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It was probably good news for the local tourist industry, but I couldn't help feeling sad when I read that the 200-foot-tall brick smokestack in Durango is now only a memory. To the best of my knowledge, only one such smokestack now remains in Colorado. If you want to see a big masonry chimney, you'll have to visit Salida.
Durango's late smokestack lasted more than a century. Much of its career was devoted to gold and silver. But during World War II, narrow-gauge trains chugged into Durango, bearing loads of uranium ore from mines near Rico.
The ore was refined in Durango's converted smelter. The resulting uranium made the world's first atomic bombs. In the process, the smokestack became so radioactive that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deemed it a health hazard. So it got knocked down Tuesday morning.
I haven't seen any firm figures concerning the precise amount of radioactivity that the old smokestack harbored. But if the EPA is now in the business of destroying landmarks because they're radioactive, then Colorado is going to be a busy place.
For instance, Pikes Peak is arguably the most prominent landmark in Colorado. And you'd be amazed at how radioactive it is.
Figure that the Pikes Peak massif is a cone about 7,000 feet high and 20 miles across, which makes for 139 cubic miles of rock. Almost all of that is granite, and a cubic mile of granite weighs 12.86 billion tons. Which gives us 1.785 trillion tons of pink granite in just one mountain.
So what? Granite is harmless stuff, isn't it?
Not entirely harmless, as it turns out. Natural granite isn't quite pure; it contains four about parts per million of uranium. That doesn't sound like much, but when you apply it to Pikes Peak, you come up with 7,141,000 tons of uranium.
Uranium naturally occurs in two isotopes. U-238 is by far the most common, and it's not radioactive. The rare stuff they make bombs out of is U-235, which is about 0.7 percent of any given mass that once emerged from the Durango smelter.
So Pikes Peak contains about 100 million pounds of U-235. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained 132 pounds of U-235; America's favorite mountain holds enough weapons-grade fissile material to make 757,000 such bombs. Given advances in weapons technology since then, a conservative estimate of the destructive force inside Pikes Peak is 227,000 megatons.
That's a lot of power; the combined U.S. and Soviet arsenals come to a mere 10,239 megatons. And all this is sitting right out in the open, where any terrorist might get his hands on it.
But we're not as concerned with warfare as we are with day-to-day radioactive exposure, so let's return to that. The most radioactive natural substance is radium, which is found in minute quantities with uranium. For every 3 million parts of uranium, there is 1 part of radium.
Thus Pikes Peak holds 4,761 pounds of radium. The stuff is so toxic that one millionth of a gram can kill you, sooner or later. There's enough in Pikes Peak to kill 2 trillion people, or about 400 times the current population of the earth.
Uranium and radium represent only the more exotic radioactive hazards that perch behind Colorado Springs. Plain old potassium, a common element, has a radioactive isotope; inside Pikes Peak at this moment, there are 97 million tons of potassium-40 spewing out beta rays.
Clearly Pikes Peak is a radioactive menace, and Colorado's prosperity is assured as soon as we convince the EPA of this fact.
The federal government will pay $54,800 to dismantle and remove the Durango smokestack, which comprised about 1,600 cubic yards of material. So the going rate for fixing radioactive landmarks is $34.25 a cubic yard.
Pikes Peak has 757 billion cubic yards to tear down and haul off, which means a cash infusion of $25.9 trillion. Figure one employee-year for every $100,000, and we can put a million people to work for 259 years. And after that, we've got 52 other 14,000-foot summits, all just as radioactive as Pikes Peak.
It's a big job and an expensive one, but somebody has to make Colorado a safe place to live.
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