FAIRFIELD - Ken Lorge chain smokes Old Golds and remembers when he tried for a lucky strike by mining uranium north of Amidon.

He's 89, and he'd be worth studying to see what's holding his slim frame together after a lifetime of tobacco and years of handling radioactive material that never earned him a dime.

About 45 miles north of Lorge's place, a family wonders if an open uranium mine on land where their cattle grazed made three of their six children sick.

The Public Service Commission plans to close up that uranium mine eight miles southwest of Fairfield next summer, another chapter in North Dakota's bit part in supplying atomic fuel for the Cold War and the emerging nuclear energy industry.

Jackie and Jerry Anheluk, of Belfield, contacted state officials about the open uranium mine the summer of 2002, after getting the devastating news that yet another of their children has Crohn's disease.

Jerica Anheluk is only 11, with pretty blue-green eyes and spaces where her permanent teeth are still coming in. She's far too young for a disease that can destroy her digestive and intestinal tract and for which there is remission but no cure.

The Anheluks don't know if there's a correlation between the open mine on land where cattle they've consumed has grazed and their children's illness.

The thought occurred to them when they went looking for reasons why their kids kept getting sick. Their suspicion deepened when some of their cattle, which may have grazed more than usual around the mine, were found to have internal abscesses.

They also know the needle zinged over to "hot" - far in excess of any recommended long-term exposure to radiation - when the State Health Department brought radiation meters out to the mine.

The health department told the family to minimize time spent at the mine and never to use any materials from it for construction or in a garden.

Anheluk said she's glad the state agencies responded - the mine was quickly fenced off from cattle, and paperwork started for reclamation - but she's in a hurry.

"I wanted it done yesterday," she said, warming her hands around a cup of coffee at the Fairfield cafe, while Jerica had hot chocolate smothered in whipped cream.

The family ranch and uranium mine are west of the cafe, just past the first rim of the snow-capped Badlands.

Many of North Dakota's uranium mines - including the ones near Amidon that never made Lorge any money - were reclaimed between the early '80s and '90s, when the commission used $3 million in federal money to build clay-lined pits to seal up the mine materials.

Bruce Beechie, a reclamation engineer, said the commission knew there were other smaller pits around. In some cases they didn't know the location, and in others - very small mine openings - it wasn't economically feasible to do the reclamation, he said.

After the Anheluks' call, the commission decided to start up uranium reclamation, at least one more time.

Uranium mining in North Dakota never set off a mad scramble like the California gold rush, although there was something of a U-boom here starting in the mid-'50s.

After successfully using uranium to create nuclear explosions and heat energy in the '40s, the federal government was paying prospectors and geologists a finder's and production fee to help locate the material. A fair amount of detecting work had been done in southwestern North Dakota and northwestern South Dakota by the end of the decade.

It is an interesting footnote in the state's history, one that includes stories of sheep near Bowman that glowed blue in the twilight after eating uranium tainted grass and a farmer who claimed exposure caused his hair to fall out and his skin to turn bronze.

"We did our best to make money, and we didn't do it," says Lorge, still patriarch of a ranch operation near the Little Missouri River. "It was quite an experiment."

To remember it all, he has to cast his mind back nearly 50 years, a time he can see more clearly than his pack of Old Golds on the kitchen counter because of cataracts in his eyes.

The story of how uranium came to be in southwestern North Dakota is eons older than Lorge's story.

It's theorized uranium was dumped into the region from a volcanic eruption in central Montana, eventually leaching into the soil layers and bonding to permeable coal.

Lorge discovered some of that "unaniferous coal" back in 1956 with four other men, one of whom had observed a uranium operation not far away in South Dakota.

They scouted around with Geiger counters and found some shallow coal seams northwest of Amidon that set the counters ticking.

They cored and tested and it turned out, indeed, they'd found a source of U3O8, uranium oxide, or yellow cake, as it's sometimes called.

The men formed the Manidon Co., a combination of Amidon and Mandan, where three partners, including Dr. Harry Wheeler, were from.

They leased rights to the location and opened up the Fritz Mine, which required 115 acres of reclamation at a cost of nearly $500,000 back in 1992.

