Back in 1946, young Joe Cooper and his" father-in-law, Fletcher Bronson, of Monticello, Utah, paid $1,000 for 500 acres of copper-mining property in southwestern Utah. They soon regretted the investment: the copper ore was so heavily contaminated with uranium that nobody wanted to process it. Then the atomic age got into swing, and Cooper and the Bronson family forgot all about copper. Their Happy Jack mine never had a waste dump, because every pound of rock dug up was commercial-grade ore. Last week Cooper, now 45, and the Bronsons decided that the...
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