Uranium Claims Spring Up Along Grand Canyon Rim
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZ. - Thanks to renewed interest in nuclear power, the United States is on the verge of a uranium mining boom, and nowhere is the hurry to stake claims more pronounced than in the districts flanking the Grand Canyon’s storied sandstone cliffs.
On public lands within five miles of Grand Canyon National Park, there are now more than 1,100 uranium claims, compared with just 10 in January 2003, according to data from the Department of the Interior.
In recent months, the uranium rush has spawned a clash as epic as the canyon’s 18-mile chasm, with both sides claiming to be working for the good of the planet.
Environmental organizations have appealed to federal courts and Congress to halt any drilling on the grounds that mining so close to such a rare piece of the nation’s patrimony could prove ruinous for the canyon’s visitors and wildlife alike.
Mining companies say the raw material they seek is important to the environment, too: The uranium would feed nuclear reactors that could — unlike coal and natural gas — produce electricity without contributing to global warming.
And uranium is in short supply. In recent years, mines closed in Canada and West Africa, yet the United States as well as France and other European countries have announced intentions to expand nuclear power. Predictably, the price of uranium has soared — to $65 a pound as of last week, from $9.70 a pound in 2002.
In the five Western states where uranium is mined in the U.S., 4,333 new claims were filed in 2004, according to the Interior Department; last year the number had swelled to 43,153.
The push to extract more uranium has caused controversy not just involving federal land but private and state land as well. In Virginia, a company’s plan to operate in a never-mined deposit spurred a hearing in the Legislature. In New Mexico, a Navajo activist group is challenging in federal court a license issued just over the reservation’s east border.
Uranium claims are also encroaching on stretches of Western parkland such as Arches National Park, Capitol Reef National Park and Canyonlands National Park, all in Utah, as well as a proposed wilderness area in Colorado called the Dolores River Canyon.
But by far the most claims staked near any national park are in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon, which draws 5 million people a year. The park is second in popularity only to the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.
“If you can’t stop mining at the Grand Canyon, where can you stop it?” asked Richard Wiles, executive director of the Environmental Working Group.
The energy-versus-environment debate is apparent within the Interior Department, which granted the mining claims through its Bureau of Land Management. Among the mining critics is Steve Martin, superintendent of the Grand Canyon park and an Interior Department employee himself. “There should be some places that you just do not mine,” Martin said.
Uranium is “a special concern,” he added, because it is both a toxic heavy metal and a source of radiation. He worries about uranium escaping into the local water, and about its effect on fish in the Colorado River at the bottom of the gorge, and on the bald eagles, California condors and bighorn sheep that depend on the canyon’s seeps and springs. More than a third of the canyon’s species would be affected if water quality suffered, he said.
Martin is not the only one uneasy about potential water contamination. Add to the list the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles, which sells wholesale water throughout Southern California from its Colorado River Aqueduct. “In addition to the public health impacts, exploration and mining of radioactive material near a drinking water source may impact the public’s confidence in the safety and reliability of the water supply,” the district’s general manager, Jeffrey Kightlinger, wrote in March to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.
No one is mining near the Grand Canyon yet, but wooden claim stakes can be spotted throughout the brush-covered plains north and south of the park.
Vane Minerals, a British company, applied last year to start exploratory drilling on seven sites in the Kaibab National Forest, near the canyon’s popular South Rim.
Under current mining law the Forest Service had no choice but to allow the drilling, Regional Forester Corbin Newman testified in March to Congress. The mission of a national forest is different from that of a national park, he pointed out. Indeed, signs at the Kaibab Forest’s border proclaim that visitors are entering the “Land of Many Uses.”
In response to the approval, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club sued in federal court, alleging that the Forest Service didn’t thoroughly investigate the environmental effect of drilling and prospective mining. In April, a judge issued a temporary restraining order until the case could be heard, probably in the summer.
Drilling had already begun near Deer Tank Wash just off a dirt road about five miles from the canyon park’s east entrance. Now, the only signs of that activity are a 6-inch pipe sticking up half a foot from the ground near a large piñon tree, and hay scattered in the mud.
