Jerry Kendall still remembers the vein of uranium his father worked at the Green Mountain Mine in Crooks Gap. It was 1958, and the ore coming out was some of the purest uranium ever found in Wyoming — high-grade material fed into a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
"They told us it was completely harmless until it had been turned into plutonium," Kendall told Cowboy State Daily from his home in Hudson. "They lied to the miners. And they knew it."
Kendall was just a kid when his family moved down from Montana. He remembers playing in the water that flowed out of the mine in the afternoons, watching his dad come home covered in dust. Nobody told them the danger they were living in.
"I just can't comprehend how them companies knew what they was doing and allowed those men to bring their families and be around that stuff," Kendall said.
His father never got sick from the uranium. In 1960, a rock slab fell in the mine, fatally breaking his neck.
Kendall is convinced that if the accident hadn't happened, cancer would have gotten him anyway — just like it got so many other miners, their wives, and their children, he said.
"The men started getting sick in the early ‘60s," Kendall remembered.
"A big percent of them ended up dying of cancer — like over 10 times the national rate. Then their wives started dying of cancer. Kids got cancer."
For years, Kendall has been bitter about it. He's demanded compensation for families who lived near the mines. He's carried that anger for decades.
While recalling it all with Cowboy State Daily, there was a moment his voice lightened. It was in his response to some recent news: A company in Casper claims it can clean up uranium’s toxic legacy.
This week, it received the first license of its kind from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
DISA Technologies is now federally permitted to remediate abandoned uranium mine waste using revolutionary water-and-slurry technology that can strip the radioactivity from contaminated rock.
"It's amazing," Kendall said, his voice lifting. "It's good news."
Throughout his childhood, Kendall watched Wyoming's uranium country boom and bust. He lived in Jeffrey City when it swelled with miners and processed millions of tons of ore. He watched what happened when it all collapsed — the ghost towns, the contaminated ranches, the buried equipment too radioactive to ever use again.
"That Western Nuclear mill site a couple miles north of Jeffrey City — they buried the whole plant," he said. "All the old trucks, all the buildings, all the equipment, everything, because it could never be used again. It was that radioactive."
He worked on ranches downstream from that mill.
"A lot of them ranchers that lived downstream died of cancer," he said.
North of Jeffrey City, near Riverton, there's another scar on the land.
The Susquehanna Western uranium mill operated on the Wind River Reservation from 1958 to 1963, and when it shut down, it left behind nearly 1.8 million cubic yards of radioactive tailings waste, according to the Department of Energy.
The government removed the tailings in the late 1980s, but rain and snowmelt washed radioactive materials deep into the ground, creating an underground uranium plume that has expanded from 20 to 27 acres in recent years and continues moving closer to the Big Wind River, according to the Wyoming Outdoor Council.
For the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone people living on the Wind River Reservation, and for the Navajo Nation hundreds of miles south, uranium's legacy isn't history.
It's a multi-generational mess. Can a new generation of technology clean it up?

Communities Left Behind
DISA Technologies' relationship with the Navajo Nation began with a 2023 EPA-funded treatability study.
The Navajo Nation has 523 abandoned uranium mine sites. Eighty-five percent of homes on the reservation are estimated to be contaminated with uranium. Cancer rates, kidney failure, and birth defects all run significantly higher than national averages.
"For decades, tribal and rural communities in Arizona, and particularly on the Navajo Nation, have lived with the health and environmental consequences of abandoned uranium mines," Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) said at a ceremony this week in Washington, D.C., marking DISA's license approval.
The company credits a bipartisan push from Kelly and Sen. Cynthia Lummis with helping get DISA licensed.
Now waste sites spread across Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming could fall into the crosshairs of DISA's clean-up technology.
The company said Jeffrey City and Fremont County might be good places to start.
By 1955, more than 7,000 uranium mining claims had been filed in Fremont County alone. The state has 321 abandoned uranium mine sites, with only 34 reclaimed.
At a legislative hearing in Casper on July 30, tribal members came forward to tell their stories.
Avilia Rae Friday, a Northern Arapaho woman from the Wind River Reservation, testified about the personal toll.
"All my relatives that live on the reservation surrounding the uranium site have passed away from cancer related illnesses," she said. "Mine is personal because I was diagnosed four years ago with double breast cancer and it was different cancer in each breast."
She remembered childhood on the reservation, walking through contaminated areas to pick berries and wild tea.
"We started to notice our animals," she said. "We would find frogs with three legs. We had people running cattle and horses on these areas. There was a cow that had a calf with two heads."
Friday's grandparents owned the land where the Susquehanna Western uranium mill was placed. They were told it was eminent domain and given 30 days to move to other land nearby.
"With my breast cancer, I was stage three. It was already in my lymph nodes on the left side. That was terrible. And I almost had to die to get healed. I wouldn't want anybody to do that," Friday told Cowboy State Daily.
