The lie of the “salt-of-the-earth” Sagebrush Rebel: Also, Big Data Center Buildup accelerates; More uranium “mining” in Lisbon Valley; Messing with Maps: housing edition — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

People protesting “federal overreach” by wrecking federal land with $20,000 machines. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

December 8, 2025

🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊

The rhetoric of the so-called sagebrush rebels, members of the Wise-Use movement, the anti-federal land management crowd, public lands ranchers, and the like gives a certain impression: They are salt-of-the-earth folks who are just trying to eke out a meagre living and feed the nation from the hostile land of the Western U.S., and they are doing battle with the coastal elites and moneyed environmentalists who have the federal bureaucrats in their pockets.

There are certainly instances in which this holds true, when a rancher can’t afford pasture of their own, so they rely on the public lands, the public forage, and the taxpayer-subsidized fees to stay afloat. But just as often, these “cowboys” are actually millionaires — sometimes even billionaires — who are accumulating even more cash with the help of the American taxpayers. (And sometimes the public land ranchers and the moneyed environmentalists are one and the same).

Two recent pieces from the folks over at Public Domain — which is run by long-time public lands reporters Jimmy Tobias and Chris D’Angelo — shed more light on this phenomenon. Tobias and ProPublica’s Mark Olalde looked into how ultra-wealthy ranch-owners were benefitting from absurdly low federal grazing fees for High Country News. When you get a chance, check it out.

And it turns out one of those millionaires is high-ranking Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen. Public Domain managed to pry her financial disclosure from the Trump administration and they posted it online. The Land Desk dove into it and followed a few segues to find not only that Budd-Falen and her husband Frank have done quite well for themselves, amassing large amounts of acreage in the process, but that their ranches have also benefitted from federal subsidies — even as they battled the federal government.

As Land Desk readers are likely aware, Wyoming attorney Budd-Falen built a career fighting federal and state land management agencies on behalf of sagebrush rebels and members of the Wise-Use movement. She and her husband, Frank Falen, once argued that a public lands grazing permit actually conveyed a “private property right” protected by the Constitution. She described land-management agencies as part of “a dictatorship” and in the 1990s helped draft a New Mexico county’s resolution declaring that federal and state land-management officials “threaten the life, liberty, and happiness of the people of Catron County … and present danger to the land and livelihood of every man, woman, and child.”

But Budd-Falen has also been a part of the federal land-management bureaucracy. She worked in Ronald Reagan’s Interior Department under James Watt, and then signed on as deputy Interior solicitor for wildlife and parks under the first Trump administration. Now she is the department’s associate deputy secretary, which gives her plenty of power and influence without the need to be confirmed by the Senate. Notably, she headed up a closed-door meeting early this month aimed at giving Utah more sway over national park management.

The financial disclosure, which is missing the usual signature from an Interior ethics official to verify it is in compliance with the law, shows that Budd-Falen’s firm — which is now owned entirely by her husband — continues to represent clients that her department may regulate. She holds stock in oil and gas companies that operate on public land. And she and her husband own millions of dollars worth of land in Nevada and Wyoming.

Here’s a rundown of their land-holdings, per the disclosure:

A ranch in Big Piney, Wyoming, valued between $1 million and $5 million, leased out to a 3rd party for between $50,000 and $100,000 annually. Karen Budd-Falen owns this several-thousand-acre spread with her siblings and says they reinvest the proceeds back into the property

Home Ranch LLC in Orovada and UC Cattle Company LLC in McDermitt, Nevada, each valued at over $1 million, and each with a livestock operation that brings in over $1 million in income annually. Together, Home Ranch and UC Cattle Company cover about 11,740 acres in northwestern Nevada.

The ranches were previously owned by Frank’s parents, John and Sharon Falen. The late John Falen, who once leased nearly 300,000 acres of public land for grazing, was featured in a 1991 Newsweek story titled “The War for the West” due to his conflict with the BLM for requiring him to fence off streams that provided habitat for imperiled Lahontan cutthroat trout. “I never figured I’d be fighting my own government to defend my way of life,” he told the reporter.

But they also relied pretty heavily on the feds for their livelihood. Not only did they pay well below-market rates for grazing on public land, but the elder Falens’ livestock operation received over $1.3 million in USDA subsidies between 1995 and 2015, according to the EWG Farm Subsidy Database.

Home Ranch LLC in Nevada received an additional $580,000 in federal farm subsidies between 2016 and 2024, while Home Ranch LLC and UC Cattle Company — both registered by Frank Falen at the Budd-Falen law office’s address in Cheyenne — received yet another $871,000 from 2022-2024.

Both Home Ranch and UC Cattle are listed as grazing permittees under the BLM’s Humboldt River Field Office. And in 2020, Home Ranch applied for a grazing permit renewal on the 106,000-acre Jordan Meadows allotment, but after a rangeland health analysis found that several categories did not meet standards, the process was canceled. Currently the allotment is listed as active and permitted for 11,720 animal unit-months, with 8,939 suspended AUMS.

L-F Enterprises LLC, a cattle operation and rentals, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, valued at $1 million to $5 million that brings in between $100,000 and $1 million annually. A note on the disclosure says Budd-Falen is a “passive” owner of this entity.

Divide Ranch, a cattle operation covering about 2,800 acres in Wheatland, Wyoming, valued at $1 million to $5 million. There is a lot of loopy stuff in this disclosure: This one has a footnote that says L-F Enterprises grazes cattle on land owned by Divide Ranch, meaning the Budd-Falens are leasing land from themselves.

Five residential properties in Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, each valued between $250,000 and $500,000 that together bring in a rental income of between $50,000 and $165,000 annually.

