I think we went too far. I'm pretty sure that the turnoff for the Grand Canyon was NORTH of the I-40!
Wait...isn't this the old U.S. Highway 666?
I don't care if that sign says 191, were turning around. Now.
Church Rock alongside the U.S. 191 near Monticello, Utah
Okay, now, where were we...First we went to the old nuclear weapons site, Rocky Flats, on the west side of Denver, then to Naturita to hear about their work to preserve the icons of their uranium extraction past, and then on to Moab to see how Moabites are trying to clean up decades of uranium extraction and processing along the Colorado River.
The Orphan Mine Headframe Prior Being Torn Down
A little farther (okay, a few hundred miles farther) down the Colorado River is the icon of the American West, the Grand Canyon. During the Cold War, uranium mining occurred in and around the canyon, and along with the uranium mining on Navajo and Hopi land, left a mixed legacy for uranium extraction in Northern Arizona. In January of this year, the Obama Administration pulled public land around the canyon from use for mineral extraction. Up until this point, the debate over whether or not to mine the land had been ongoing in some form or another since the late 1980s, much to the displeasure of environmental advocacy organizations and mining consortia alike.
Here is a video from Eight, Arizona PBS out of Arizona State University (Go Sun Devils!) discussing the pros and cons of uranium extraction near the Grand Canyon. One important thing to note is that the industry representative, Pam Hill, mentions that she was a former employee of Energy Fuels Nuclear. This is not the same Energy Fuels I mentioned in the Pinon Ridge post, but the two are very closely related.
General Land Office 200th Anniversary Commemoration Conference
Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a conference on public lands management hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder's Center for the American West and the Public Lands Foundation. The purpose of the conference was to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the General Land Office (GLO), which oversaw westward expansion throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. The GLO lived on until 1946 when it was merged with the much younger U.S. Grazing Service to form the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). During this conference I had the opportunity to meet with a multitude of current and former land managers including former directors of the BLM, chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service, and the current Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. I found it very interesting that certain members of the U.S. Department of the Interior, namely Secretary of the Interior Salazar and former BLM Director Bob Abbey jokingly remarked that the Department of the Interior was in addition to it's land management duties the "Real" department of energy. While the comment was tongue-in-cheek on the part of both Secretary Salazar and Director Abbey, it reflects how important America's public lands are for energy production. The BLM for instance manages 256 million acres (about 2 1/2 Californias) of land and around 700 million acres (about 30% of the total area of the United States) of subsurface mineral rights, most of that in Alaska and west of the Great Plains.
Of all the publicly owned lands, BLM land is the most important to energy because of the multiple use mandate established by the Federal Lands Management Policy Act (FLMPA) in 1976. Multiple use means that the BLM has to balance all of the various scientific, historical, ecological, archaeological, and human uses of the land. In Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico, multiple use includes uranium mining. Along a stretch of the Colorado-Utah border, a large amount of BLM land sits on top of the Uravan Mineral Belt, a source of uranium rich Carnotite ore. The BLM's Uncompahgre Field Office, which manages part of the Uravan Mineral Belt, records 25 uranium exploration projects either on or adjacent to BLM land. Given how many different projects are going on in this area of the American West alone, it is interesting to note that none of the former public land managers participating in panels at this conference brought up the issue of uranium on public lands. While issues over uranium mining may not be as high profile as oil & gas issues, they are certainly not dead either. Just ask the people who live on Colorado's western slope.
