Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Do uranium mines belong near Grand Canyon? But what if a dozen or even scores of new uranium mines were leaching uranium radioisotopes into this critical water source? That is what Arizona’s governor, water authorities in two states, scientists, environmentalists, and Congress are all worried about. Should they be? Everybody from mining-industry officials to environmentalists agrees that the Orphan mine is a poster child for the bad old days of uranium mining going back to the 1950s. Today’s regulations and newer mining techniques make such pollution far less likely, industry officials say, though environmentalists vehemently disagree. The question remains: Is Orphan only a vision of the past – or is it a vision of the future, too? The US Southwest may be about to find out. Driven by soaring uranium prices and fresh interest in nuclear power, mining companies have staked more than 10,600 exploratory mineral claims – most of them smaller than five acres – spread across 1 million acres of federal land adjacent to the Colorado River and Grand Canyon National Park, a federal official told Congress in June. Most are uranium claims, though some may be for other metals, observers say....

2 comments:

Larry T, said...

Very refreshingly, the anti-mining NGOs have, according to this CSM article, begun to adjust their perspective regarding the potential "threat" posed by uranium mining in northern Arizona: Initially, Shuey et al. claimed the fact that the low-flow Horn Creek spring (0.1 gallons/minute) with something like 30 ppb dissolved uranium posed a clear and present danger to hikers in the Canyon, not to mention 25 million people downstream of the Grand Canyon National Park. Now the same people, have fallen back quite a bit from their earlier position, and are speculating that if a whole bunch of these springs started putting out 30 ppb uranium at 0.1 gallon per minute, then maybe we'd have a real problem downstream. That position is a distinct improvement -- and is getting closer to the truth of the matter; namely, that there is no real threat to anyone's drinking water from uranium-bearing breccia pipes, or from breccia pipe uranium exploration or mining in northern Arizona.

The original South Rim spring water data can be found online at:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2004/5146/ (the USGS data)
http://public.dirxploration.fastmail.us/ (the Univ. of Nev. Las Vegas data)

And discussion that puts these data into geological and hydrological perspective can be found at:
http://www.dirxploration.com/newsmay2008.html

Frank DuBois said...

Thanks for the discussion and the links.