It might have been the tombstone for an industry.

The neatly inscribed chunk of rock 25 miles north of Grants marks the final resting place of about 7 million dry tons of tailings - the finely crushed radioactive leftovers of extracting uranium from rock - from the mill site at Ambrosia Lake.

It’s meant as a warning sign of the 1,850 curies of radon located within the massive pile.

But it’s also a symbol of what’s left of a town that once was - a tombstone for the “Uranium Capital of the World.”

Grants, as the locals are proud to say, isn’t dead. But its role as the uranium capital, as headquarters of a district that mined more uranium than any other in the United States, fell just as the price of the commodity plummeted in the early 1980s.

“We’re talking about bringing them back.”

Rick Van Horn says this on a drive through the old Ambrosia Lake mining site north of Grants. It’s his company, Uranium Resources Inc. of Lewisville, Texas, that has renewed hope among many that Grants could soon reclaim its old title.

URI last month agreed to buy Rio Algom Mining LLC and a mill license from BHP Billiton Ltd. for about $126.5 million in cash.

That includes paying $16.5 million for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to build and operate a conventional uranium mill at the Ambrosia Lake site.

Operating a mill - one that will ultimately be capable of processing 8,000 tons of uranium ore a day - is a necessary key that will allow mining companies to commence work in the area, opening a new door for New Mexico’s long-dormant uranium mining industry. It comes at a time when the demand for clean-producing energy, such as nuclear power, is re-emerging.

Van Horn, the company’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, said the mill and the mines it will service could create up to 4,000 jobs within the Grants Mineral Belt, leaving officials within Grants to harbor dreams of a mining renaissance.

“This is pretty exciting,” said Star Gonzales, executive director of the Grants/Cibola County Chamber of Commerce, whose office is a testament to the area’s mining lineage; it’s also the home of the New Mexico Mining Museum.

“We do view this as a huge economic boost.”

Grants, a town named after the three brothers commissioned to build a railroad there, from the late 1800s saw its economy shift around livestock, logging and even carrots.

It wasn’t until July 1950, when a Navajo man named Paddy Martinez discovered a conspicuous piece of rock on Haystack Butte, that Grants’ economic potential would be unearthed. That shiny yellow rock was found to contain low-grade uranium, and Martinez’s discovery couldn’t have come at a better time.

The federal government in 1947, on the eve of the Cold War, created the Atomic Energy Commission and was seeking new sources of nuclear energy for weapons production, said Jon Indall, a Santa Fe attorney for the Uranium Producers of America.

Martinez’s discovery sparked a flood of mining interest in the region. At least five uranium mills emerged in the area by 1958, according to a brief history of the area provided at the New Mexico Mining Museum.

The AEC became the primary buyer of uranium ore.

“The industry was really as much a child of the government,” Indall said. “They entered into these contracts, and they set up ore-buying stations. They did everything they could, the AEC, to create this industry from private companies.”

Uranium sparked unprecedented growth in the Grants Valley. In 1950, the year of Martinez’s discovery, the town had a population of around 2,200. That would reach 7,000 by 1955 and 10,000 by 1960, according to the local history.

Grants officially was a boomtown.

“I saw the money they were making,” state Sen. David Ulibarri, a Grants Democrat, recalling when he took a mining job with Homestake after his high school graduation in 1967. “One thing I can remember is they were good jobs, and people were happy.”

By 1968, the federal government decided it had gathered enough uranium ore, Indall said. “They went back to the (mining) companies and stretched out those deliveries to keep the industry alive until 1970, when the utilities were to start buying it,” Indall said.

That led to a temporary lull, but the industry sparked again in the mid-’70s as the nation began to focus on nuclear power as an emerging fuel source. Private utilities soon replaced the federal government as the primary buyer of uranium ore, bringing the industry to a new peak.

By 1978, New Mexico saw a record yearly production of 9,371 tons of uranium that was shipped to mills and buying stations, according to a report from the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources at New Mexico Tech in Socorro.

Grants was surging. By 1980, the city’s population swelled to 11,439. The local high school athletic teams - the Grants Pirates - were large enough to compete in the state’s highest division against the big Albuquerque schools.

The local newspaper, the Grants Daily Beacon, featured an atomic symbol by its name above the words in the uranium capital.

The streets of Grants and nearby Milan were filled with a melting pot of personalities and shiny new pickups, some locals say.

“Grants was a pretty fast-moving town. It was one of the most interesting towns anywhere,” said Bill Stevens, 79, who managed the Ambrosia Lake site for Kerr-McGee Corp. through 1979.

On the first Wednesday of each month, about a dozen men who once managed the mines and mills of the Grants area convene over barbecue sandwiches in Albuquerque.

They call themselves the Dinosaurs Club and sit in a dimly lit room, around a large wooden table, talking about stock prices, industry news and, often, the old days.