The wash is prone to flooding, said Taylor McKinnon, a public lands advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Would the water from a flash flood go through the bore hole to the aquifer? We don’t know because there wasn’t an analysis,” he said.
Meanwhile, five additional proposals for exploratory drilling have recently been submitted to the Kaibab National Forest, according to Newman. And three old uranium mines near the canyon park are on standby, ready to resume operations.
Many of the companies are based abroad, said McKinnon, so their directors don’t understand the special place that the Grand Canyon holds in this country’s lore: “What if an American company went to drill at Stonehenge?”
But the region is special in another way, said Kris Hefton, chief executive of Vane’s American uranium operation. The uranium is found in “breccia pipes,” contained geological formations that hold higher-grade deposits than elsewhere in the U.S., he said.
Breccia pipe mines can be compact, less than 20 acres in size, and uranium producers say they are among the easiest to restore after mining is done. And because the ore holds so much uranium, it’s cheaper to mine. “They’re not as susceptible if the price drops,” Hefton said, adding that mining can be profitable in the region even if uranium fetches only $20 a pound.
“You won’t have to depend on foreign uranium,” he said. Though higher-grade deposits are found in Canada, and more mines are opening in the next five years, “you never know what the Canadians will do. It just makes sense to protect our industry from a national security standpoint.”
Nevertheless, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has introduced a bill that would withdraw a million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon park from future mining and mineral leases. The bill would not affect the claims already staked if they are found to contain uranium deposits.
And so uranium mining could end up being part of the view at Gunsight Point, a promontory north of the park at the end of a rutted dirt road on public land. There, two striking gorges merge into one, with a dry wash at the bottom of Snake Gulch coming in from the east and Kanab Creek flowing in from the west.
Overlooking the creek are 14 uranium claims, according to an analysis of Interior Department data by the Environmental Working Group. The claims are held by companies such as Energy Metals and Uranium One Ventures, and by an official with Quaterra Resources Inc., which boasts to investors that it is “one of the largest claim holders in the Arizona Strip District.”
On a hazy morning, the canyon is still visible downstream. And Martin, charged with its protection, is apprehensive. His experience with uranium mines is confined to one that actually operated right at the canyon’s edge, grandfathered in because it opened before Congress created the national park in 1919. The U.S. bought the site in 1962, and mining stopped in 1969.
Now the remains of the aerial tram that carried the ore can be seen at the South Rim. Special strips have been placed atop the structure to keep California condors from resting there, to protect them from lightning strikes. And a chain-link fence keeps hikers away from mine wastes.
Elevated radiation has been detected in Horn Creek below, and signs have been posted warning visitors not to drink the water. A National Park Service sign explains to the public that uranium deposits also lie just outside the park.
“What does the future hold?” the note asks, and concludes: “Mines and other industry near parks often bring unforeseen impacts on park resources.”
© 2008 The Los Angeles Times
Nuclear power does not produce enough energy to cover the lifetime energy inputs needed for plant construction, ore mining and processing, and plant decommissioning.
It is the most short-sighted way to boil water ever devised!
It is the most short-sighted way to boil water ever devised!
Well, isn’t that this administration’s specialty? The art of short-sightedness.
Can’t we stall these greedy short-sighted bastards until the next administration gets in office? Nobody in this country who does not have a dog in the hunt wants nuclear anything, including nuclear power. It is insanity. We can’t get rid of our old used up stuff except for weapons of mass destruction. Nuts!!!
YIPPEEEEEEEEE, We’ve already chopped down most of the forests and killed off most of the the widlife, polluted the river and it’s feeding streams. Now let’s go back and take the rocks and build some more friggin atomic power plants. May be some coal there to burn too.
Yeah, the desert rock coal project, they use water to transport it…”smack” homerun…
It just never ends!
Unless we stop it!
No matter how optimistic I can force myself to be, there is little hope of anything changing.
Nothing will change…
UNLESS, we humans suddenly experience extinction, or…
Our species, Homosap’s, the so-called intelligent one, grows up, matures as a species and realizes that we are NOT here for the purpose of seeing how much damage we can do to Earth in the name of MONEY!