Two commercial properties in Cheyenne, each valued between $500,000 and $1 million, that together bring in between $115,000 and $1.1 million annually.

And then there are the stocks:

Budd-Falen has held between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Enterprise Products Partners L.P. That’s the midstream oil and gas company that owns and operates the pipeline that spilled about 97,000 gallons of gasoline near Durango, Colorado, last December. The spill contaminated groundwater, forced people to move out of their homes, and is still being cleaned up — recently the EPA joined the effort.

And she held between $15,000 and $50,000 shares in Exxon Mobil Corp., the oil and gas giant that drills on the same public lands Budd-Falen oversees.

I know it’s cliche, but I can’t help but think that this is yet another example of the foxes guarding the henhouse, something that the Trump administration seems to specialize in.

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

The Big Data Center Buildup continues, with larger and larger projects put on the table every day, many in places that one wouldn’t expect. This has sparked a backlash of growing intensity, both among those worried about the centers’ electricity and water consumption, and those who see AI — which is driving much of the growth — as a threat.

This week, a group of more than 200 environmental, social justice, and consumer organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for a nationwide ban on new data centers. It says, in part:

Given the Trump administration’s fondness for AI, and donations from Big Tech, I don’t see the GOP-dominated Congress acting on this.

More news tidbits:

As if to verify the opposition groups’ concerns, the developers of the massive proposed Project Jupiter data center complex near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, recentlyy asked state regulators for permission to generate more power than the state’s largest utility and emit more greenhouse gases than both Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined, according to a Source NM report. The latter figure was so high that many observers assumed it was a typo. But then, given its purported size — developers say the complex will cost $165 billion — and ginormous energy consumption, fueled by methane, it surely will emit a lot of carbon, typo or not.

Then there’s Beale Infrastructure’s Project Blue, the hyperscale data center planned for 290 acres outside of Tucson that was originally slated to be occupied and operated by Amazon Web Services. From the outset, it has run into stiff local opposition, nixing plans to annex it into Tucson so it could use recycled wastewater for cooling. The developers shifted gears, saying they would use air-cooling instead to save water in the very water-constrained area. But that was a no-go for Amazon, which pulled out of the deal last week. Beale says other tenants have lined up in the tech giant’s stead. Meanwhile, the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the data center’s power purchase deal with Tucson Electric Power.

And in the places-you-wouldn’t-expect-a-data-center beat: An obscure UK-based developer has proposed building a $10-billion, 1-gigawatt data center on 500 acres of land it plans to purchase from the city of Page, Arizona.

The purple dot in the green grid marks the approximate location of the proposed data center in Page, Arizona. Local opposition is growing, based on power use, water use, noise, and proximity to Horseshoe Bend.

Details remain sketchy: It’s not clear who, exactly, the developer is; a land-purchase agreement indicates the data center might generate its own power, but no fuel source is listed — and 1 GW is the capacity of a big coal or natural gas plant; they plan to “acquire, develop, construct, and use water in a sufficient quantity and quality to continuously serve the Data Center and Energy Project,” yet don’t say where they would get this water; and the developer said the project would create 500 permanent jobs, which is a rather large staff to oversee a bunch of computer processing units. A majority of the city council has supported the $7 million land sale, which is contingent on a successful feasibility study, and the attendant tax revenues and jobs. That is not a surprise given the economic blow dealt by Navajo Generating Station’s 2019 closure and lower visitor numbers at Lake Powell and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. But local opposition is growing and may derail the plans — if the lack of water doesn’t.

A shuttered uranium mine and its waste dump just below the burn scar left by the July 2025 Deer Creek Fire near old La Sal, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Another uranium project is coming to the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah, though this one is a bit unconventional. Last month, Mandrake Resources signed onwith Disa technologies to use its “high-pressure slurry ablation,” or HPSA, technology to “recover saleable uranium and other critical minerals” from old mining waste piles on Mandrake’s 94,000 project area south of La Sal.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental review of the Disa’s proposal to remediate abandoned mine dumps with HPSA describes the technology as involving …

Because the process is separating uranium and thorium fines from ore, it is considered a form of milling, not mining. And that’s an important distinction, because when you mill uranium ore, you leave behind mill tailings, which must be disposed of according to NRC and Environmental Protection Agency standards. Instead, the “coarse material,” as the waste is described, would be reintegrated into the mine site — even though it may contain radioactive and other harmful materials.

Nevertheless, the NRC granted Disa a license to use HPSA to remediate waste rock at abandoned uranium mines. “The NRC failed to define and regulate the wastes that would be produced by the HPSA process at former uranium mine sites in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act and NRC and EPA regulations applicable to the wastes from the processing of any ore for its uranium content,” said Sarah Fields, of Uranium Watch.

Also of concern is water use: Disa says it would obtain water from offsite, trucking it in at volumes between 10,000 and 40,000 gallons daily. Most likely this would come from a nearby municipal water supply, but it’s not clear which municipality that would be for the Mandrake/Lisbon Valley project.

Mandrake originally acquired and staked hundreds of mining claims on federal and state lands in the Lisbon Valley to extract lithium. But when its drilling samples showed high levels of uranium — and when lithium prices crashed — the Australian company switched gears, or perhaps just broadened their scope. The firm’s website still refers to the land-holdings as its “Utah Lithium Project.”

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

This is a pretty cool tool released by the U.S. Census Bureau a little while back. It shows how many housing units were added (or lost), along with the percent change, from each state, county, town, and even census tract between 2020 and 2025. Assuming it’s accurate, it could really help inform discussions about housing supply and demand, about the drivers of the housing affordability crisis, and whether land-use regulations and NIMBYism are really shutting down housing construction.

