N.M. company joins search for uranium

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Add the Uranium Company of New Mexico to the latest wave of mining operations applying for exploration permits around Mt. Taylor. The mining company, which has ties to an Australian firm, filed its application with the New Mexico Mining and Minerals Division in December.

Indian tribes in the area and the grassroots groups they've joined forces with are urging the state not to grant the permits. Still living with the environmental fallout of past uranium mining booms, they fear that another would only bring them more of the same.

Public comments are due Friday.

Fueled by a renewed global interest in nuclear power, uranium prices started to skyrocket in 2003. In the past few years, seven companies have filed for exploratory permits around Mt. Taylor alone. Uranium Company makes eight.

"We've been waiting since 1987 for uranium prices to go up enough so we could start exploring," said Karl Meyers, who identified himself as the general manager of the company, which has held continuous title to the land since 1968.

The site, about 3,000 acres according to Meyers, sits in the extreme southwest corner of Sandoval County, a few miles north of the Navajo Nation's Tohajiilee Chapter and west of the Laguna Indian Reservation. In its application, Uranium Company lays out its plans to drill 10 holes each 600 feet deep and five inches wide to find out exactly how much uranium lies underneath. According to a 2006 prospectus designed to attract investors, there could be more than 4.5 million pounds at 12 percent U3O8 (a relatively stable combination of uranium and oxygen).

Uranium Company hopes to start drilling by April.

On its own, one exploration project isn't too much for the surrounding tribes to worry about.

"It's not about any one exploration project," said Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist for the Southwest Research and Information Center, a non-profit group out of Albuquerque helping local tribes keep the uranium industry off of Indian land.

"Each one of these is a relatively small operation ... but when you start looking at the cumulative effect," he said, "all of a sudden it starts to add up to a major impact."

Local miners are still filing for restitution under the federal government's Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which extends eligibility to people who worked in a uranium mine anywhere in the country prior to 1971. Others blame their chronic ailments on residual radiation from nearby mining sites still waiting to be cleaned up decades after they've been abandoned.

Today's mining and exploration companies say modern technology and tougher government regulations would spare them a repeat. But tribes aren't convinced.

In 2005, the Navajo Nation Council approved the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act, which bans all uranium mining on Navajoland. This past December, at the first Indigenous World Uranium Summit, co-hosted by the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, grassroots groups from some half-dozen countries ratified a declaration opposing all uranium-related activity on "native lands."

For the local tribes that hold Mt. Taylor sacred, mining the area would also constitute a desecration of the site. Unfortunately for them, the mountain sits on one of the most historically prolific uranium belts in the country.

With all the renewed interest in the area, they're waiting on Gov. Bill Richardson to take a firm position on uranium mining in the state, one they hope opposed to it.

But the companies pulling the state in the other direction aren't just well funded. They're multinational.

Uranium Company is so new it's not even registered with the state yet. But according to Meyers, it's tied to Mineral Energy and Technology, which had its uranium assets acquired by Uranium King an exploration company out of Australia last summer. Western Energy Development, another company after an exploration permit near Mt. Taylor, is owned by Canada's Western Uranium Corporation.

That's not to say the tribes have to look abroad to pick a fight.

Tohajiilee, one of the Navajo Nation's own chapters, passed a resolution in favor of Uranium Company's exploration plans, according to chapter coordinator Nora Morris, who declined to discuss the resolution. Messages for Chapter President Tony Secatero and Lawrence Platero, the chapter's council delegate, were not returned.

Cibola and McKinley Counties, meanwhile, passed their own resolutions supporting uranium mining in general. Their resolutions touted the industry's potential to create new jobs for the area.