Uranium Frenzy in the West

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Bottom line: Wall Street won't invest because nuclear power is too expensive, too risky, too complex, takes too long to bring on line, and can't compete with other energy sources once massive tax-payer subsidies are removed from the equation. (Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner have, however, proposed more than $500 billion in subsidies to double nuclear capacity in the decades ahead.) But those limitations will not dampen the radioactive rush in the West, especially since the planet's limited supply of uranium is ever more valuable on international markets—which means mining and processing uranium ore will continue to defile some of our wildest landscapes.

Flimflam capitalism: Speculation makes the hearts of wannabe tycoons pound harder. Back in the 1950s, prospectors would begin a mine, bulldoze an airstrip, fly in potential investors, swing a Geiger-counter over ore that supposedly came out of that bit of ground and… well, you know how it ends, but, strangely enough, investors often don't. Scam or legit, there is money to be made simply in building up the infrastructure of speculative exploration.

Even dry holes can be lucrative for a short while. Economically impoverished and vulnerable locals welcome the temporary jobs and merchants want to sell to all those move-in drillers, heavy equipment operators, and miners. Local politicians, eager for access to the pie, will cut deals to open doors. In Utah, for example, two top legislators signed lucrative "consulting" contracts to pave the way for a developer to get the necessary water for a nuclear power plant and formal permission to build it somewhere in the state. Critics charge that the legislators also tried to get generous taxpayer subsidies to sweeten the pot.

The first phase of a mining boom is the rush to stake claims. In Colorado last year, 10,730 uranium mining claims were filed, up from 120 five years ago. More than 6,000 new claims have been staked in southeast Utah. Throughout the West, claims are up tenfold. Next comes exploratory drilling. That means carving roads across the wildlands to bring in equipment. Drilling teams will have no trouble financing their road-building adventures, since profits for the metals mining industry are up 1,400% in the past six years.

Such speculation is as basic to industrial capitalism as the raw materials that power its machinery. Witness the inflated fantasies of the recently punctured housing bubble. Even if the mines never materialize, the run-up will leave lasting scars, especially as the new uranium boom follows on the heels of an oil and gas boom, a desperate effort to wring every last drop of fossil fuel from the depleted reserves of the West.

Bulldozers first, four-wheeled locusts next, then dust in the wind: Like some devastating one-two punch, mineral development and motorized recreation are essentially guaranteed to create the next Great American Dustbowl. First, uranium prospectors bulldoze more roads to add to the thousands of miles of roads already carved across open Western lands in previous booms. Next, a horde of Off-Road Vehicle (ORV) riders take to them, causing more erosion and bio-degradation.

ORV ownership has expanded exponentially throughout the West and most of our deserts have already become weekend ORV theme parks. Those tens of thousands of untrained riders are barely regulated. Enforcement is a joke. They go where they wish and do what they please. Ecological devastation from the exploration and extraction cycle, already substantial, is aided and abetted by the inevitable crush of ORVs. As these riders braid new tracks through lands that otherwise qualify for wilderness protection, they may lose their standing forever, while already compromised wildlife habitats are further fragmented.

The thin and fragile soils of our deserts, barely held in place by a delicate microbiotic crust, have already been overgrazed and overrun. It can take twenty years to grow that protective microbial mat, but one spinning tire can destroy it in one second. If you live to the east of us, expect to see the dust under that "crypto" crust released into your air, as high desert winds churn it up and carry it away. Recent research concludes that snowpack in the Colorado mountains is melting earlier and faster due, in part, to dust blowing in from Utah and Nevada that covers the snow fields and absorbs heat. The Dustbowl, of course, is another old story. Unlike the dust storms of the 1930s, however, our Western dust may have the added charm of being radioactive.

Guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment: If you live downwind from us, you might want to pay a little attention to what's happened to Navajos living on a 26,000 square mile reservation that spans the Four Corners region where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. For three generations now, they have been breathing uranium-laden dust from mine tailings and drinking from wells tainted with minute traces of radioactive mining waste. From 1946 into the late 1970s, more than 40 million tons of uranium ore was mined near Navajo communities.

More than a thousand mines were abandoned on the reservation. For every 4 pounds of uranium extracted, 996 pounds of radioactive refuse was left behind in waste pits and piles swept by the wind and leached into local drinking water. In addition to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Navajo miners who sickened and died of cancer and respiratory illnesses—it's hard to say just how many, since nobody in power bothered to keep track—epidemiological studies reveal a terrible ongoing toll. Navajo children living near the mines and mills suffered five times the rate of bone cancer and 15 times the rate of testicular and ovarian cancers as other Americans. Exposure to uranium has also been linked to kidney damage and birth defects.

Recent research indicates that, in addition to being toxic and radioactive, uranium is also an endocrine disruptor and can have a devastating effect on health—even when only scant traces are present in the air we breathe or the water we drink. Uranium's ability to bind to and deceive hormone receptors evidently interferes with cellular communication that governs metabolism, cell production, organ development, and gland function. Dr. Stephanie Raymond-Whish, a Navajo scientist, believes, for instance, that uranium exposure is one explanation for sky-high rates of breast cancer on the reservation.

No wonder, then, that the Navajo Nation imposed a ban on uranium mining and milling on Indian lands in 2005. Despite the ban, Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI) is trying to open four major mines near the Navajo communities of Crownpoint and Churchrock. HRI specializes in mining uranium by pumping water and bicarbonate into uranium-bearing strata, then withdrawing the solution and recovering the uranium in it.

Assisted by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, the Navajo tribal government has been resisting, insisting that it, and not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees all aspects of the nuclear energy industry, has the authority to keep the company off tribal lands. The tribe fears that the kind of injection-leach mining that HRI plans to do will consume vast quantities of scarce water, while contaminating precious groundwater used for drinking by people and livestock. At just such an operation in Grover, Colorado, groundwater radioactivity was found to be 15 times greater than before mining began.

Nor will mining be limited to Indian lands. As with oil and gas exploration, the likelihood is that nothing will turn out to be off limits. Claims for the right to mine within five miles of Grand Canyon National Park, for example, have jumped from 10 in 2003 to 1,100 today. The Grand Canyon Trust, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club just blocked a mine proposal for nearby Deer Tank Wash because flashfloods could easily carry left-over radioactive materials down into the park. As applications pile up, however, conservationists will be hard pressed to keep ahead of the onslaught of challenges to the Grand Canyon's integrity. So if you want to see this national treasure, fill up this summer on $4-5 a gallon gas and come soon, before a dusty haze envelops the area, dump-truck traffic becomes the norm, and the wildlife flees.

Virtually all of southern Utah's famed national parks and monuments—Arches, Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Natural Bridges, and Grand Staircase Escalante—are surrounded by potential uranium deposits. Unlike the first uranium boom of the atomic era, which took place in sparsely populated and remote canyons and mesas, the new boom is likely to go wherever uranium is found. To take but one example, the Powertech Uranium Corporation is opening a mine just ten miles from the sprawling city of Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University.

Here's the reality of the new West—like the old West: The boom will suffer no limits because speculators and mining companies enjoy so few restrictions.

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