Milan, one says, was once called “trailerville” for all of the portable housing that existed there for the mining families.

And they were paid well.

Workers in the uranium industry then could earn from $22,000 a year to $75,000 for the most accomplished miners, said Jack Burgess, 70, who managed several mines during that era and now works as an independent consultant for the mining industry.

“Money was flowing,” said Tim Hurley, a mine safety consultant from Albuquerque who managed mines for Kerr-McGee and Ranchers Exploration & Development Co. “They had their pickups, their boats, hunting rifles. You know, toys.”

The boom also spawned a sense of local entrepreneurship in some.

“I have a brother, and he saw these trailers coming in, and they didn’t have washing machines and dryers and all these things,” said Abe Pe¤a, 81, a local historian who has written several books on the history of the region. “He set up all these coin-operated laundries.”

But a confluence of circumstances was to emerge that would bring an end to the industry in the region.

The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pa., caused no deaths, but nonetheless bolstered a perception that nuclear power plants were dangerous.

Overproduction in the Õ70s and Õ80s led to large stockpiles of uranium, and the dismantling of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons reserves added to that, according to the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources report.

Ultimately, it was the diminished market price for uranium that caused the mines and mills of Grants to shut down.

In 1974, the market price for uranium was around $8 per pound. It shot up to around $40 a pound by 1978. But as the market dwindled, the price fell to around $20 a pound in 1982 and even lower into the Õ90s.

By 1989, all conventional underground and open-pit mines in New Mexico closed, according to the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources report.

“When it crashed, it was devastating,” said Gonzales of the Chamber of Commerce.

Pe¤a, the historian, said the local unemployment rate shot up to over 30 percent.

“A lot of foreclosures. A lot of anxiety among people. The miners that came from elsewhere in their trailers by and large left,” Pe¤a said. “You could see hundreds of homes on the market for sale.”

Today, with about 9,000 residents, Grants has diversified its economy, in large part thanks to employment opportunities from two state prisons, Gonzales said. A billboard along the side of the road where vehicles exit Interstate 40 shows a corrections officer welcoming visitors to the area.

But a need remains.

“The job need is great for higher paying jobs. And the (corrections officer) job seems to be very tough, either for background restrictions or just the nature of the beast,” Gonzales said. “There’s a need for more.”

Now, Grants finds itself back in a familiar position, eager to usher in another wave of uranium mining on the verge of a new nuclear age.

The re-emergence comes as that stockpile of uranium has been whittled down, the cost of natural gas increases and the world becomes more aware of environmental drawbacks of generating electricity, said David McIntyre, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The NRC has recently received two applications for new reactors - one in south Texas, another in northern Alabama. They are the first applications for new reactors in 30 years, McIntyre said.

“We’re expecting a number of new applications for up to 32 reactors over the next two or three years,” he said.

With that demand comes a surge in price. The weekly spot price for uranium has ranged from $70 to $140 a pound this year, and it hit $90 a pound last week, according to data from Ux Consulting Co., a Roswell, Ga., uranium consulting and market analysis firm.

And the ground remains fertile with uranium, local industry experts say.

About 350 million pounds of uranium have been extracted from the Grants Mineral Belt, Van Horn said. He and Indall both cite estimates of up to 600 million pounds that remain unmined.

Indall said about eight “fairly substantial” companies and another four or five smaller firms have been staking claims in the Grants area since about 2003.

Many of the old-time miners question whether that much uranium ore exists. Stevens said he looks at such statistics with some skepticism.

“Most people think uranium is a rare element. It’s all over,” Stevens said. “But only in rare circumstances is it concentrated where you can extract it and make a profit.”

But URI hopes to do just that.

The company’s purchase of the Ambrosia Lake site is expected to close by June 1. Van Horn said it will take 18 months to two years to construct a mill on the footprint of the former Kerr-McGee mill at the site.

At the early stages, the company will be able to process 3,000 tons of uranium a day with plans to grow to 8,000 tons a day once the industry gets back into full gear.

While the re-emergence of uranium brings with it the hope of a vibrant economy, some people in Grants are equally cautious about relying too much on an industry that could vacate with a dip in the markets.

“A lot of people have some founded fears of them coming and leaving, not taking care of the community in which they live,” said Gonzales. “We’ve had extensive conversations with these companies and let them know we expect some infrastructure and community support. . . . In another generation or so, it could be played out again.”

But Indall says the uranium industry will stick around for a while.

“We’re not going to be producing 40 million pounds a year in New Mexico anytime soon. But we are going to be producing, let’s say, 10 or 15 million pounds eventually, once they get the mill going,” Indall said. “If you do the math, that’s probably 30 to 40 years that this should continue.”

As a man who knows about history, Pe¤a knows that means another boom for Grants.

“Money does crazy things,” he said. “It’s hard to predict.”

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