Charles D. Snow, Ivins, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, 21 February 2003 : Saving the Legacy tape no. SL-589

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harle D. now 21 ebruary 200 WIN: [laugh] W 11, if the stuffs in the ground anyway and you put it back in th ground, what have you done? CHA: It s hard to explain to the public, for example that during some of our expl rati n work we did a lot of airborne surveys where we'd take a scintillation unit into an aircraft and fly around; and we used to have to fly closer than five hundred feet to the ground because if you go much higher than that, the background radiation of radium 226 and radon is such that it masks the count that you're trying to pick up on the ground. And it's ubiquitous; it's almost everywhere. We looked long and hard at the Chattanooga shale down around Chattanooga, Tennessee, because there's enough uranium in that shale that it's near economic quantities. The difficulty in milling is one of the reasons we didn't do it. People have lived there and continue to live there in great happiness, and don't know the difference. WIN: True. In the mining situation a lot of people didn't realize dangers. The uranium miners suffered from it, but- CHA: Well, some of the dangers I'm acquainted with in uranium mining was the diesel smoke from the diesel equipment that was used underground on the Colorado plateau. During the time that we were there working at the Moki Mine, for example, why the state would come down, and they were conducting a program to see if we were being affected by the radiation, and so on; and they started taking x-rays of us. The first time they came down they had an old army field unit left over from World War II. They'd stand you up and take a three-position shots of your chest-a front, a back, and the side. At the time they were using some of the old slow film left over from World War II, yet when they developed it and it didn't tum out to suit them, they'd stand you up and do it again. 29