From the Fort Collins Coloradoan (Bobby Magill):
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in July issued a report describing the environmental impacts of several in situ leach uranium mines in Wyoming and New Mexico. The report doesn’t cover Colorado because the federal agency doesn’t have jurisdiction over uranium here. In Colorado, Utah and a few other states, the state government has authority over uranium. The report found most of the in situ mines’ operations would take at most a small toll on the groundwater, depending on specific geologic conditions unique to each site. The report did find, however, the mines’ impact on deep aquifers could be large depending on site-specific conditions. A 2008 Colorado law, HB 1161, requires companies doing in situ leach mining to clean the mine’s contaminants out of the groundwater once mining is complete and leave the water in the same condition in which it was found. Solution mining has been used in Texas and Wyoming for decades, but many of the mines have been cited by state environment departments for a slate of violations. One of those came as recently as Dec. 8, when the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality cited Cameco Resources for failure to clean a chemical leak, or “excursion,” at its Highland Uranium Project near Glenrock…
“The regulations are more strict now,” said [Bill] Chenoweth, former geologist for the now-defunct U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Grand Junction, adding that mines are able to completely cleanse the groundwater of any contaminants, just as HB 1161 requires. “If they spend enough money in flushing and recycling the water, they can do it,” he said. “It’s all a matter of economics.”[…]
Black Range Minerals and Geovic Mining have their sights set on mostly private land near Keota and Grover in an area that was the site of uranium exploration in the 1980s in Weld County near the Pawnee Buttes. Geovic Mining, a Denver-based company whose primary business is a cobalt mine in Cameroon, is holding its breath waiting for Powertech to move its Centennial Project through the regulatory hurdles imposed by a 2008 state law. The law, HB 1161, requires companies operating an in situ leach uranium mine to ensure no contamination is left in nearby groundwater once the mine shuts down. Geovic also is waiting for the price of uranium – currently about $45 – to increase enough to justify a new mine…
Like Geovic, Australia-based Black Range, which owns property northwest of Keota, is waiting for the right moment to make its next move. “The project’s sitting idle at the moment,” said Ben Vallerine, exploration manager for Black Range. “We haven’t secured the land we need. We’ve got some leases from the federal government, and we have to do a plan of operations to complete that leasing process.” He said Black Range has secured about 35 percent of the land it needs for a uranium mine. Black Range’s land sits near federal land in the Pawnee National Grassland, but U.S. Forest Service spokesman John Bustos said the agency is not analyzing any uranium leasing proposal for the grassland and no leases have been granted. The Forest Service denied leases for in situ leach uranium mining operations on the Pawnee National Grassland near Keota in the 1970s and 1980s “because of concern for rehabilitation of aquifers in the formation containing the uranium,” according to a 1997 Forest Service environmental impact document for the plan that currently governs how the grassland is managed.
Here’s a look at the current state of uranium mining in Colorado along with some history, from Bobby Magill writing for the Fort Collins Coloradoan. From the article:
With the third-largest uranium reserves in the country behind Wyoming and New Mexico, interest in uranium exploration in Colorado in recent years before uranium prices fell has been staggering. “In 2005 and 2006, 10,000 mining claims were filed on federal land in Colorado,” said Vince Matthews, Colorado State University geologist and director of the Colorado Geological Survey. “Then, in 2007 alone, another 10,000 were filed.”
Uranium was first discovered in Colorado in 1871 near Central City in Gilpin County, but the mother lode of hot ore was to be found more than a decade later in western Montrose County. The Uravan mining district, centered on a wedge of canyon country between the Uncompahgre Plateau and the Utah state line, encompasses hundreds of uranium mining claims…
A cycle of boom and bust around Uravan – formed from the names of the elements uranium and vanadium – followed, first with the radium boom of a century ago, then a vanadium boom of the 1930s and ’40s, a uranium boom in the 1940s and another uranium rush during the Cold War…
Congress approved a program in 1972 to cleanup the mill tailings beneath homes across the [Grand Junction], and it soon realized health hazards from radioactive tailings weren’t limited to Mesa County. Another federal program during the next two decades cleaned up uranium mill tailings in Durango, Fruita, Palisade, Gunnison, Naturita and Rifle…
The biggest uranium deposit in the state was found in Jefferson County in the 1940s, where 17 million pounds of the ore ware extracted until the mine there closed in 2000. The Cochetopa mining district near Gunnison produced 1.2 million pounds of uranium, while less than 500,000 pounds were produced from a few mines in Fremont County. A uranium mill still operates in nearby Canon City.
Just west of the Pawnee Buttes in Weld County, Wyoming Minerals Corp. built a uranium project near Grover – 35 miles east of the Centennial Project – in the early 1980s to test technology called solution mining, or in situ leach uranium mining…
There are now more than 90 active uranium prospects and 35 active uranium projects statewide, according to state statistics. Powertech remains in the permitting process for the Centennial Project, and the state will kick off a formal rulemaking to ensure in situ leach mines, such as the one proposed by Powertech, conform to a new state water quality reclamation law in early 2010…
Energy Fuels Resources Corp. recently scored the support of Gov. Bill Ritter in its proposal to open a new uranium mill – the first of its kind in decades in the United States – in Western Colorado’s Paradox Valley, west of Naturita. The mill, opposed by environmental groups, still must receive approval from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.