No one has even come close to convincing me otherwise, and I AM open to being convinced, that nuclear power generation is a good thing that will work. Why? Because of one word–WASTE! I see no short or long term solution to the problem on nuclear waste. And because more technology is not the solution to all of our problems–it IS the problem–technology will not solve this problem, only create more problems that will call for more technology which in turn will need more technology which will bring about more problems…Well, you get the point. If you don’t believe technology is the problem and not the solution, just read history and / or live long enough to see that technology does not really solve problems, no matter how many computers and computer programs are written!
And messing about with the laws, the courts, etc., in short, THE SYSTEM, as we now know it, will NOT work! The SYSTEM is so hopelessly broken that only we can change it. And it will only be changed via revolution! It matters not how many presidential hopefuls babble on about “change” and “we can do it” and… and… and… and… There are only 2 viable solutions: Either the human species (not race) experiences extinction, and the sooner the better, or we stand up and bring about changes through revolution and rebellion!
I admit both are extreme choices, but as long as we live by our arrogance and selfishness, we are doomed! Tell me–I’m listening–what other choices do we have if we are to protect and serve Earth!
Earth first in all things and thoughts, deeds and decisions!
Grow Up Humans! Or it’s the BIG X!
Thanks for listening to my rant.
Stargeezer.
http://www.darkskyinitiative.org
For peace, economic and social justice, and human rights. www.carolmillercongress.com
how many years must pass in order to realize that the most abundant fuel source we have is ~150 million km miles away? our planet literally revolves around it, and yet we continually fail to understand the sun’s importance to the life cycles of the earth.
have we forgotten, since the 1980’s, that nuclear waste disposal is an impossible task?
have we forgotten, since the 1990’s, that burning coal puts holes in the ozone?
Yes PETE, most have forgotten it or deny it.
I don’t believe WE have forgotten, I do believe that those ‘in charge’ do not care about how we feel or about the environment at all. Their focus in on money and power, that’s it.
One small way we are trying to bring attention to our unrest is to buy absolutely nothing the last day of each month, and to display a bandana on vehicles, clothing, backpacks, etc. It is a way to express our abhorrence of the way this country, in particular, is conducting itself. Hope you join us.
What comes out of a smokestack at a coal fueled power plant?
In Europe, they trap the residure from coal stacks and use it for fuel in nuclear power plants. Here Bush has relaxed the EPA rules and that poison billows right up into our atmosphere and or, into surrounding neighborhoods and farmlands.
I think this is a good idea. It is certainly not a river any more. It really is just a catchment basin now–and given the GW forecasts, maybe not even that for much longer. It looks like we will have two new canyons, Glen and “Mead”, for the RVers to move over to, so I say let’s have at it–let’s put it to its new and highest best use.
Go West young man (but be sure and bring your water with you.)
Nuclear power has just about the lowest lifecycle GHG emissions of any power source developed by man. If you melt the steel and kiln the limestone and concrete for the structures, and refine the uranium with nuclear produced electricity, it goes even lower.
Here is my optimistic projection for the 22nd Century: There will be thousands, maybe over ten thousand nuclear reactors all over the world. High speed electric rail and fast nuclear ships will have replaced air travel, homes will be electrically heated, and personal transportation will be powered from hydrogen or batteries. The hydrogen will come from water and produced either using nuclear electricity or directly in a nuclear plant. Desalination will provide clean water where needed.
Enriched uranium reactors will decline or may even be phased out in favor of “fast” reactors or other advanced fuel cycles that leave little or no high level waste. Uranium mining may decline as small amounts of unenriched uranium or DU leftover from today will power many plants. The new plant designs will prove safe, and there will not be any calamities. Except for making a little clean steel, coal and biofuels and the mess and air pollution they make will be a thing of the past, and oil will just be used to make stuff. And CO2 in the atmosphere will be declining towards pre-industrial levels. No sulfur or smog in the air, no mercury in the fish…
If it doesn’t happen in the US, its already happening elsewhere. Yes, there will be renewables big time in places like Portugal with small populations and little heavy industry, and places like the North Sea shallows where the wind blows almost all the time. But we won’t have to ruin the scenery off Cape Cod, plant the prairies with switchgrass and hemp, and upset world wide food prices and pollute the Mississippi and Gulf with (energy negative) corn based ethanol production.
