Travis Chiotti puts a brass tag bearing his name on a hook on the “in” board before heading 1,400 feet down-shaft. It's a pair — the other tag goes in his pocket.
Just in case.
Helmet, headlamp, heavy steel-toed rubber boots, emergency respirator.
Check.
Mining is hard work. Simply moving around is taxing. In these wet tunnels, the slopes are steep and slippery. The mud clings, and calf-deep pools of water can trap a boot.
Underground miners are a special breed. Absent the cacophony of pumps, ventilation air blasting at 140,000 cubic feet per minute, drilling, blasting, and moving rock with diesel skip loaders, the absolute silence is deafening.
And if one’s headlamp battery fails, there's only total darkness.
The miners don’t mind. They like it down there, they told The Denver Gazette one day in May.
Chiotti, a superintendent at the mine owned by a Colorado company, and his crew are at the frontlines in the battle over uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. The outcome of that battle offers all kinds of implications for Americans — jobs, energy, the environment, the economy, national security.
Uranium fuels nuclear power, which, to many supporters, is the only real path to a sustainable, efficient, plentiful and practically carbon-free energy. To critics, its risks, including vulnerable plants and radioactive waste, far outweigh the benefits. Uranium mining is also caught in the crossfire between environmentalists and their allies in government seeking to transition away from "fossil" energy, and the oil and gas industry and its supporters, who argue that a balanced energy portfolio is the more practicable and reasonable path.
At the Grand Canyon, the layers of this battle are more localized.
Native Americans, including the Havasupi, Navajo and Hopi tribes, and environmental organizations, such as the Grand Canyon Trust, vehemently object to uranium mining. They want the Pinyon Plain mine — and every other uranium mine in the region — closed permanently.
They claim that this mine, in particular, threatens to contaminate underground water sources with radioactive materials and arsenic. They are particularly concerned about the deep Redwall-Muav aquifer that feeds Havasu Creek and its spectacular travertine pools on the Havasupi Reservation.
The tribes have good reason to be fearful of uranium mining, said Jody Pasternak, author of the acclaimed 2010 book, “Yellow Dirt - A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajo,” which documents the history and effects of the uranium boom on the Navajo Nation.
In her book, Pasternak said that for more than 70 years, Native Americans in the region have borne the terrible consequences of careless, dangerous, and dismissive government policies and practices around uranium mining and of a near-total lack of cleanup and remediation of radioactive mine waste going back to the 1940s.
Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels Resources Inc, said the mining practices of decades past are no longer applicable or legal. He said the underground uranium lode can today be safely extracted to provide reliable, low-carbon nuclear energy, serving the needs of millions and millions of American households.
When mining is completed, said Moore, the only evidence it ever existed would be a monitoring well.
He also said that the company, which is based in Lakewood, Colorado, has made repeated unsuccessful overtures to the Navajo Nation to assist in cleaning up abandoned radioactive mine waste by hauling it off the reservation to be processed for residual uranium at no cost.
And Moore said fears of contaminating the Redwall-Muav aquifer are groundless.
He pointed to a 35-year record of research, permitting and lawsuits over the mine, in which every decision has been in the company’s favor.
Moore's point is that mining uranium today, under current federal mining and environmental regulations, is nothing like it was in the past.
A 'clean release'
Pinyon Plain assistant mine superintendent Matthew Germansen told The Denver Gazette that the company has mined out and reclaimed eight or nine uranium ore sources in the region — and they've all had a “clean release,” which means they meet or exceed EPA standards for remediation.
Safety is the overriding concern for the company, Germansen said. And it’s not just the safety of the personnel at the mine that’s a priority. It extends to the public, as well, he said.
“We're a family,” Germansen said. “We're going to make sure that yes, they've got the safety practices in place underground, but we also know that they're people and we're people, too. We all got to work together to make sure we're working as a team.”
“We're going to do it right because we want to prove to the public that we can do it safely and that we have done it safely and we're going to do it safely this time,” he added. “Energy Fuels wants to do it so that we have healthy miners and healthy equipment and healthy production, and the regulators want us to do it so that we can also have that health go beyond the fence line to the greater public.”
The Pinyon Plain mine is not the first or the only source of uranium or other minerals like copper around the Grand Canyon, some of which have been mined since the 1950s, when the uranium mining boom, precipitated by the World War II Manhattan Project to create the first nuclear weapon, exploded in the uranium-rich Southwest.
