Durango's old smelter site has a uranium-era cleanup history

Part of Durango’s industrial past sits quietly in a side canyon. On the south edge of town, an old lead smelter site was converted during World War II into a uranium and vanadium mill. It produced material used in the early atomic program, and later sold uranium for national defense until operations ended in the early 1960s.

When such mills closed, they left behind tailings, the leftover sandy waste, that are mildly radioactive. Under a federal law often shortened to UMTRCA, the U.S. Department of Energy carried out a cleanup. Tailings from the mill site, and from places around town where the material had been used as fill or in concrete, were collected and moved to an engineered disposal cell in Bodo Canyon, southwest of Durango.

That cell is now a long-term care site managed by the DOE Office of Legacy Management, which inspects and maintains it. The mill site itself was remediated.

For a buyer or resident, the practical point is simple: this is a known, documented, federally managed legacy, not a mystery. If you have questions about a specific property’s history with this cleanup, the federal record is the place to look.

For the official history and current management, see the U.S. Department of Energy’s Durango disposal and processing sites page.