Uranium mine set to reopen

Jul 2 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Cyndy Cole The Arizona Daily Sun, Flagstaff

A mining company has cleared all federal hurdles and now plans to begin mining uranium this fall about 10 miles south of the Grand Canyon's South Rim.

The approvals to mine near Red Butte, south of Tusayan, pre-date a 2009 Interior Department decision to put about 1 million acres of federal lands on either side of Grand Canyon National Park off-limits to new uranium mining.

This could be the only uranium mine to open south of the Canyon, in a location that generated controversy 25 years ago.

Environmental groups last week issued statements strongly opposed to the idea, and at least one conservation organization plans to sue in an attempt to block mining.

Other lawsuits to halt reopening the only current operating uranium mine north of the Grand Canyon failed.

REFINED IN BLANDING, UTAH

A company called Energy Fuels Nuclear proposed opening the so-called Canyon Mine in 1984, and it installed a headframe and some infrastructure. But it set aside those plans by 1992, after uranium prices crashed.

The plans were litigated in the federal courts in the early 1990s, when tribes lost their bid to stop the mine on arguments it would interfere with religious beliefs related to the landscape.

Now a new company proposes to start where the old one left off by drilling a shaft to extract ore that is found in tube-shaped deposits.

Because the National Park Service has refused permission to allow the ore to be trucked through the national park along Highway 64 to Cameron, the ore instead would be trucked south through Flagstaff, then north on Highway 89 to Blanding, Utah. There it would be turned to yellowcake, later refined several times more and ultimately sold to nuclear power utilities domestically and internationally.

As for haul routes, the state's environmental quality agency, its highway agency, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have "no requirements" and the EPA is "only concerned with radon emissions at the mine," the Forest Service states in the plans.

The Navajo Nation is opposed to uranium hauling through tribal lands.

300 JOBS CREATED

Plans are to replace an old pond liner at the Canyon Mine, expand a pond and to get started mining this fall, said Harold Roberts, an executive vice president at Energy Fuels Resources Corporation, which bought portions of Denison Mines in a deal set to close Friday.

"Later this year we hope to sink the shaft," he said Tuesday.

The Denver-based company, with a parent corporation in Canada, is proposing to open two more mines on the Arizona Strip north of Grand Canyon as well, and to remediate one that has long sat vacant.

The only mine now operating in northern Arizona, Arizona 1 mine 35 miles southwest of Fredonia, has perhaps a year or two worth of ore to mine and then will close, Roberts said.

Energy Fuels Resources Corporation expects to employ more than 300 people in mining operations across the west, from digging ore and hauling at uranium mines to ore-processing in Blanding, Utah.

APPROVED BACK IN 1986

Conservation groups condemned the Kaibab National Forest's go-ahead, allowing miners to get started at the Canyon Mine.

Both Roberts and conservationists pointed to the same U.S. Geological Survey study -- one to show mining has been safe in northern Arizona, and the others to show it hasn't.

The hefty study was much debated.

It found that the voluminous Colorado River wouldn't likely be polluted by uranium mining, but that there was a 13 percent probability that small underground pools of water could be affected north of the Grand Canyon, adding heavy-metal contamination to springs or streams.

The Kaibab didn't consider all the facts, the Grand Canyon Trust said.

"The Forest Service review ignores significant new evidence from the Orphan, Kanab North and other uranium mines that show how soil and water contamination can occur well beyond the mine sites," Roger Clark, Grand Canyon program director at the Grand Canyon Trust, said via a statement. "We are also disappointed that the review team did not include experts from the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service."

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club also opposed the plans.

"We now know uranium mining threatens permanent, irretrievable damage to Grand Canyon's watershed, yet the Forest Service pretends we've learned nothing in the past quarter-century," said Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigns director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "This dangerous proposal should never have been approved back in 1986, and rubber-stamping it a generation later is an insult to the public, American Indian tribes and Grand Canyon National Park."

The Center is planning to litigate.

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.