I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
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Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Looking toward Mt. Taylor (Photo by grace tee/Flickr)
A controversial plan to open an old uranium mine on Mt. Taylor, near Grants, New Mexico, is now facing a new obstacle. The Colorado legislature just passed a law forbidding an expansion or increase in operations at uranium mills until they clean up existing sites their operations have contaminated in the past. The Cotter Uranium Mill, just a little over a mile south of Cañon City, Colorado, is owned by the same company that owns the Mt. Taylor mine, and is the designated recipient of future Mt. Taylor uranium ore. But the new law raises doubts that the mill will be able to accept the ore.
Under the new legislation, which Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter still has to sign, the mill won’t be able to increase or expand operations until it cleans up existing environmental problems.
“This is not unexpected,” John Hamrick, vice president of milling at Cotter, told the Cañon City Daily Record. “This bill will prevent us from processing the Mount Taylor ore.”
Uranium mining and milling occurred in New Mexico from the 1950s through the early 1980s, when the industry closed up shop in the state. The Mt Taylor mine is a conventional, underground site that was filled with water and shuttered. New Mexico mills were also closed.
Now, an increase in uranium prices has led to numerous proposals for new uranium mining in the state, which brings the promise of jobs to economically depressed communities. But its a sore subject. Many families cite past uranium mining for an increase in disease, through either direct exposure to work in the mines or through the impacts of environmental contamination caused by the mines.
The contamination continues to be a problem; 137 of the 259 old uranium mines have never been restored. Some activists say that all the old mines should be properly cleaned up before new mining is even considered and are skeptical of claims that new technologies render mining safe today.
Proposed mine is within a Traditional Cultural Property
Compounding these concerns is that much of the proposed new mining is on or very near Mt. Taylor, which is a sacred site to some American Indian tribes, including the Navajo Nation, the Hopi, the Zuni, and the nearby Laguna and Acoma Pueblos. Those five groups successfully petitioned the state to permanently designate Mt. Taylor an official Traditional Cultural Property in 2009. That designation doesn’t give the tribes veto power over mining proposals within the almost 400,000 acre expanse of land, but it does give them an avenue to provide more substantive input on development decisions that come before the federal and state agencies in charge of permitting.
The owner of the Mt. Taylor mine is Rio Grande Resources, a wholly owned subsidiary of the same company that owns the Cotter Mill–General Atomics Corporation. The environmental record of General Atomics at the Cotter Mill is cause for concern in New Mexico, said Eric Jantz, attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.
“Since General Atomics acquired the Cotter Corporation in 2000, the company has had over a hundred violations of federal and state environmental laws,” Jantz told The Independent. “This demonstrates a pattern of willful disregard for environmental law, which is a real concern for the community.”
General Atomics has not responded to The Independent’s request for a reply to this allegation.
Colorado mill is already a Superfund site
The Cotter mill opened in 1958, and from that year until 1978, radionuclides and various heavy metals were discharged into 11 unlined tailings ponds.
Those ponds were replaced in 1982 with two lined ponds, but it was too late to stop the contamination. The mill was designated a federal Superfund site in 1984, due to excessive uranium contamination of both the groundwater and the soil under the mill as well as under the surrounding community. It has also been cited for violating a laundry list of Colorado environmental regulations.
There is only one mill in the United States that is currently operating–the White Mesa Mill in Utah, which has its own environmental problems.
The lack of milling facilities makes the resumption of widespread conventional mining problematic. Building a uranium mill has huge upfront costs–in the hundreds of millions of dollars–which makes the new Colorado law a big problem for Mt. Taylor ore as well as any other ore that is mined from a conventional mine in the state. Currently, about a third of the known uranium resources in New Mexico are owned by another company, Hydro Resources, Inc., which is planning a combination of both conventional and in situ leaching mines.
The use of insitu leaching mining shouldn’t be affected by a lack of mills, as the uranium acquired under that process is drawn up after being dissolved out of the ore while in underground aquifers. With conventional mining, the ore comes straight from the earth and has to be processed in a mill to extract the uranium.
