| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.1

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West. By Eric W. Mogren. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. x + 241 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $34.95.

In Warm Sands, Eric W. Mogren examines the evolution of federal policies associated with managing tailings generated in the course of uranium production. He argues that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), worried about eroding the nation's faith in nuclear power, initially downplayed health- and pollution-related concerns associated with those tailings. As a result, industrial practices that would have been relatively inexpensive to implement in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to costly remediation actions in the 1980s and 1990s. 1

State and federal health officials first turned to the AEC with concerns in the 1950s. They did so after discovering higher than normal concentrations of radium downstream from uranium mills located on the Colorado Plateau. However, the AEC expressed little interest in their findings. Existing laws gave the agency responsibility for managing material that had a radioactive content over .05 percent, but the concentration of radioactive material in the tailings fell below this threshold. Health officials, though, continued to press for federal action, and unfavorable publicity eventually motivated the AEC to take action. . . .

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