Some of the guys at the Public Service Commission remember going to the Fritz Mine years back. It looked other worldly - no vegetation anywhere and dead green water down in the pit.

Jim Killingbeck, who heads up the radiation control program for the State Health Department, said he and others who metered the old mines for radioactivity didn't gear up in space-age suits.

Like the proverbial canary on a miner's shoulder, though, they did wear radiation sensitive badges.

Besides sealing the "hot" soil in clay-lined pits, reclamation included installing some 150 monitoring wells to detect whether uranium was moving through underground aquifers.

In some areas, tests found slightly elevated uranium levels in water and rural households getting water with higher than recommended uranium levels.

In those cases, reverse osmosis was recommended to treat drinking water.

Water monitoring for uranium was suspended in the mid-'90s.

At peak, there were as many as 20 pits located in Billings, Golden Valley, Slope and Stark counties. North Dakota's uranium production totaled 592,300 pounds, according to records kept by the now-obsolete U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

In all, the PSC reclaimed 440 acres at seven sites and spent about as much to do it as the mines ever earned.

In Lorge's case, he figures the Fritz Mine yielded 10,000 pounds of uranium over four or five years of operation. The going price was between $6 and $10 a pound, back then.

He said the government never did pay Manidon the discovery and mining bonuses it promised.

The Manidon Co. extracted uranium by burning the coal right in the seam and then loaded the uranium-rich ash on railroad cars at Belfield, where it was shipped to uranium mills.

Others - like Kerr McKee - hauled the lignite to a kiln, where it was burned to ash and then shipped.

There were two kilns in the southwest, one near Bowman, the other at Belfield on the railroad siding, where uranium-bearing lignite was burned 24-7.

Lorge said he can remember the red dust that blew over Belfield when the radioactive ash was loaded onto railroad cars.

"There must have been ladies who had their wash out on the line, but no one ever complained," he said.

Manidon Co. sold out to another company in 1963, and uranium mining peaked a couple of years later.

By 1968, a decade after Manidon started up, uranium production ended in North Dakota. The boom was over partly because of an over-supply and because the nuclear energy industry was slow to start.

Some around Bowman did complain in later years about the after-effects of the Kerr-McGee uranium kiln between Rhame and Bowman.

One farmer, who reported glowing sheep and hair loss, lost 2,500 sheep to molybenosis, a sometimes fatal disease that he claimed was caused by the uranium kiln's effect on plant life, a claim that was later proven true.

At Belfield, dirt from the uranium kiln was used to backfill foundations of buildings in town, including a school addition.

When uranium breaks down, it creates "daughter" products, including radon, a health-harming gas.

The Belfield school recorded abnormally high radon readings and appealed to the federal government for help.

In the late '80s, a suction and exhaust system was installed in the Belfield school to draw radon out of the building.

For years, the State Health Department and the Department of Energy talked about a massive clean up program at the two kiln sites, removing hundreds of thousands of acres of soil for disposal.

Landowners protested the inconvenience, and health experts estimated that the multi-million-dollar clean-up might prevent 1.15 deaths from cancer in 1,000 years.

In the end, the health department recommended against the state spending $1.7 million, its 10 percent share.

Anheluk said there are five other families in Belfield in which a family member has Crohn's, a big number in a town of 880, she thinks.

Besides Crohn's, she believes a higher than average number of people get sick with or die of cancer in town, too.

Dana Mount, senior environmental engineer with the health department, said there's no documented cancer cluster around Belfield.

North Dakota is second in the nation for high radon levels, linked to lung and other cancers.

Killingbeck said there's a 63 percent probability that any home in the state has higher than recommended radon.

It's likely no one will ever know whether the three Anheluk children - Jerica, Toby, 16, and Jude, 21 - have their health, if not their lives compromised because of their cattle grazing near the old uranium mine.

The younger kids take 23 pills every day and are learning to cope with Crohn's disease.

Jerica's tall for her age and plays basketball and volleyball.

She has sweet manners, too.

When asked, "How do you feel?" she says, "I'm OK, how are you?"

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at scoop@ndonline.com or 888-303-5511.)