Quoting from the article:
“Nevertheless, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has introduced a bill that would withdraw a million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon park from future mining and mineral leases. The bill would not affect the claims already staked if they are found to contain uranium deposits.”.
BIT TARDY, I am, at posting; I know I am, but I’ll still post this thought anyway.
If the bill won’t “affect the claims already staked”, “if they are found to contain uranium deposits”, then this means that the bill won’t stop the uranium mining claims ‘already staked’ from being approved and the associated plan(s) from being implemented, which, in turn, logically (and clearly enough) anyway, means to be a corporatist (akin enough to fascist) govt; like the U.S. kind, such as when it’s protecting Big Pharma patents that are overall bogus, but which also have been and continue to be used against people suffering from life-vs-death conditions; that is, to either bleed every penny they can out of us, or else kill us, sooner rather than later, when there’s nothing left of us to be profitably bled anyway.
And these greedy bastards sure do seem to know how to count [pennies], regardless of their extreme and relatively extreme wealth, such conditions! We’re inundated with psychopaths; there are “plenty” among govt officials, including so-called [sci]entists, but not only all of them, those two parties, for there are also the mental and physical “health” care “professionals” and industries. And they all “complement” the MIC (military idiot, aka industrialist, complex) and the either Big Oil corporations, or else those like Halliburton, which aren’t Big Oil, per se, but make a large proportion of revenues from servicing Big Oil, which means that I include the latter when I otherwise speak of only ‘Big Oil’. They all do know how to count pennies, but haven’t yet made their way up into the dollars; if they did, then they’d backtrack and correct themselves, and FAST.
After all, there is NO way that fair mutual accords are more expensive than violent disaccords are! Sure, some junior “rocket scientist” will come up with some contrary claim, but won’t be able to answer and maintain answering when “under the gun”. “Bring it on”, I figure; for I know to be right and figure that I still might not have determined what all of the ways I’m right about or in are, so challengers will help me to have to think of the yet unrealised; about which I am strongly confident will not cause any change in view on my part. Iow, the [only] way to live is one that [is] Just, that we respect “Do not unto others what we don’t want done unto ourselves” and to “Do for others what we’d want done for us”, without which we really have NO place at all within [society]; for society is as opposed to individual, hence opposed to the selfish, for society requires [reciprocity].
It’s all simpleton stuff, but even simpletons are rocket scientists compared to evidently MOST Westerners. We are in trouble.
Anyway, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva seems to have “let the cat out of the bag” (another “dot”) while apparently having hoped to not be doing this. After all, if he was truly honest, truly caring about the environmental-human health concerns, and [intelligent] (enough for his mind or views to be minimally worth a can of Baked Boston Beans anyway, around $1 or so), then the bill would also not allow claims that’ve already been placed to continue to be valid, not officially, anyway; because they’re invalid views in all terms (except the gangster kind) than govt, imperialist, …, West elitist “interests”.
It’s “funny” how they’re interests are always none of their own business, always being of someone else’s sovereign business, affairs. The imperialist West’s elites have national interests abroad and the ‘national’ is constituted of the ‘me, myself, and I’ (and ‘”screw” everyone else’) syndrome. (And they probably do think “screw” in also sexually perverted terms, since they seem to have a particular fondness for forcing children into child prostitution, slavishly).
Some people are taking the Roman Empire too far! Trying anyway. It “helped” to ensure the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, from which MOST Western churches derived, and I’m RC, officially, pre-before-I-could-decide on this, but while I also am on the side of Jesus [of Nazareth], the fellow of around 2,000 years ago, The Nazarene guy; liking his philosophy, and his way of not explaining most parables, which was to emphasise our need to [think], hence to [humanise] us, to help us understand how to become more humane, Just. Well, even apostle Peter f*cked up, and Jesus, somehow intuitively knew this’d happen and foretold the event; supposedly or purportedly, anyway. Don’t ask me what the exact truth of the latter is; I wasn’t there, and am not God. True Christians are also athiests in some respects, and this helps true Christians of [intellect] to be able to understand that athiests are not represented by the again mostly false representations in the West.
That’s about all the West has for illustration, falsehood, after falsehood, repeatedly; they have to f*ck up everything. When evil stops in another part of the world, the West proves its dissatisfaction by peaking the injustices AGAIN.