Check it out here and play around with it a little. Here are some screenshots of more detailed views of Phoenix and Durango.

Might good come from the NREL name change?: Maybe, but also plentiful skepticism about scrubbing of ‘renewable energy’ from name of laboratory by President Trump’s team — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

December 2, 2025

Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.

But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?

It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.

“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.

Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.

“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”

The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.

Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.

A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”

See: “Jimmy Carter’s overlooked Colorado nexus” Big Pivots, Jan. 2, 2025.

Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”

Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.

Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”

That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.

In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.

In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.

Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.

“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.

He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.

“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.

Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.

In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing.

See: “Climate change is a product of progress, not an existential crisis.”

Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.

“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”

And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.

“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”

Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.

“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.

“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”

The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best

The big data center buildup: An AI server farm tsunami threatens to overwhelm the West’s power grid and water supplies — Jonathan P. Thompson (High Country News)

Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 25, 2025

This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

In early November, Texas-based New Era Energy & Digital announced plans to build a “hyperscale,” meaning massive, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County, New Mexico, the epicenter of the Permian Basin oil and gas drilling boom. The campus will be so big, and use so much power, that, if and when it is built, it will come with its own nuclear and gas power plants, with a mind-blowing combined generation capacity of about 7 gigawatts. That’s like piling the West’s largest nuclear and natural gas plants — Palo Verde and Gila River, both near Phoenix — on top of one another, and then adding another 800 megawatts. That kind of power could electrify something like 5.3 million homes, though these power plants’ output presumably will all go toward more pressing requirements: processing movie streaming, doomscrolling, social media posting and, especially, AI-related activities. [ed. emphasis mine]

Despite the enormity of this proposal, it has received very little news coverage. This is not because anyone is trying to keep it secret, but rather because such announcements have become so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning every new one. New Era’s hyperscale server farm and others like it are still a long way from generating and then devouring their own electricity. But even if only a fraction of the current proposals succeed, they will transform the West’s power grid, its landscapes and its economies as significantly as the post-World War II Big Buildup, when huge coal plants and hydroelectric dams sprouted across the region to deliver power to burgeoning cities via high-voltage transmission lines.

Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best

In fact, this transformation is already underway. A new report from the nonprofit NEXT 10 and University of California Riverside found that, in 2023, data centers in California pulled 10.82 terawatt-hours of electricity — 1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts — from the state’s grid, or about enough to power 1 million U.S. households. This resulted in about 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions, even with California’s relatively clean energy mix. (On more fossil fuel-reliant grids, the emissions would have been twice that, or even more.) These same centers directly and indirectly consumed about 13.2 billion gallons of water for cooling and electricity generation. In Silicon Valley, more than 50 data centers accounted for about 60% of one electricity provider’s total load, prompting the utility to raise its customers rates to fund the transmission and substation upgrades and new battery energy storage the facilities required.

These facilities are also colonizing cities and towns far from Big Tech’s Silicon Valley epicenter. Over 100 data centers — structures that resemble big-box stores overflowing with row after row of computer processors — have already sprung up in Phoenix-area business parks, and the planned new ones could increase Arizona’s total power load by 300% over current levels, according to utilities. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at the Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.

Data center developments around the West include:

NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County.

The 290-mile Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission project under development in Idaho and Oregon was initially designed to serve about 800,000 PacifiCorp utility customers. But in October it was revealed that the line now will deliver all of its electricity to a single industrial customer in Oregon, most likely a new data center.

In September, an NV Energy executive told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity for planned data centers. Since the utility has largely moved away from coal, this new load would likely be met by generation from existing and planned natural gas facilities, along with proposed utility-scale solar installations.

Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Xcel and the state’s public utilities commission are currently working to reverse the planned closure of a coal plant due to projected data center-associated electricity shortages.

Wyoming officials are doing their best to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. This summer, Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. It would add to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.

New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Doña Ana County approved tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Developers have indicated they plan on building dedicated power generation, though they have not yet disclosed the energy sources.

Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers, drawn by the area’s relatively cheap land, existing agricultural water rights and the fact that it’s home to the Intermountain Power Project, a colossal coal plant built during the original Big Buildup in the years after World War II. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run on natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power it would produce, and data centers could fit the bill. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20 million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there, and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar and natural gas.

The Intermountain Power Project plant in Delta, Utah. The plant was scheduled to be converted away from coal, but Utah lawmakers want it to continue to burn coal. They need a buyer for the dirty power, and data centers could fit the bill. By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2014_11_21_lhr-lax_330, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38536818

The Western power grid is interconnected but also divided into 38 balancing authorities, or grid operators. Nearly every one of them is expected to see an increase in data center-driven demand over the next decade or so as the Big Digital Buildup gains steam, and few of them are currently equipped to meet that demand. In fact, the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. warned this month that growing data center-driven power demand is increasing the risk of outages this winter in parts of the West. Therefore, many of the largest data centers are going to need to generate their own power, while utilities also will have to scramble to add generating capacity and associated infrastructure as quickly as possible to serve the region’s on-grid facilities. The costs of that new infrastructure will be borne by each utility’s ratepayers.

How will the needed power be generated?

There’s simply no way utilities and developers can meet the projected demand with solar and wind, alone. So, utilities are already making plans to keep existing coal plants running past previously scheduled retirement dates, and to build new natural gas plants and even nuclear reactors. Yes, nukes: Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI and Meta are all looking to power proposed facilities with the new — so new they have yet to be developed — crop of small, modular and advanced reactors, if and when they are finally up and running.

Can data centers be “sustainable”?

