URAVAN, Colo. — This town supplied the uranium that produced the bombs that ended World War II and fueled the Cold War nuclear arsenal. But the three generations that grew up here remember it only as a great place to live.

Soon, bulldozers will scrape the former community of 1,000 off the face of the Earth. Road maps no longer show it. ZIP code 81436 has been reassigned.

Sure, kids used to play in the radioactive tailings from the uranium mines at the remote sandstone-rimmed spot on the San Miguel River. But now, despite what the state considers hazardous, all that lingers in the air is regret and new meaning to the phrase, "You can't go home again."

"It's real sad for me. I can't feature it without those houses. I think we were the first family to move there (in 1936)," said Shirley Vancil. Three of her four children were born there.

Phil Espinoza, who moved to Uravan in 1957 after service in the Navy, called it "a beautiful home with down-to-earth people. Most kids go home to see their hometown. Our kids can't do that anymore."

Debby Ackerson Jackson experiences that deprivation first-hand. "Even after we left, we knew we could go back," she said. "Now it's like they're trying to make it extinct." Jackson was born in Uravan in 1954--one of several hundred born in the Union Carbide mill town.

The last residents left in the late 1980s, half a century after Vancil's family settled here. Today, some former Uravan residents and others are lobbying to save bits and pieces of the ghost town. The old boardinghouse may qualify as a national historic site.

But the recreation hall-church, the commissary, the clinic and the mill buildings are being knocked down. Already gone are the houses of A, B and C blocks, their gardens and fruit trees.

The state of Colorado is requiring UMETCO, the Union Carbide subsidiary responsible for the old company town, to clean it up, said Don Simpson, the state employee responsible for radiation control. That means trucking its low-level radioactive tailings to the rim above Uravan and burying it.

Billions of dollars already have been spent moving radioactive tailings away from former mining centers across the country. Some of those tailings may be brought here.

Dr. Geno Saccamanno, a pathologist in Grand Junction who has studied uranium-related cancer cases for four decades, said much of the tailing removal was unnecessary.