by Roger Clark, Grand Canyon Director
For decades, regulatory agencies and mining companies have said it’s safe to mine uranium in and around the Grand Canyon. But accumulating evidence and events are debunking that belief.
This spring, the freshly sunk shaft of Canyon uranium mine flooded with groundwater. Per the mine’s “aquifer protection permit” issued by the state of Arizona, water was pumped from the mine shaft and into the on-site containment pond. But the lined pond was already nearly filled with seasonal snowmelt. The mine’s operator, Energy Fuels Resources Inc., needed to find somewhere else for this excess water to go. Complicating matters, the company reported dissolved uranium levels in the pond at three times the safe drinking water standard.
Soon Energy Fuels started trucking water off-site to a disposal site for radioactive materials and using wastewater evaporation cannons to shoot poisoned pond water into the sky. Witnesses’ photos show mist from geysers of wastewater drifting into the surrounding national forest.
In response, neither the U.S. Forest Service, which originally permitted the mine in 1986, nor the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, established a year later, has fined the mine owner for violating any state or federal regulation. The state agency did require the company to add “particulate matter” to Canyon Mine’s air quality permit to account for the new source of air pollution — essentially giving it permission to pollute.
Both agencies assume that Canyon Mine’s containment pond is sufficient to prevent any risk to ground or surface water. In the past, regulators have said there will be little harm should the mine shaft fill with groundwater.
Energy Fuels has denied a problem exists. Industry experts, such as mining consultant and former federal geologist Karen Wenrich, have testified before Congress that uranium mines near the Grand Canyon are small and “dry” and pose no risk to the underlying aquifer that feeds the Grand Canyon’s seeps and springs. “The water table is way below the level of the [Canyon] mine,” Wenrich said in a recent interview.
A spokesman for Energy Fuels told National Geographic in 2016:
The mining we do here is heavily regulated. There are major controls for water protection, both ground and surface water protection, which basically means that no water can enter or exit the site except through precipitation.
In claiming that there is no evidence of groundwater contamination, the company fails to mention that Arizona does not require monitoring wells for uranium mines. Unlike copper and other types of mining elsewhere in the state, Canyon Mine’s aquifer protection permit requires no monitoring wells. Nor must it comply with the best management practices and compliance measures developed by the Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service for the Grand Canyon uranium mining district in 2012.
Updated conservation measures include commonsense practices such as drilling at least one monitoring well up-gradient and two down-gradient from the mine to detect when dissolved uranium reaches the nearby aquifer. This precautionary measure would trigger emergency action to stop a plume of contamination from spreading to water wells and groundwater-fed springs, before it is too late to prevent irreparable harm.
In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey reported 15 springs and five wells already permanently polluted as the result of uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region. Nonetheless, when the U. S. Forest Service reviewed Canyon Mine in 2012, it ignored this new information and allowed the owners to resume sinking the shaft after the mine had been on “standby” for more than two decades.
The agency saw no need to update or revise the 1986 plan of operations, no need to require monitoring wells, and no need to adopt any other compliance measures.
The regulatory agencies’ willingness to put the Havasupai people’s sole source of drinking water at risk is of grave concern to the tribe. Standing outside Canyon Mine’s security fence in 2015, tribal councilwoman Carletta Tilousi predicted that the mine “is going to contaminate our groundwater source…And when this contamination does reach our home, there’ll be no more Havasupai.”
Earlier this year the Havasupai Tribal Council and community members learned that the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality failed to notify a Navajo community in eastern Arizona that their drinking water contained unsafe levels of dissolved uranium. This example fuels distrust in the same agency that issues aquifer protection permits for Canyon uranium mine, while conceding to industry claims that monitoring wells are unnecessary.
In 1986, the U.S. Forest Service permitted Canyon uranium mine to open within miles of Grand Canyon National Park and in the headwaters of Havasu Creek. The agency concluded that “neither the water quality on the Havasupai Indian Reservation nor Grand Canyon National Park should be environmentally affected either directly or indirectly by the development of the Canyon Mine.”
The agency’s steadfast resistance to change the outdated conclusion is concerning, given what we now know about the harm already inflicted on the Grand Canyon and uranium mining’s devastating effects on nearby tribal lands. In 2005, the Navajo Nation permanently banned all uranium mining and milling on its sovereign lands.
Nonetheless, state and federal regulators are so far standing behind the mining industry’s assurance that Canyon Mine poses no risk to the Grand Canyon or to the Havasupai people who live there.
Why ban uranium mines on public lands that surround the Grand Canyon? One clear reason is because regulatory agencies are prone to capture by the same industries that they regulate. If we cannot count on them to act in the public interest, then the public must act. To fully protect this region, the temporary ban on new uranium mines near the Grand Canyon must be made permanent and monitoring wells should be required at Canyon Mine, where contamination of the aquifer may already be well underway.
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