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…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
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.
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter signed a new law yesterday that puts a cramp in plans to re-open the old Mt. Taylor uranium mine in northwestern New Mexico. The law requires uranium mills, which process the ore from uranium mines, to clean up existing contamination before expanding their operations. The Cotter Mill in Cañon City, Colorado is the intended recipient of ore from new mining at Mt. Taylor by 2014, but company officials says the new law will hamper their plans to take the Mt. Taylor ore.
“This is not unexpected,” John Hamrick, vice president of milling at Cotter, told the Cañon City Daily Record when the bill was passed by the Legislature. “This bill will prevent us from processing the Mount Taylor ore.”
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. Cleanup of environmental contamination has been slow in coming, though, and the company has also been cited for violating a laundry list of Colorado environmental regulations in recent years.
The new law is meant to protect future generations, leaving them a better environment than his generation found it, Ritter said as he signed the bill:
“We should think not about ourselves, but about the generations to come” when it comes to protecting the environment, Ritter said. “It’s incumbent on us to turn this state over to the generation after us and the one that follows in a better way than we found it.”
As The Independent previously reported, 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.
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, since building a uranium mill has huge upfront costs–in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
