of rigorous regulations with the shameful local history of uranium mining, which has left grown men without limbs and a whole town, Uravan, condemned.
One woman remembers thinking as a girl that her hometown was the most beautiful place in the world, recalling how the river glinted with all the colors of the rainbow. As it turns out, those colors were created by radioactive tailings.
Another woman says: “It’s very nice that people are watching out for animals and land, but to the exclusion of people and their rights? I have a problem with that.”
In the end, the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill isn’t built. But the local debate that the film tracks – should there be a mill? – is rich with the emotion and the intellectual contradictions that define environmentalism in the Southwest.
If the U.S. is going to move toward a greener future, won’t nuclear energy be a part of that?
If not here, then where?
Who owns the Earth? How do we live on it? Do all things end?
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
If you go
Durango Film: An Independent Film Festival will present two screenings of “Uranium Drive-In.”
6 p.m., Friday, Gaslight 1.
Noon, Sunday, Gaslight 2.
