Clive rises from the desert like an oasis.
Past the Kennecott smelter and tailings pile. Past the exit for Iosepa and the barrow pit ponds of the Great Salt Lake. Past the turnoff for Grassy Mountain, a toxic waste landfill.
Almost to Wendover, a metal barn draped with a tarp that says, "Think Safety," is a final outpost for civilization and some of its nastiest detritus.
A day before Earth Day, I went on EnergySolutions' "box lunch tour," following on the heels of 60 senior citizens from Springville. Two company handlers drove me out; a fun bus picked up and dropped the retirees.
"We're just glad to have this opportunity. All we know is what we read in the paper. Everything's negative," Oneita Brady says to EnergySolutions Vice President Jeff Gardner as we all gather in the lobby of the administration building. The zen fountain is broken, filled with dying potted plants. But the cubicle warren around the corner looks brand new -- like an empty office waiting for Dilbert.
Brady, a retired newspaper reporter and editor, is convinced after her Skool Lunch and spin around the piles of what looks like so much dirt and rock.
"All I've ever read is negative about this place," she says. "I'm not as frightened as I used to be. I don't think we're going to go up in smoke."
There's a reason EnergySolutions will take anyone -- even legislators and environmentalists -- on "tours" of the company's radioactive landfill: They work.
"That tour is so damn effective," says Vanessa Pierce, from Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. She's been twice.
It starts from the moment you're on the road. If the hour-plus drive through the west desert doesn't deaden your sense of alarm at breathing Clive's air, the presentations will. Every other word out of Media Relations Director Mark Walker and Government Relations Vice President Jill Sigal's mouths is "safety."
Company President Steve Creamer requires a safety message at the beginning of every meeting -- from "Don't text while driving" to "Remember to wear your dosimeter." Signs are posted all over the landfill, including at the entry: "EnergySolutions: Where Safety Really Counts." Three million safe hours and counting -- a measure of on-the-job injuries.
"We go beyond what is required," says Sigal. "Steve Creamer cares about his employees. He cares about the community. He cares about Utah.
"Safety, safety, safety. That's the most important thing to us," she adds.
All right, already. I get it: Safety.
The numbing carries on. No offense to Gardner, but the charts and acronyms and silent videos he genially plods through as you munch on your turkey sandwich and vegetable pasta is hypnotizing, sort of like an after-lunch staff meeting.
And then you're off to the truly alarming part of the tour -- the "access control building," where employees suit up and brush off. Two piles of dosimeters to measure radiation exposure seem like the work of a responsible corporation -- or a state requirement. Surely the electric yellow radiation signs everywhere -- "Caution! Asbestos Waste Disposal Site. Do not create dust. Breathing asbestos dust is hazardous to your health." -- are an excess of caution.
And then you skim around the perimeter in a car, looking at concrete trucks and trackhoes. The glove boxes from nuclear bomb assembly lines are buried. So is the radioactive swing set. The place looks like some post-apocalyptic scene from "Mad Max." We never see the monuments EnergySolutions is supposed to leave behind so aliens or anthropologists a million years from now will know to leave that pile of rocks alone.
"People don't know the tough questions to ask," says Pierce. "Everything does look like basic dirt and trash and you can't see the radiation that it's contaminated with. It's hard to really appreciate how dangerous that dirt is."
Like State Sen. Howard Stephenson, I thought for a minute about scooping some up to put in my grow boxes.
Then I noticed the guy in a cloud of dust off in the distance. Wearing his white coveralls, a respirator and a personal air quality monitor on his hip, he watched as a Caterpillar dumped a pile of dirt into a concrete-lined hole.
On second thought, maybe not.
