Will sacred Mt. Taylor be mined for uranium?

It would be tempting to say that the current battle over resumption of uranium mining at the sacred Mount Taylor, which sits atop one of the richest known uranium ore reserves in the country, is just the latest in this long and shameful saga. But it is not alone. There are stories like this everywhere in Indian Country — Bears Ears would be just one more example.

Mt. Taylor, located in the southwestern corner of New Mexico’s San Mateo Mountains, is a pilgrimage site sacred to at least 30 tribes including the Navajo Nation, the Hopi, the Zuni, and the nearby Laguna and Acoma Pueblos. Even the National Trust for Historic Preservation lists Mt. Taylor and points out on its website that new attempts to mine uranium there “may contaminate or impair the primary water source for Acoma Sky City (pictured), the oldest inhabited community in the United States,” in addition to the threats posed to the mountain itself from uranium ore extraction operations.

The existing uranium mine site on Mt. Taylor has not been operational since 1990 but got its first standby permit in 1999. The 1993 New Mexico Mining Act allows mines to remain inactive in standby status for a maximum of 20 years before reclamation must be required. Instead, on December 29, 2017, the New Mexico Mining and Minerals Division issued a Return to Active Permit for the Mt. Taylor uranium mine, owned by Rio Grande Resources (RGR).

The decision to allow resumption of uranium mining is based on spurious economic claims, say the groups fighting the decision, including the broad coalition, MultiCultural Alliance for a Safe Environment ( MASE) and Amigos Bravos. They face an uphill battle. Writes Earthworks: “Much of the land in question is still governed by the 1872 Mining Law, which permits mining regardless of its impact on cultural or natural resources. Many local tribes fear the development of uranium resources in the Mount Taylor region would destroy the culturally and spiritually significant land.”

Read the rest of the story at Beyond Nuclear International.

Supreme Court will hear Virginia uranium mining case

Virginia Uranium, the Canadian company that wants to extract uranium from a deposit in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, has tried for years to argue its case on merit. And failed. That’s because there are no environmental, health or, at present, even economic arguments to support lifting the Commonwealth’s moratorium on uranium mining.

But corporations eager to plunder and profit do not readily throw in the towel. Instead, the company has taken its case to the US Supreme Court where it will argue the issue from a legal perspective.

Virginia Uranium has the support in this venture of the lapdog federal regulator, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which never fails to be on side with its corporate masters. (Technically the NRC answers to Congress, not the nuclear industry, but the agency annually assesses and collects fees from the industry totaling about 90 percent of its annual budget authority.)

The specifics of the Supreme Court case will debate who actually has the jurisdiction to decide whether the Virginia Uranium project can go forward. The federal government will make the case that it falls under the terms of the Atomic Energy Act. This would give the NRC the power to oversee all matters related to radiation risks posed by the mine — the core of the state’s reasoning in opposing it.

The state will argue that the Coles Hill site is on privately owned land. This would mean the mine site falls outside the jurisdiction of the AEA which is aimed at regulating mines on federal land.

Read the rest of our story on Beyond Nuclear International.

Berkeley, CA becomes second US city compliant with UN Ban Treaty

Berkeley has become the second city in the US to proclaim itself ‘in compliance’ with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, following Takoma Park, Maryland, who made a similar declaration last month. Takoma Park received their ‘certificate of treaty compliance’ at a small ceremony in the United Nations building on May 14^th.

Through the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act of 1986, Berkeley has maintained one of the strongest municipal prohibitions against the nuclear weapons industry in the country for over thirty years, prohibiting any work on nuclear weapons from taking place within the city, and barring the city from contracting with, or investing in, any company working on nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, Berkeley has a complicated legacy that leads many to doubt its sincerity as a nuclear-free city. It played a foundational role in the original development of nuclear weapons, with the discovery of plutonium in Berkeley labs in 1941. The University of California continues to be closely connected to both the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, key facilities in the ongoing production of nuclear weapons in this country.

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May 18, 1979 - Karen Silkwood verdict

As reported by PEACEbuttons.INFO:

May 18, 1979: A jury in a federal court in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee established a company's responsibilty for damage to the health of a worker in the nuclear industry. [More.]

MOX got nixed but plutonium pits could be next

The US Department of Energy has told Congress it plans to cancel an unfinished plutonium fuel fabrication plant in South Carolina that has already cost $7.6 billion and would have cost $50 billion more to complete. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the department instead wants to use the facility to manufacture pits, the plutonium cores that trigger nuclear weapons. The MOX plant (pictured) would have combined surplus weapons grade plutonium with uranium from irradiated reactor fuel to make mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX. The plan was the result of a joint agreement with Russia, originally signed in 2000. Russia ceased implementation of the MOX plan in 2016 as US-Russia relations cooled. No US reactors are designed to use MOX fuel. The 34 tons of plutonium originally designated for MOX will now be diluted with an inert substance and disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The WIPP plant suffered a serious explosion and release of radioactive materials in February 2014 that exposed workers and forced a prolonged closure, costing at least $2 billion. All in all, a story of a colossal waste of money. More