Uranium is being mined near the Grand Canyon as prices soar and the US pushes for more nuclear power

The largest uranium producer in the United States is ramping up work just south of Grand Canyon National Park on a long-controversial project that has been largely dormant since the 1980s.

The work is unfolding as global instability and growing demand are driving uranium prices higher.

The Biden administration and dozens of other countries have pledged to triple nuclear power capacity worldwide as they fight climate change, ensuring uranium will remain a key commodity for decades as the administration offers incentives to develop next-generation nuclear reactors and new policies. focuses on Russian influence on the supply chain.

But as the U.S. pursues its nuclear energy potential, environmentalists and Native American leaders remain fearful of the impact on communities near mines and factories in the West and are demanding better regulatory oversight.

Producers say uranium production today is different from decades ago, when the country rushed to build up its nuclear arsenal. Those efforts during World War II and the Cold War left a legacy of death, disease and contamination on the Navajo Nation and in other communities across the country, making any new ore development a hard pill to swallow for many .

The new mining at the Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim entrance will take place within the boundaries of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukv National Monument designated by President Joe Biden in August. The work was allowed to continue because Energy Fuels Inc. had valid existing rights.

Low impact without risk to groundwater, is how Energy Fuels spokesperson Curtis Moore describes the project.

The mine will cover just 6.8 hectares and will operate for three to six years, producing at least 2 million pounds (about 907,000 kilograms) of uranium – enough to supply the state of Arizona with carbon-free energy for at least a year. electricity, he said.

“As the global outlook for clean, carbon-free nuclear energy strengthens and the U.S. moves away from Russian uranium supplies, demand for domestic uranium is growing,” Moore said.

Energy Fuels, which is also preparing two mines in Colorado and Wyoming, has produced about two-thirds of the U.S.’s uranium over the past five years. In 2022, it was awarded a contract to sell $18.5 million worth of uranium concentrates to the U.S. government to help build the country’s strategic reserve in case supplies could be disrupted.

The ore extracted from the Pinyon Plain Mine will be transported to Energy Fuels’ facility in White Mesa, Utah – the only such facility in the US.

Amid growing demand for uranium, a coalition of Native Americans testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in late February, asking the panel to pressure the U.S. government to revise outdated mining laws and prevent further exploitation of marginalized communities to prevent.

Carletta Tilousi, a longtime member of the Havasupai Tribal Council, said she and others have written numerous letters to state and federal agencies and met for hours with regulators and lawmakers. Her tribe’s reservation is in a canyon near the Grand Canyon.

“We have participated diligently in consultation processes,” she said. “They hear our voices. There is no response.”

A group of hydrology and geology professors and nuclear watchdogs sent Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs a letter in January asking him to reconsider permits granted by state environmental regulators that cleared the way for the mine. She has not yet responded and her office declined to answer questions from The Associated Press.

Lawyers for Energy Fuels said in a letter to state officials that reopening the permits would be an improper attempt to circumvent Arizona’s administrative procedures and rights protecting permit holders from “such politicized actions.”

The environmentalists’ request followed a plea weeks earlier from the Havasupai, who said mining at the base of Red Butte would endanger one of the tribe’s most sacred sites. This landmark, called Wii’i Gdwiisa by the Havasupai, is central to tribal creation stories and also has significance for the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni peoples.

“It is with heavy hearts that we must acknowledge that our greatest fears have come true,” the Havasupai said in a January statement, reflecting on concerns that mining could harm water supplies, wildlife, plants and geology on the land. could affect the entire Colorado Plateau.

The Colorado River, which flows through the Grand Canyon and its tributaries, is vital to millions of people in the West. For the Havasupai Tribe, their water comes from aquifers deep beneath the mine.

The US Geological Survey recently worked with the Havasupai Tribe to investigate contamination possibilities, including exposure through inhalation and ingestion of traditional foods and medicines, processing animal skins, or absorption through materials collected for face and body painting.

Legal challenges aimed at stopping the Pinyon Plain Mine have been repeatedly rejected by the courts, and top officials in the Biden administration have been reluctant to offer their opinions except generally on efforts to improve consultation with Native American tribes.

It marks a new front in an ongoing battle over energy development and sacred lands, as tribes in Nevada and Arizona battle the federal government over lithium mining and the construction of renewable energy transmission lines.

The Pinyon Plain Mine, formerly known as the Canyon Mine, was permitted in 1984. Because existing rights were retained, the mine was effectively operated legally, despite a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region by the Obama administration. in 2012.

The U.S. Forest Service in 2012 reaffirmed an environmental impact statement prepared years earlier for the mine, and state regulators signed off on air and aquifer protections over the past two years.

“We work extremely hard to do our work to the highest standards,” Moore said. “And it’s disturbing that we’re being vilified like this. The things we do are backed by science and the regulators.”

The regional aquifers that feed the springs at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are deep — about 1,000 feet (304 meters) below the mine — and separated by virtually impermeable rock, Moore said.

State regulators have also said the area’s geology is expected to provide an element of natural protection against water migrating from the site into the Grand Canyon.

Environmental assessments carried out as part of the permitting process have concluded that the mine’s operation will not impact visitors to the national park, residents of the area or groundwater or springs associated with the park. Still, environmentalists say the mine raises a larger question about the Biden administration’s willingness to pursue policies favorable to nuclear power.

The U.S. Department of Commerce under the Trump administration released a report in 2019 describing domestic production as essential to national security, citing the need to maintain the nuclear arsenal and fuel commercial nuclear reactors to produce electricity to generate. At that time, nuclear reactors supplied almost 20% of the electricity consumed in the US

The Biden administration remains the course. It is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar modernization of the nation’s nuclear defense capabilities, and the U.S. Department of Energy on Wednesday offered a $1.5 billion loan to the owners of a Michigan power plant to rebuild the shuttered facility restart, which would be a first in US history. US

Taylor McKinnon, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said pushing for more nuclear power and allowing mining near the Grand Canyon “makes a mockery of the administration’s environmental justice rhetoric.”

“It’s literally a black eye for the Biden administration,” he said.

Using nuclear power to meet emissions targets is a tough sell in the western US. From the Navajo Nation to the Ute Mountain Ute and Oglala Lakota homelands, tribal communities have a deep-seated distrust of uranium companies and the federal government, while abandoned mines and associated pollution persist. be cleaned up.

A complex of mines in the Navajo Nation was recently added to the federal Superfund list. The eastern edge of the reservation is also home to the largest radioactive accident in American history. In 1979, more than 350 million gallons of radioactive and acidic slurry spilled from a tailings retention basin, contaminating water supplies, livestock and downstream communities. It was three times the radiation released in the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania just three months earlier.

Teracita Keyanna of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association got choked up during her testimony before the Human Rights Commission in Washington, D.C., and said federal regulators proposed keeping contaminated soil on site rather than removing it.

“It’s really unfair that we have to deal with this and that my children have to deal with this and later my grandchildren too,” she said. “Why does the government feel like we are disposable? Were not.”

There is bipartisan support for nuclear power in Congress, but some lawmakers who come from communities ravaged by contamination are standing in their way.

Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri said during a January congressional meeting that lawmakers cannot discuss expanding nuclear power in the U.S. without first addressing the effects nuclear waste has had on minority communities. Bush pointed to her own neighborhood in St. Louis, where waste remained from the uranium refining needed for the top-secret Manhattan Project.

“We have a responsibility to fix our mistakes — and learn from them,” she said, “before we risk subjecting other communities to the same exposure.”

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Montoya Bryan reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Associated Press writer Walter Berry in Phoenix contributed to this report.