Uranium mining: Good or bad?
It’s an emotional issue, critics insist

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The uranium industry and its allies say a new licensing system the federal government is working on will help wean the country off foreign oil. Opponents of the proposal say it will only heighten the health and environmental risks posed by an industry already getting away with too much.

They weighed in during a public hearing hosted by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at the Hilton Albuquerque Thursday evening.

The NRC called the hearing to gather public input on its plans for a generic environmental impact statement (GEIS), a tool that would allow the commission to speed up its licensing of new mines by pooling all the common knowledge it has of modern mining into one report. The public, however, turned the event into a virtual debate on the entire industry. For over two hours, a queue of speakers grabbed the microphone to talk about everything from the hundreds of jobs a new uranium boom would bring their impoverished communities to the radioactive fallout many of those same communities are still struggling with after the last boom.

Industry allies accused their opponents of turning what ought to be a rational discussion into an emotional one.

“You bet it’s an emotional issue when you’ve got your family members dying around you,” said Paul Frye of the Office of the Attorney General for the Navajo Nation. To the industry’s great displeasure, the tribe banned uranium mining on Navajoland in 2005.

The NRC and the mining industry speak of “streamlining” the licensing process. A company that wants to start in situ leach mining or open a uranium mill today must give the NRC an environmental impact statement, an involved report on how the mine or mill will affect the environment. If the NRC had a GEIS, it could ask for a less involved — and speedier — environmental assessment.

‘Streamlining’
To Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist for the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), “streamlining” was merely “a euphemism for reducing regulation ... and x-ing out the community.”

Although environmental impact statements don’t automatically trigger public hearings, said Gregory Suber, branch chief of the NRC’s Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs, they almost always do. Environmental assessments can also involve public hearing. But practically, he said, they often don’t.

With a GEIS, he conceded, “the potential for fewer public meetings is there,”

But just because a GEIS will give the NRC the option of asking for fewer impact statements, Suber insisted, doesn’t mean the commission will always take it. If the NRC ever decides a license needs more site specific information, he said, the commission can always ask for it.

But why would the NRC go through the trouble of preparing a GEIS, Shuey asked, if it had no intention of asking for less site specific information? The very purpose of a GEIS is to cut down on the amount of site specific information companies will have to provide. That’s how they’ll save time.

As its name suggests, the GEIS would pool whatever information the NRC considers “generic” about all mining and milling sites into one study. Opponents worry about what the NRC will file under “generic.”

“There is tremendous site-specific information at each of these sites that needs to be considered,” said Shuey. To think that the NRC can apply the same standards to different sites and make the licensing process safe, he added, “that’s just fallacious.”

In situ leach mining involves using the water flowing through an aquifer to strip underground rock of its uranium. No two sites are exactly the same.

“When you go to each of those communities, the groundwater’s different,” said the Sierra Club’s Robert Tohe. “One size does not fit all.”

“There is nothing generic about our environment,” added Leona Morgan of the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, a grassroots group that’s been fighting the industry’s attempts to mine McKinley County for more than a decade.

“The only common (in situ leach mining) issues that I’m aware of are not very good for ... the environment,” said Michael Jensen of Amigos Bravos, a New Mexico group working to restore the state’s rivers.

The NRC’s goal, said William von Till, bureau chief for the Division of Waste Management and Environmental Protection, is to restore the ground water at mine sites to their original conditions.

“That’s a worthy goal,” said University of New Mexico chemist Steve Cabanis, “but it doesn’t seem to be borne out by history.”

By von Till’s own admission, in fact, it hasn’t happened once.

Culture concerns
To some Navajos in the room, it was an affront to their very culture.

“Us Navajos say don’t mess with anything if you don’t know how to make it right again,” said Eliza Pinto.

“Our Navajo people say how do you know what it’s like underground,” added Anna Frazier, of Dilcon, who works with Dine Citizens Against Ruining our Environment.

“You may be scientists,” she told the panel of NRC officials, “but you really don’t know.”

The industry painted the issue as a matter of national security.

“If America is to reduce its reliance on foreign energy supplies,” said George Byers of Neutron Energy Inc., it will have to lean more heavily on nuclear energy.

But reactors need uranium. And to assure an adequate supply , he said, the industry needs faster licensing.

For the industry’s allies, faster licensing means more jobs sooner.

“We are in dire need of jobs in our community. People are selling drugs just to make money,” said Danny Charley.

A Crownpoint resident, Charley hopes to make some money off industry himself. A Texas-based company wants to mine on his land. If it does, he could make easy money off the royalties.

But if it’s supply the industry wants, said SRIC’s Paul Robinson, it need look no further than the country’s nuclear stockpile, which adds up to more than all the uranium still in the ground.

Meeting locations
Others attacked the very idea of making nuclear energy a part of the country’s green energy future. Jobs, they said, could be had from developing the area’s other renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

Opponents even chastised the NRC for the way it was gathering public input. The commission’s hearing in Albuquerque was the last of two. It hosted the first in Wyoming. For many, they were too few and to far away from the communities the GEIS would impact. Andrew Campbell, the NRC’s acting deputy division director for environmental protection and performance assessment, said the commission chose Albuquerque for its central location. But most of the companies that want to mine in New Mexico are staking claims in the northwest corner of the state, one to two hour’s drive away.

“They’re not holding meetings in Church Rock or Crownpoint or Gallup,” Shuey said.

Others implored the NRC to extend its deadline for public comment past Sept. 4.

considering extending the deadline and hosting more hearings.