CAÑON CITY — The two dozen Cotter Mill workers who gathered Wednesday say the uranium processing business was wild and dangerous in its early days. Men worked uranium ore into “yellow cake” concentrate with little thought to the radiation it emitted, several said.
“There was no such thing as a respirator back then,” former mill worker Bill Robb said.
Now, they say they’re paying for America’s atomic age with their health and they want the federal Labor Department to pay for their maladies.
“I have a spot of yellow cake on my lung,” said Richard W. Sartor, who worked at Cotter.
The mill is long closed and its grounds are the focus of a federal Superfund cleanup run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Health and Environment.
.