These developments will have environmental consequences, some more than others. Fossil fuel burning feeds climate change and pollutes the air, and oil and gas drilling and coal mining ravage landscapes; utility-scale solar and wind facilities can harm wildlife habitat and often require hundreds of miles of new transmission lines to move the power around; and nuclear power comes with unique safety hazards and a nagging radioactive waste problem, while the uranium mining and milling industry risks reenacting its deadly Cold War legacy. Even a facility that gets all of its power from solar and batteries is still using resources that, without the extra demand, would otherwise be replacing fossil fuels on the grid. And, unless it has a closed-loop air-cooled system, the data center will still consume water for cooling, usually from municipal drinking water systems.

Wyoming-based Prometheus Hyperscale has made waves with its ambitious and seemingly visionary talk of building “sustainable” data centers with dedicated clean energy generation, water recycling and efficient cooling systems that would capitalize on the cold in the Northern Rockies. It’s even talked about harnessing the heat from the servers to warm greenhouses and shrimp-farming operations. Maybe, one day, the power will be supplemented by nuclear micro-reactors. But so far, the company’s walk is not exactly matching its talk. In the beginning, at least, the facility will run on natural gas, and Prometheus says it will offset carbon emissions by paying another company to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from biofuel plants in Nebraska.

Is resistance futile?

Resistance to the imminent server farm tsunami and its outsized energy and water use is widespread, but because these are local projects considered on local levels, battling them can feel a bit like playing whack-a-mole. After Tucson-area residents defeated the city’s plan to annex the proposed Project Blue data center, which would have enabled it to use treated wastewater for cooling, the developers simply moved the project into the county and planned to use an air-cooling system, which requires less water but more energy. When opposition continued, the firm committed to investing in enough renewable energy on Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset all of its electricity use.

Also working against the resistance is the fact that many local governments and utilities actually welcome the onslaught. Data centers can bring jobs and tax revenues — assuming the state, county or municipality doesn’t exempt them from taxes — to economically distraught areas. Meanwhile, utilities are champing at the bit to sell more of their product and raise rates to pay for the needed additional infrastructure. When announcing all the data centers headed for Nevada, NV Energy executive Jeff Brigger noted that the utility is “excited to serve this load.”

While much of the opposition to data centers is based on their environmental impacts and the effects they might have on utility rates and on the communities where they’re built, the notion of AI itself is also a factor. It’s one thing to see a lot of water or power used to grow food, for instance, but quite another to see coal power plants continue to run simply so that a computer can write a high school essay or answer an inane question or draw a picture or even serve as a companion of sorts. To be fair, AI does have potentially significant and positive applications, such as diagnosing medical conditions and crunching large quantities of data to find, say, possible cures for cancer or solutions to geopolitical problems.

But before it goes about changing the world, maybe AI ought to start with itself and figure out how to do its thing without using so much energy and water.

#COP30 Backpedals on #Climate Action: Offering no new plans to cut fossil fuels, the UN’s climate conference failed to produce a roadmap to stop #GlobalWarming — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org)

The convention center in Belem, Brazil, where COP30, the United Nations annual climate talks, took place over the past 12 days. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

November 22, 2025

BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 conference center was as pervasive as the diesel fumes from the generators outside the tent.

This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was billed as the “COP of Truth” by host country Brazil, but it could go down in history “as the deadliest talk show ever,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

COP30 was yet another “theater of delay” with endless discussions, and the creation of yet more administrative duties, “solely to avoid the actions that matter—committing to a just transition away from fossil fuels and putting money on the table,” he said.

A draft text released Nov. 18 clearly spelled out the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the final version, the language was watered down, merely acknowledging that “the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.”

After setting out ambitious targets ahead of the climate talks, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago, the secretary for climate, energy and environment in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the disappointment.

“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know the youth civil society will demand us to do more to fight climate change,” he said during the opening of the final plenary.

Do Lago pledged to press for more action during his upcoming year as the COP president.

“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps, one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” he said.

That was not enough for some leading climate scientists.

“Implementation requires concrete roadmaps to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels, and we got neither,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

During the closing plenary, a representative from Colombia said that her country refused to accept parts of the decision as written. “Denying the best available science not only puts the climate regime at risk, but also our own existence. Which message are we sending the world, Mr. President?”

In a post on X, Colombian President Gustavo Petro elaborated, saying, “I do not accept that in the COP 30 declaration. It is not clearly stated, as science says, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not said, everything else is hypocrisy.”

He noted that life on the planet is only possible “if we separate from oil, coal, and natural gas as a source of energy … Colombia opposes a COP 30 declaration that does not tell the scientific truth to the world.”

After several similar objections, do Lago suspended the plenary to consult with the UNFCCC secretariat about how to proceed, since the entire process is built on consensus. And while consensus isn’t the same as unanimity, the U.N.’s climate body has faced repeated criticism in recent years for ignoring the pleas of smaller countries amid the rush to finalize COP agreements.

But apparently there was enough consensus to proceed.

Looking for bright spots, former Irish President Mary Robinson, now a member of The Elders, a group of global leaders that works to address issues, including climate change, said the deal is far from perfect, but it shows that countries can still work together “at a time when multilateralism is being tested.”

Robinson said the COP30 outcome includes concrete steps toward establishing a mechanism to ensure no countries are left behind in the transition away from fossil fuels.

“We opened this COP noting the absence of the United States administration,” she said. “But no one country, present or absent, could dampen the ‘mutirao’ spirit,” or collective effort.

Given the recent rise of global political tensions, she said Belém “revealed the limits of the possible, but also the power of the determined. We must follow where that determination leads.”

In another of the final documents, COP30 emphasized “the inherent connection between pursuing efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C and pursuing just transition pathways,” and that such a pathway leads to “more robust and equitable mitigation and adaptation outcomes.”