She grew up riding her bike and picking plants around the old mill site, jogging past it, riding horses through the area.
When asked how she felt about DISA's new technology and cleanup mission, Friday wasn’t sure what to make of it.
"I'm very skeptical because you say they use the force of water," she said. "Anything that contaminates our land, our air, our water, our food source, you know, we're not here to contaminate this world. We were put here to take care of it."
DISA told Cowboy State Daily the technology uses a closed-loop water system, “Meaning almost all of the water is continuously recycled and reused.”
“The water’s only purpose is to help transport the material and create the particle-to-particle collisions that separate clean sand from uranium-bearing fines,” the company explained in a follow-up email.
DISA added, “Only a small portion of water — about 10–15% — remains as moisture in the cleaned material once processing is complete. That’s roughly the same amount of water that’s needed to compact the remediated soil when it’s placed back on site.”
Watershed Moment?
Across the West, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are 15,000 sites associated with abandoned uranium mine waste. For decades, they've been viewed as difficult to fix — too expensive to haul away, too dangerous to leave in place, and capping them only delays the inevitable erosion that sends radioactive materials back into the water supply.
Greyson Buckingham, DISA's CEO, explained his company's technology using a simple metaphor: "Imagine like a tennis ball being covered in mud and you're shooting these tennis balls at each other. What happens when they hit? The mud breaks off, but the tennis balls stay intact. And that's what we're doing, effectively just shooting millions of particles at a time at each other."
High-pressure slurry ablation is a mechanical process — no chemicals involved — that uses the difference in hardness between minerals to separate them. When DISA's system forces particles into high-pressure collisions through opposing nozzles, the softer radioactive minerals break away from the harder base rock.
The results, according to DISA, are dramatic. The technology removes over 90 percent of the uranium and radium from mine waste, concentrating it into just 20 percent of the original volume. The remaining 80 percent — the "clean coarse fraction" — can stay on site safely.
Some of the concentrated radioactive material can be recycled into nuclear fuel.
“The sale of that material can cover a significant portion, or even all, of the remediation costs,” according to DISA.
Getting to this moment required a four-year odyssey through a regulatory obstacle course.
When DISA first approached Colorado regulators in 2021, they didn't know how to classify the technology. The company was told it would need a uranium milling license — a framework designed for a completely different operation, requiring years and costing millions for each individual site.
"We said, 'Well, that makes no sense,'" Buckingham recalled. "We're remediating the site. We've demonstrated that we only make the site cleaner — 90 to 98% cleaner. We eliminate all leachability. We don't use any chemicals. Why would you regulate us in a way that we would never be able to deploy the technology?"
Stephen Cohen, DISA's chief regulatory affairs officer, remembered the frustration.
"The NRC staff took a very rigid position in the beginning," he said.
The company could have given up. Instead, DISA requested meetings with all five NRC commissioners and made its case: These sites were never going to be cleaned up unless regulators found a new framework for proven, safe, chemical-free technologies.
The commissioners listened. Senators Kelly and Lummis are both members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and they began asking pointed questions at hearings.
The Navajo Nation EPA weighed in forcefully. Environmental groups and academic leaders signed letters of support.
In September 2024, all five NRC commissioners voted unanimously to approve a new regulatory pathway: a Service Provider License under a source material framework. Instead of requiring a separate license for every site, DISA would have one overarching license.
"That was a huge day for us," Buckingham said. "Frankly, that was our third attempt to try to get regulatory clarity."
If the license had not gone through?
"That would have just broken us, honestly," he said.
At the Oct. 7 licensing ceremony in Washington, D.C., Dr. Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, said, "By combining innovative technology with regulatory leadership, we have a new path to remediate legacy uranium sites."
Cohen put it like this: "This is a watershed moment. It really took an enormous paradigm shift. The impact cannot be understated."
Ghost Towns
Back in 2019, Jerry Kendall led a film crew from Canada up to the old uranium mines where his father worked. The crew was working on a project about Uranium City, a ghost town in northern Canada that had boomed and busted just like Jeffrey City.
At the gate to the Green Mountain Mine where Kendall's father died, they used a Geiger counter. It went off immediately.
"We made it to the mine, and it pegged both scales before we even got there," Kendall said. "That was 60 some years after they were mining it."
The documentary crew wanted to tell the story of uranium's legacy — the ghost towns, the contamination, the communities left behind.
Now, with DISA's breakthrough, Kendall is again thinking about that Canadian ghost town and what this technology might mean for it.
"If they could neutralize that radioactivity, that could open that city up again," he said.
For decades, Kendall carried anger about what uranium did to his family and his community. On June 30, he posted about it on Facebook.
"I have been bitter over the fact that our government seen fit to not disclose the dangers that went along with mining uranium and for the families that were to live around those mines," wrote Kendall. "I thought maybe if I hollered long and loud enough, I could change things. I now realize I cannot."
Enter DISA and its clean up ambitions, which led Kendall to repeat: "It's good news.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.