First approved by Arizona and federal agencies in 1986, the Canyon mine, now known as the Pinyon Plain mine, has been at the center of controversy since 2013. It contains perhaps 3 to 5 million pounds of marketable refined uranium oxide.
Battle lines were drawn back in 2008, when then-Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano urged the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to stop the staking of new mining claims around the Grand Canyon, citing concerns about contamination of the Colorado River.
Ken Salazar, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior and a former Colorado U.S. senator, finalized the withdrawal on Jan. 9, 2012, prohibiting new mining claims for 20 years, while preserving existing mines and valid mining claims, one of which was the Pinyon Plain mine.
“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” said Salazar, who is now the American ambassador to Mexico. “Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place and millions of people in the Colorado River Basin depend on the river for drinking water, irrigation, industrial and environmental use.”
Last year, President Joe Biden invoked the Antiquities Act for the fifth time as part of his “America the Beautiful” initiative, which seeks to conserve and "restore" 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. Biden signed a proclamation establishing the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni–Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument on August 8, 2023.
The monument expands on — and makes permanent — the 2012 withdrawal and encompasses almost all of the known or suspected uranium lodes scattered around the Grand Canyon. It comprises 917,618 acres of public lands managed by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service.
“The proclamation continues the Biden-Harris Administration’s unprecedented engagement with Tribal Nations around traditional homelands and sacred sites,” the White House said in a fact sheet.
But the proclamation also said existing mineral rights and mines would be respected and may continue.
In 2012, the Bureau of Land Management said that up to 11 mines could still be developed under the withdrawal, including four already approved, which included the Pinyon Plain mine.
Whether the designation of a national monument changes the potential for further mining is today an unanswered question.
Ore and culture
In addition to worries about contamination, the tribes said the mine, located on public lands on the Kaibab National Forest, interferes with their traditional religious practices and uses of their ancestral lands.
“There are also cultural issues with the mine because it sits within traditional cultural property,” said Amber Reimondo, energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust. “It's an area that's highly significant to several tribes and especially the Havasupai Tribe. Red Butte, which is just a couple of miles away from that mine, is incredibly significant in Havasupai origin stories. They conduct ceremonies there. They collect medicinal plants.”
Talia Boyd, a coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network told The Denver Gazette that the Grand Canyon is a "very significant cultural landscape to the Diné, (and) to many other tribes within the greater Grand Canyon region. The sacred landscape of Red Butte is being desecrated by the contamination coming off of the Pinyon Plain mine.”
“The Pinyon Plain mine is at the base of Red Butte. It's a cultural landscape for the Havasupai Tribe. So, they're not able to access their sacred landscape because this mine is basically right in the front of it. And in order to get to their site, they have to pass by this mine,” Boyd added.
Energy Fuels Resources Inc maintains that the mine — located about 12 miles due south of Grand Canyon Village and about 40 miles southeast of the Havasupi Reservation, and 4.5 miles north of Red Butte — has never been cited for any violations of radiation regulations, including off-premises pollution.
“Radiation monitoring occurs underground, on the surface and surrounding the mine site," said Germansen.
Uranium, war and realpolitik
Uranium mining in the U.S. has realpolitik implications.
To critics like Riamondo, the location of the mine is worrisome because it extracts what she characterized as a minor amount of refined uranium oxide, known as “yellowcake.”
To supporters, domestic enrichment for power plant use in the U.S., something the Biden administration is pushing hard and funding, doesn’t eliminate the need for domestic sources of refined uranium oxide.
Yellowcake is only 0.3% fissile U235 and 97.7% non-fissile U238. To be usable for nuclear power it must be enriched to between 3% and 20% U235, depending on the reactor technology being used.
And that's not to mention the elephant in the room — Russia.
“The United States uses about 40 million pounds (of refined uranium oxide) every year. And so that would be two years to supply 1.57 million pounds of uranium,” Riamondo said. “And then that really changes the cost-benefit analysis when you're thinking about the risk that a mine creates compared to the very little amount of uranium that they can contribute to the overall supply.”
She argued mining uranium ore in the United States is unnecessary because it can be obtained from other sources, including Canada and Australia.
But not from Russia.
Biden signed an act on May 13 barring importation of enriched uranium from Russia beginning in August. Russia previously supplied 14% of imported uranium and 28% of enrichment services in 2021, according to government records.
“Our problem from the federal government's perspective is enriching and converting uranium into the nuclear fuel from its ore status,” said Riomondo. “So, the idea that we need to mine more uranium is just an argument of convenience from the mining industry. We don't need to mine more uranium in the United States.”