The conference’s adoption of a just transition mechanism was hailed as a huge win by the Climate Action Network International, an umbrella group that represents hundreds of local, regional and national grassroots organizations working on climate justice. In a statement, the group called it “one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN climate negotiations.”

The outcome could have been even better with stronger leadership from the European Union, which publicly advocated for more ambition, but opposed key provisions in closed-door negotiations, several observers said.

“With the U.S. absent, the European Union had a chance to lead; instead, they stepped into the vacuum as the primary obstructionist,” said Singh, including opposition to language on fossil fuel phaseout timetables.

He said the European Union member countries were “playing a cynical blame game while the planet burns.” Decisions made at this and previous COPs provided the tools needed to address the crisis, but the political will and the money to implement them are still lacking.

USDA looks to expand public lands grazing: Plus: Data Center Watch, Mining Monitor, Messing with Maps 1940 edition — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Running cattle near Valley of the Gods in Bears Ears National Monument. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 14, 2025

I promised a while back to take a closer look at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to “Fortify the American Beef Industry.” I did, and my conclusion is that it’s a bunch of bunk. Okay, maybe not all of it: There are some parts about enforcing “Product of USA” labeling, and about supporting small processors by reducing overtime and holiday inspection fees and so forth that could be helpful to your friendly, local meat processor.

Curiously, however, the plan’s main emphasis is on grazing on both Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management public lands, even though this makes up only a tiny portion of the U.S. beef industry. It’s almost as if the plan was driven by an ideological agenda rather than a practical one. Oh, and look at that: The Public Lands Council is taking credit for essentially formulating the grazing section of the plan! (h/t to Western Watersheds Project)

The plan will “streamline and expand grazing on federal lands, elevate grazing as an administration priority, and provide direct relief and support to American ranchers.” The plan endeavors to return livestock to vacant grazing allotments and promises to ensure that the number of livestock grazing on public lands remains steady or increases. The plan also aims to diminish protections for wild predators — including endangered ones — and make it easier for ranchers to collect taxpayer subsidies when a wolf or bear is suspected of killing their cattle.

It’s difficult to imagine how public lands grazing can be made any easier. After all, the feds have charged a measly $1.35 per month for a cow-calf pair to graze on the public’s forage for years, which is the congressionally mandated minimum. And while the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” might go back and forth on the “mining” part of the monicker, it has retained its livestock-friendly reputation through every administration, Republican or Democratic. The agency regularly bends over backwards to accommodate livestock operations, and it often has been unable or unwilling to remove livestock from cattle-trampled lands to allow them to recover — even in “protected” areas such as national monuments.

The administration is hoping to fill up the estimated 24 million acres of vacant grazing allotments and to bolster the number of cattle grazing on public lands, but it’s not clear how that would happen. It’s not like active allotments are bursting at the seams with too many cattle: In many cases, ranchers run far fewer cattle than authorized simply because they have fewer cattle to graze and because the industry is putting more cattle on feed. U.S. beef cattle inventories have declined by more than 30% since the 1970s (along with per capita consumption), but the number of beef cows in feedlots has ballooned.

Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Allotments may be vacant not because the BLM or Forest Service cancelled the lease, but because the forage is of marginal quality, due to drought or overgrazing or just not great grass growing conditions, or a conservation group bought out the lease from a willing seller.

Even if the plan did increase the number of cattle on public lands, it wouldn’t make a big difference to the industry as a whole, because public lands provide less than 2% of all of the forage consumed by the nation’s 27.9 million head of beef cattle.

Sending more cattle out into desert lands to eat what’s left of the native grasses and trample more sensitive places isn’t going to “fortify” the American beef industry. It will merely perpetuate the age-old and culturally embedded practice of giving grazing incredible leeway on public lands, while benefitting only a handful of chosen livestock operators.

The West’s Sacred Cow — Jonathan P. Thompson

I’m not an absolutist on the issue; I don’t believe that all public lands grazing should be outlawed. But it should be limited to appropriate places and at appropriate levels, and should be halted before it wrecks a particular landscape. Plus, ranchers should pay a reasonable amount for the thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ forage their cattle consume each month, along with a bit extra for the externalities, with which public lands grazing is rife. This sensible type of management simply is not occurring presently, as can be witnessed on just about any tract of active BLM “rangeland” in the Four Corners Country, where fragile desert streambeds are being sullied and valuable cryptobiotic crusts decimated by herds of thousand-pound beasts.

***

If the administration was really interested in helping these ranchers, it would support a “just transition” away from public lands grazing, which is on the decline despite the government’s efforts to prop it up. That would include backing the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act, which was recently reintroduced in Congress by Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat.

The legislation would allow conservation groups to buy out federal grazing allotments from willing ranchers and livestock operators, after which the BLM or USFS would permanently retire the allotment.

While private entities can and do buy out leases currently, there is no guarantee that the leases will remain cattle-free, which is what would allow the administration to re-cow some of those vacant leases mentioned above. The proposed legislation would fix that, making the retirement permanent. The resulting certainty would encourage conservation groups to invest more in the buyouts, which would benefit the ranchers, who may be looking to get out of the business or out of a specific grazing allotment.

A cow in the desert. Jonathan P. Thompson photo

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

Certain aspects of the film Eddington just keep jumping off the screen into real life. The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is about a small town in southern New Mexico where a gargantuan tech firm, SolidGoldMagiKarp, has chosen to site a data center during the height of the COVID epidemic. There’s also a conflict between a mask-denying sheriff and a slightly more high-falutin’, charismatic mayor (who supports the data center and its purported economic benefits). A lot of drama ensues — most of it not directly related to the data center — which leads into a bloody, over-the-top machine-gun battle, which, it turns out, does have ties to the data center (which ultimately gets built, because: big money).

