Eyeing Uranium
Company looking at exploration sites

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — With the price of uranium on the rise, Urex Energy wants to take a closer look at exactly what lies beneath the 2,740 acres it recently acquired full rights to on the La Jara Mesa of Cibola National Forest. The Reno, Nev., company has a request to explore the site before the U.S. Forest Service, which will be accepting written comments on the proposal until Nov. 6.

Today's technology and tougher government regulations, Urex officials say, would spare the area from the widely acknowledged environmental fallout of uranium mining operations past. Unconvinced, American Indian groups opposed to the company's designs fear that renewed mining will only further contaminate their land and people and desecrate a sacred site.

What Urex proposes to do, exactly, is drill 21 "exploratory holes," each one six inches in diameter and 1,200 feet deep, on the site, which lies a dozen or so miles northeast of Grants.

Urex believes it has good reason to expect to find what it's looking for. According to the company's Web site, the Grants Mining District produced more than 123,000 tons of U3O8 (a relatively stable combination of uranium and oxygen) between 1950 and 1978, making it one of the most prolific uranium deposits in the United States.

The big question is, how much will it find? The pending exploration, according to the Forest Service, will attempt to confirm the figures prior site owners gathered in the 1980s. Based on that data and the reported deposits of adjacent property owners, Urex President Richard Bachman hopes to find some 20 million pounds of U3O8 in the Brushy Basin that runs through the company's property, maybe twice as much if it digs deeper.

The next two weeks, said Mt. Taylor District Ranger Chuck Hagerdon, will be the public's chance to tell the Forest Service what it thinks of Urex's plans.

"This is their opportunity ... to respond with their concerns," he said.

The Forest Service, meanwhile, will be conducting its own environmental analysis of the company's plans. It's the agency's responsibility to make sure the company's explorations leave no residual radiation.

"In other words, they can't just pull the uranium out and leave it on the ground," Hagerdon said. "They have to clean up after themselves."

While the Forest Service can saddle Urex with mitigation and reclamation demands, Hagerdon said, it cannot actually stop the exploration.

That doesn't mean no one will try. Wynona Foster, project manager for the Eastern Navajo Din Against Uranium Mining, said her group was working with other grass roots organizations to fight Urex's plans.

The company's land lies near the base of Mt. Taylor, one of four sacred mountains for the Navajo that outline their ancestral lands. Mining any of those mountains or their surroundings, the Navajo believe, would desecrate them.

"It's a desecration of our sacred mountain," Foster said, "and any desecration of a sacred site impacts our spirituality as a people."

Foster's group and others equally fear the health and environmental risks.

Like their counterparts across the country, local miners have filed for restitution under the federal government's Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which extends eligibility to anyone who worked in a uranium mine anywhere in the United States for long enough prior to 1971. Fast forward to 1980, when the New Mexico Environment Department found background levels of radon a product of uranium's radioactive decay and, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a proven cause of lung cancer well above average near select Grants-area mines.

Bachman believes those days are over. New technology, together with ever tougher government regulations, make mining for uranium a much safer business today, he said.

As for the desecration of a sacred site, Bachman notes that conventional underground mining the most likely option at La Jara , he said, given what Urex already knows about the site leaves "a very small footprint" on the land.

Besides, Bachman added, there are the economic benefits to consider.

The Cibola County Commission couldn't agree more. Seeing in the industry a promising engine for the "depressed" county's economic revival, it passed a resolution Sept. 11 supporting and encouraging "the granting of state and federal permits needed to facilitate the operation of coal and uranium mines within the County of Cibola." A month later, Urex announced that Milan-based Stewart Drilling would be leading its exploration of La Jara.

Barring any setbacks, Bachman hopes to start drilling the mesa in mid-November. Whatever its fate, Urex is hardly the only company after the area's uranium. According to the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based group opposed to uranium mining, it's but one of more than half-a-dozen companies with some stake on or near Mt. Taylor.

What worries the center's Chris Shuey more than thinking of each stake separately is thinking of them as a whole.

"It's not about any one exploration project," Shuey said.

"Each one of these is a relatively small operation ... but when you start looking at the cumulative effect," he said, of so much activity in such a confined space, "all of a sudden it starts to add up to major impacts."

Shuey's hope is that the Forest Service, while weighing each new request keeps an eye carefully trained on the bigger picture.

"The Forest Service needs to step back and take a holistic look at all this new development," he said.

If it does not, his fear is that the government will as he believes it has in the past let this latest uranium rush get out of hand.

The Cibola County Commission's Sept. 11 resolution calls the county's uranium deposits a blessing. To the groups fighting the mining and energy companies after that uranium, it's been more of a curse.

The Forest Service asks the public to send its comments to Rob Byers, Minerals Program Manager, Cibola National Forest, 2113 Osuna Rd. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1001.