Mark Chalmers, president and CEO of Energy Fuels Resources, disagrees. He said there’s enough mineable uranium in the U.S. to power the nation for a century or more, and that domestic enrichment doesn’t eliminate the need for domestic sources of refined uranium oxide.
“We are the largest producer of uranium in the United States. We have been for the last several years,” Chalmers told The Denver Gazette. “We have assets all over the Western U.S. that can come back into production when the markets support that.”
Chalmers said 50% to 60% of the uranium used in nuclear power plants in the United States comes from or through Russia.
To supporters of uranium mining in the U.S., that's a problem on multiple levels. They argue that America's domestic supply is more than capable of delivering the country's need for the mineral, while also eliminating those entanglements with Russia.
Chalmers said nuclear power companies are trying to turn away from getting supplies of uranium from Russia following the latter's invasion of Ukraine.
“They don't want to be a part of funding a war effort, and we know that the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom (came) out recently that they are directly funding the war effort, and Russia is using Rosatom to actually circumvent sanctions,” Chalmers added. “And so we as a company do stand ready to help supply those utilities and provide a good, secure source of domestic uranium for domestic nuclear power plants.”
Uranium in the Grand Canyon
Critics have long raised worries about uranium mining contaminating the waters of the Grand Canyon, but the canyon already has naturally occurring uranium in the waters that is being constantly washed out of the soils, rocks and aquifers of the region, according to reports from the Arizona Geological Survey and others.
A 2011 report by the Arizona Geological Survey examining the impacts of uranium mining on waters of the canyon stated that Colorado River water contains about 4 parts per billion of uranium, and that natural sources deposit approximately 60 metric tons of dissolved uranium into the river each year.
“The seemingly large amount of naturally occurring uranium in the Colorado River (tens of tonnes per year) reflects the large water flux in the river, not unusually high uranium concentration,” said the report. "Colorado River water is consumed by millions of people in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Uranium concentration in river water, at about 4 ppb, has been consistently well below the EPA Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 30 ppb for drinking water."
Another report from 1988 , just as the Pinyon Plain mine was starting up, noted that radium and uranium levels in the Colorado River and all but one of its tributaries, including Havasu Creek, were below EPA standards for drinking water.
A third 2020 study added, “Uranium concentrations in water samples from Havasu Creek ranged from 0.6 to 3.9 μg/L, with a median of 3.2 μg/L. Only dissolved arsenic concentrations at Havasu Creek, with median and 75th percentiles of concentrations of 11.3 and 12.1 μg/L, respectively, were regularly above MCL benchmarks."
The maximum concentration level (MCL) allowed by the EPA for uranium in drinking water is 30 μg/L. Parts per billion is equal to μg/L (micrograms per liter), meaning the EPA maximum is 7.5 times higher than the 4 ppb in the Colorado River as reported by the Arizona Geological Society in 2011.
Moore pointed out that even if uranium from the mine were to get to the aquifer directly feeding Havasu Creek by percolating through permeable rock and bypassing fault zones, the amount of uranium arriving 40 miles away, and perhaps tens of thousands of years from now, would be diluted so much it would be indistinguishable from normal background radiation.
Reimondo insisted percolation might go much faster through undiscovered fissures and fractures in the strata between the mine and the Havasu Reservation, and that risk is too great to take.
Energy Fuels Resources Inc said it plans to mine the ore deposit for two to seven years and will move more than 70,000 tons of rock in the process.
Closure of the mine, according to the plan approved by the state, includes backfilling the shaft with non-uranium bearing rubble and sealing off the upper aquifer using bentonite, a clay that is nearly impermeable to water.
After removal of all surface structures and contaminated soils, the 14-acre site would be replanted with native vegetation. The only things that will remain are two monitoring wells, one belonging to the federal government and the other to EFRI that will be monitored for the next 30 years.
To miners, the potential is staring them right in the face.
Germansen, the assistant mine superintendent, said the breccia pipe uranium has vast amounts of energy in a compact package.
“There’s enough uranium in this breccia pipe to power the entire state of Arizona for a year in a 14-acre parcel,” he said. “Coal mining would be a train that would reach from coast to coast, LA to New York."
"I mean," he added, "the scale is incredible of the efficiency of this mine relative to the efficiency of coal strip mining. There are so many hazards that we know about from coal that don't exist with uranium.”
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