So far data centers haven’t provoked warfare of the kind in the movie. But they are spurring a lot of conflict in the desert over their potential water and power use. There’s Project Blue in southern Arizona, which promises to add enough electricity from renewable sources to Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset its projected enormous power use, but a lack of specifics invites skepticism. Project Jupiter, the gargantuan data center campus planned for Santa Teresa, New Mexico, says it will generate its own power, but hasn’t specified how — except that it’s not likely to use nuclear reactors because they couldn’t come online quickly enough.

Now there’s another proposal, this one for New Mexico’s Permian Basin. New Era Energy & Digital wants to build a hyperscale, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County. It, too, will build dedicated generation: A whopping 2,000 megawatts of capacity from gas, and 5,000 MW from nuclear, according to a Power magazine report. That’s an insanely huge amount of electricity. Palo Verde nuclear plant near Phoenix has a nameplate capacity of 3,937 MW and Diablo Canyon in California has 2,236 MW of capacity.

Take a moment to digest that: This proposed data center would gobble up more electricity than two of the West’s largest power plants combined could generate, which is enough to power some 2 million homes. These numbers are terrifying, but they also strain belief and reinforce the suspicion that the AI-data center boom is actually just a hype-inflated bubble that’s poised to burst before most of these facilities are ever built.

If New Era does advance its plan, it’s likely to encounter resistance (along with support) of the kind that could spark some cinematic conflict. A natural gas plant of that size could burn methane from oil wells that might otherwise have been flared off, but it will also emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants. And the nuclear reactors will produce radioactive waste, which likely would be stored onsite, something that even those accustomed to oilfield pollution might not be too enthusiastic about.

Meanwhile, the firm’s only disclosure about potential water use for cooling is that it chose the location in part for its “abundant water supply,” which is odd given the fact that the Ogallala aquifer on which the region depends is being depleted rapidly. The only kind of water that’s abundant in those parts is produced water, the briny, contaminated liquid waste that comes up from oil wells at a rate of at least four barrels of water to each barrel of oil.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Anfield Resources went ahead and broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah last week, and claims it will be producing ore by the middle of next year. That’s despite the fact the firm has yet to submit its plans for a water treatment plant to state regulators. Also, the state has not approved Anfield’s proposed reopening of its Shootaring mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which is where the ore would be processed. Anfield officials told the Moab Times-Independent that they are unlikely to send ore to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding.

***

Atomic Minerals says it has received Bureau of Land Management approval to drill more exploratory holes at its Harts Point Uranium Project just outside Bears Ears National Monument and adjacent to the Indian Creek climbing area and the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. The new drill holes will be just over two miles from the Dugout Ranch and Canyonlands Research Center.

***

The Trump administration has added 10 new minerals to the U.S. Geological Survey’s critical minerals list, including copper, potash, and uranium. This doesn’t automatically mean a whole lot, but it will potentially give federal and state agencies and regulators yet another reason to fast-track mining proposals.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

One of the reasons I like looking at old maps and including them in these dispatches is that they provide a snapshot of how people, or at least the mapmakers, saw the region. Usually I put maps here that are at least a century old, simply because the changes they reveal are so dramatic.

When someone posted this 1940 Rand McNally map of Utah on Facebook the other day, the most remarkable thing at first glance was that it included the proposed Escalante National Monument (which is why they posted it). But as I looked more closely, I realized that this map was made just as the West was about to go through a major transformation. Over the ensuing few decades the population of the region would explode as the post-war migration and uranium, coal mining, oil and gas, power plant building, and dam building booms swept across the West.

Roads were built, small communities virtually vanished, and the landscapes and cultures were altered — along with the maps. These outtakes from the old map gives a glimpse of what the place was. For best viewing, click on the image and it will take you to the website. Click again and it should show you a larger version.

On the top outtake, notice the proposed Escalante National Monument, which would have stretched from Moab down to what is now Page, Arizona. By this time the proposal had been whittled down from the original concept, which also would have included much of what is now Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks.
Also note what is absent. The town of Page didn’t yet exist, because it was created to house workers building Glen Canyon Dam (construction began in 1956). Highway 95 followed a different route over Comb Ridge and ended at Natural Bridges NM. And the Moki Dugway road wouldn’t be built until the 1950s.

In western Colorado, especially, there were a lot of communities (probably very small, but big enough to include on a map) that no longer exist, including: Renaraye, McElmo, Ruin Canyon, Spargo, Ackmen, and Gladel. Ackmen basically relocated to Pleasant View after highway 666 (now 491) bypassed the older town; and Gladel is now Slick Rock. Egnar, meanwhile, does not appear on the map.

On the bottom map, note that I-15 didn’t yet exist, and the major artery through southwestern Utah, Hwy 91, bypassed the Virgin River Gorge south of St. George. I have to say, I really wish they hadn’t built an interstate through that lovely canyon. Also notable: Hildale, Utah/Colorado City, Arizona was simply Short Creek back then, and was on the Arizona side of the line (possibly where “Old Colorado City” is now?).

Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress: Experts say stifling bureaucratic procedures that are disconnected from the #ClimateCrisis have consistently stalled COP negotiations — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org) #COP30

This section of the Colorado River at the boat launch near Corn Lake dipped to around 150 cfs in lake August 2025. Known as the 15-mile reach, this stretch of river should have at least 810 cfs to meet the needs of endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

By Bob Berwyn

November 12, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.

The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.

UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning.

On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.

View this post on Instagram

“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”

The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.

Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016.

In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.

“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”

For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.

The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.

“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.

“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.

The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results.

“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.

Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.

How (Not) to Talk About Climate

Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.”

The experts at COP “tend to focus on what can be measured and reported, on outputs and deliverables, which shapes the negotiations themselves,” he said. “The cadence of those encounters becomes ritualized to their detriment.”

A quick look at some of the daily notifications from COP30 displays what Boykoff describes, with invitations to a “High-Level Ministerial on Multilevel Governance” or “The Launch of the Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the Operationalization of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships.”

Such language, he said, reflects a culture that prizes precision and hierarchy over connection and clarity. It’s a diplomatic shorthand that signals professionalism while numbing urgency, and it narrows the space for creativity, emotion, or reflection, he added.

Boykoff said the only way to move beyond the rituals of repetition may be to break them.

“What we really need,” he said, “is to shake it up, to create spaces that let people reflect, feel, and engage in new ways. Because if we keep doing the same thing year after year, we shouldn’t expect different results.”

Falzon said the technocratic UNFCCC language reflects the dominance at the talks of an “old world hierarchy in which rich countries set the agenda, poor countries fight to be heard, and the system keeps reproducing the conditions it’s supposed to fix.

“It’s not just the negotiations that are unequal,” she said. “The whole thing mirrors the inequalities of the world it’s meant to change.”

Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it — Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Bill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry’s tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first Trump administration. (Public Domain)

Click the link to read the article on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website (Michael Mann):

October 31, 2025

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Thus wrote the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966.

If Maslow were around today, I imagine he might endorse the corollary that if your only tool is technology, every problem appears to have a technofix. And that’s an apt characterization of the “tech bro”-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse.

There is no better example than Bill Gates, who just this week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly) the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history—climate-fueled Melissa—struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact. The very next day a major new climate report (disclaimer: I was a co-author) entitled “a planet on the brink” was published. The report received far less press coverage than the Gates missive. The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul than a sober assessment by the world’s leading climate scientists.

Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy). Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!”

That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including “modular nuclear reactors” that couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.

Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary “patch” for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?

Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later?

Here’s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no “patch” for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels. [ed. emphasis mine]

It was arguably Gates who—at least in part—inspired the tech-bro villain Peter Isherwell in the Adam McKay film “Don’t Look Up.” The premise of the film is that a giant “comet” (a very thinly veiled metaphor for the climate crisis) is hurtling toward Earth as politicians fail to act. So they turn to Isherwell who insists he has proprietary tech (a metaphor for geoengineering, again thinly veiled) that can save the day: space drones developed by his corporation that will break the comet apart. Coincidentally, the drones are designed to then mine the comet fragments for trillions of dollars’ worth of rare metals, that all go to Isherwell and his corporation. If you haven’t seen the film (which I highly recommend), I’ll let you imagine how it all works out.

For those who have been following Gates on climate for some time, his so-called sudden “pivot” isn’t really a “pivot” at all. It’s a logical consequence of the misguided path he’s been headed down for well over a decade.

I became concerned about Gates’ framing of the climate crisis nearly a decade ago when a journalist reached out to me, asking me to comment on his supposed “discovery” of a formula for predicting carbon emissions. (The formula is really an “identity” that involves expressing carbon emissions as a product of terms related to population, economic growth, energy efficiency, and fossil fuel dependence). I noted, with some amusement, that the mathematical relationship Gates had “discovered” was so widely known it had a name, the “Kaya identity,” after the energy economist Yōichi Kaya who presented the relationship in a textbook nearly three decades ago. It’s familiar not just to climate scientists in the field but to college students taking an introductory course on climate change.

If this seems like a gratuitous critique, it is not. It speaks to a concerning degree of arrogance. Did Gates really think that something as conceptually basic as decomposing carbon emissions into a product of constituent terms had never been attempted before? That he’s so brilliant that anything he thinks up must be a novel discovery?

I reserved my criticism of Gates, at the time, not for his rediscovery of the Kaya identity (hey—if can help his readers understand it, that’s great) but for declaring that it somehow implies that “we need an energy miracle” to get to zero carbon emissions. It doesn’t. I explained that Gates “does an injustice to the very dramatic inroads that renewable energy and energy efficiency are making,” noting peer-reviewed studies by leading experts that provide “very credible outlines for how we could reach a 100 percent noncarbon energy generation by 2050.”

The so-called “miracle” he speaks of exists—it’s called the sun, and wind, and geothermal, and energy storage technology. Real world solutions exist now and are easily scalable with the right investments and priorities. The obstacles aren’t technological. They’re political.

Gates’ dismissiveness in this case wasn’t a one-off. It was part of a consistent pattern of downplaying clean energy while promoting dubious and potentially dangerous technofixes in which he is often personally invested. When I had the chance to question him about this directly (The Guardian asked me to contribute to a list of questions they were planning on asking him in an interview a few years ago), his response was evasive and misleading. He insisted that there is a “premium” paid for clean energy buildout when in fact it has a lower levelized cost than fossil fuels or nuclear and deflected the questions with ad hominem swipes. (“He [Mann] actually does very good work on climate change. So I don’t understand why he’s acting like he’s anti-innovation.”)

This all provides us some context for evaluating Gates’ latest missive, which plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers like self-styled “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. (Incidentally, Lomborg’s center has received millions of dollars of funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years and Lomborg recently acknowledged serving as an adviser to Gates on climate issues.)