Bla bla bla, and bla some more.
In the US, 3/4 of the energy consumed by electric power plants is unused and dumped in the environment as waste heat. 1/2 to 3/4 of this waste heat could be utilized in industrial processes (cogeneration) to cut overall energy consumption and reduce the impact of heat on ecosystems.
Central power plants are also a problem because they make people dependent on elites. Instead we should make the plants small and disperse them around about to the communities. This gets rid of the highvolt grid (10% losses) as well. Old coal plants should be replaced with smaller capacity coal cogeneration plants, owned by local municipalities, with solar-thermal and/or wind supplement according to the climate, in many areas producing 100% of power.
It was revealed today that Darth Viper personally blocked investigations/reports on the cause behind the 2001 California Electricity Crisis. The cause was the deliberate market manipulations by his greed-stricken energy cronies. This US vice president has perpetrated more crimes than the sum of all his predecessors’ including Gagnew’s.
Do we want to have a “Nuclear Future” with the spawn of Darth Viper in charge? We never know when they’ll initiate a “false flag” operation on the nuke plants in our back yards. We see the writing on the wall today. We can reject all that and demand local scale renewable cogeneration, that’s over 75% efficient and which limits elite control.
Stargeezer, AMEN brothaman, ~speakit!!~
Is NOTHING Sacred? We’re just talking about the largest geographical feature on Mother Earth and they want to carve it up into URANIUM MINE PARCELS? As though this “parcel” is some small brown-paper-and-string thing, rather than th earth we live on.
I suppose no one has stopped to think about what this will do to the Colorado River, or the millions of people and American crops are grown in Central CA, Where did you think that unnaturally large broccoli come from? Those apricots? Almonds? Tomatoes? STRAWBERRIES?
Yes, in the name of energy, even poisoning our children’s food supply is unobjectionable. Never mind that side dish of cancer. Those children will get a FINE education and grow up to fix the problems we’re leaving, right?
This is America!
This article claims that uranium is in short supply. This is not true.
The price of uranium got so low that essentially all prospecting stopped for 20 years. For a long time the future looked dim for nuclear power and thus the need for fuel. The governments of the US and Russia flooded the market with diluted excess nuclear weapons material.
There are vast reserves of uranium elsewhere in this country as well as offshore. There is no need to mine near the Grand Canyon.
Bill
Western South Dakota was declared a “nuclear sacrifice zone” by Pres. Nixon during the uranium boom of the 70’s. Now we are scarred by thousands of abandoned uranium mine sites releasing toxic dust and radioactive particles into our air and water.
Cleaning up just ONE of these abandoned mine sites is estimated to cost a BILLION dollars, and thousands of these sites make the landscape look like the famous “badlands”.
Nuclear power is an economic scam, as well as an environmental disaster.
As long as we see the Earth as just a big store of stuff we want to use up as quickly as we can, environmental degradation will continue to accelerate. We need to remember that we and our cities are part of the larger ecosphere. We are guests of Gaia as long as she permits us to be, and nothing more. Let’s be delightful ones for a change, and stop ransacking and raping our hosts. We should convert over to minimal environmental impact energy-transforming machines (e.g. bicycles) as quickly as possible. Most of our energy use is overuse and can not be qualified as necessary.
There is no EPA anymore so do what ever you want as long as the politicions gets their kickback it is open season 24/7. Every place around the world the USA has its influence turns to shit, so why not the USA as well. I can see in the next 10 to 15 years the average life span of Americans drop off even more. With no pensions or SS why live to a ripe old age under a bridge or one step up from that in a trailer.
About 11.9 million tons of uranium tailing and contaminated soil were left near Colorado River three miles northwest of Moab, Utah…which at the closest point reach to within 1000 feet of the river.
DOE studies suggest that ground water from the mill tailing is flowing under the Colorado River and impacting groundwater beneath the preserve.(Desert News, March 2,2005).
The government has started moving the contaminated soil away from the river which will take many years to accomplish. In the meantime the water supply of CA, AZ and NM from Colorado River could soon be contaminated. Pray that it has not already happened.
What is the threshold?