The radiation level inside the abandoned mine was nine times what is considered safe. "You've got kids playing in a mine? How dangerous is that?" Mesch said.

The state is now working with the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service on a pilot project that could spend up to $1.2 million to close an estimated 200 uranium mines in Cottonwood Wash and then restore the water quality to safe levels by removing the waste rock and tailings left behind a generation ago.

Almost $500,000 was spent by the state closing more than 200 uranium mines in the Marysvale area. And state and federal officials are hoping to finalize a deal to close hundreds more in the Tuscher Mountains south of Richfield.

Yet thousands more mines, mostly in uranium-rich southeastern Utah, await their turn on the priority list. Quite simply, there isn't enough time or money to close them all quickly or efficiently.

If the price of the Marysvale closures is any indication, it could cost taxpayers $125 million to close just the abandoned uranium mines.

The amount of money being spent to close dangerous mines is miniscule compared to that being spent by Congress to clean up defunct uranium mills. The most costly of the cleanups could be the Atlas site where 10,000 tons of contaminated soils are currently leaching into the Colorado River.

The Department of Energy has already funded cleanups of four uranium mills in Utah and 20 other mill sites around the West. To date, the federal government has spent $15.2 million capping a tailings pile east of Green River in Grand County, $44 million consolidating and burying tailings at a mill on Navajo lands near Mexican Hat, and $84 million moving radioactive tailings from the Vitro site in South Salt Lake to an isolated dump site in Tooele County. The DOE has spent $237 million cleaning up the Monticello mill site, and before all the monitoring is done in 2005 the number will reach $248.7 million.

Scores of smaller, privately owned mills remain lost and forgotten in the canyons of southern Utah where each rainfall carries the radioactive sediments into local streams and, ultimately, into the Colorado River.

Toxic legacy

Undoubtedly, the question of how much the government knew about the dangers of uranium mining will be debated for years to come. But the toxic legacy will remain a permanent fixture in Utah, not only in the haunting faces of the dead peering from family photo albums but in the contaminated water and soils that may yet sicken future generations.