Among the classic Lomborgian myths promoted in Gates’ new screed, which I’ll paraphrase here, is the old standby that “clean energy is too expensive.” (Gates likes to emphasize a few difficult-to-decarbonize sectors like steel or air travel as a distraction from the fact that most of our energy infrastructure can readily be decarbonized now.) He also insists that “we can just adapt,” although in the absence of concerted action, warming could plausibly push us past the limit of our adaptive capacity as a species.

He argues that “efforts to fight climate change detract from efforts to address human health threats.” (A central point of my new book Science Under Siegewith public health scientist Peter Hotez is that climate and human health are inseparable, with climate change fueling the spread of deadly disease). Then there is his assertion that “the poor and downtrodden have more pressing concerns” when, actually, it is just the opposite; the poor and downtrodden are the most threatened by climate change because they have the least wealth and resilience.

What Gates is putting forward aren’t legitimate arguments that can be made in good faith. They are shopworn fossil fuel industry talking points. Being found parroting them is every bit as embarrassing as being caught—metaphorically speaking—with your pants down.

For years when I would criticize Gates for what I consider to be his misguided take on climate, colleagues would say, “you just don’t understand what Gates is saying!” Now, with Donald Trump and the right-wing Murdoch media machine (the Wall Street Journal editorial board and now an op-ed by none other than Lomborg himself in the New York Post) celebrating Gates’ new missive, I can confidently turn around and say, “No, you didn’t understand what he was saying.”

Maybe—just maybe—we’ve learned an important lesson here: The solution to the climate crisis isn’t going to come from the fairy-dust-sprinkled flying unicorns that are the “benevolent plutocrats.” They don’t exist. The solution is going to have to come from everyone else, using every tool at our disposal to push back against an ecocidal agenda driven by plutocrats, polluters, petrostates, propagandists, and too often now, the press. [ed. emphasis mine]

This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML

Friday quick takes: Energy impotence? Uranium. Floods and reservoirs — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

The West Elk coal mine near Somerset, Colorado. It’s the largest coal producer in the state. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 17, 2025

🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

President Donald Trump’s quest for what he calls energy dominance has run into a few snags, many of which are of his own making. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the term “energy dominance” doesn’t really make sense (What is energy dominating? Or are we dominating energy? Or …????). Let’s assume that it’s just an insecure male’s version of energy independence (so woke!), or just a dumb term for producing enough energy to keep all the data centers running.

In that case, don’t you think you’d want to use all of the tools — or weapons, if you prefer — at your disposal? Certainly any reasonable person, even one who doesn’t care about pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, would do that, pushing for more solar, wind, battery storage, hydropower, and geothermal, in addition to nuclear and natural gas. But as has been shown over and over, Trump tends to let his personal whims — along with a desire to crush everything that he thinks Democrats favor — erase rationality.

As a result, he has waged war on the most promising energy sources (i.e. solar and wind), while trying to dust off the old, dying ones (i.e. fossil fuels) and prop them up on the battle lines in hopes they won’t fall down too soon. Well, it’s not working out so well.

Oil and gas drilling is continuing on federal lands, although at a much slower pace than during the Biden administration, even though Trump has handed out drilling permits like candy at a parade. That’s in part due to low oil prices, and in part due to higher drilling costs: Trump’s tariffs have increased the price of pipe and other materials used on the rigs.

The number of rigs actively drilling has stayed somewhat steady over the last nine months, but rig counts remain below what they were in 2023 and 2024 and there are no signs that Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric is having the desired effect. Source: Baker Hughes, Land Desk graphic.

But the most obvious failure is playing out in the administration’s bid to revitalize the flagging coal industry. Let’s take a look:

After the administration and congressional Republicans made much ado about rescinding Biden-era moratoria on new federal coal leasing, the Interior Department rushed to auction off parcels containing hundreds of millions of tons of coal in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. They flopped:

In Montana, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company bid $186,000 for a tract containing an estimated 167 million tons of coal adjacent to its Spring Creek Mine in the Powder River Basin. That’s a mere 1/10 of one cent per ton. Contrast that with other Powder River Basin leases in 2012 that brought in more than $1/ton. The feds rejected the bid, saying it was below fair market value.

The dismal result prompted the Bureau of Land Management to cancel the 441-million-ton West Antelope coal lease sale in Wyoming.

And then the Interior Department rejected a single lowball bid for a lease containing about 6 million tons of federal coal in Utah.

On a somewhat related note: After the Trump administration announced it would subsidize the coal industry to the tune of $625 million, PacifiCorp said it would go forward with its plans to convert the Naughton coal plant in Wyoming to run on natural gas.

You’d think that maybe the administration would get a hint and adjust their strategy accordingly. Yeah, right.

A warning sign in the Lisbon Valley. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Last week, Anfield Energy announced that Utah regulators had approved its proposed Velvet Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley. “Permitting Complete, Construction to Follow,” the company’s press release says, adding that they expected to break ground within 30 days. The project was the first beneficiary of Trump’s accelerated “energy emergency” permitting, and the BLM completed its environmental review in a mere 13 days.

The company may be jumping the gun a bit. The Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining actually gave only tentative approval to the project, conditioned upon the company posting a $539,000 bond. And it specifies that no ground disturbance can happen until the project gets other applicable agencies’ go-ahead.

But as Sarah Fields of Uranium Watch points out, Anfield has not yet received approvals from other state agencies for its radon ventilation shafts, wastewater treatment plant, or its air quality permit.

Trump “emergency” fast-tracks Utah uranium mine — Jonathan P. Thompson

***

Anfield — or at least its PR team — is busy as of late. They also announced that they had completed the first phase of exploratory drilling at the defunct JD-7 uranium mine in the Paradox Valley. While these announcements are a dime-a-dozen, I was a bit intrigued by this one, because the JD-7 is like a poster child of the follies of the last uranium “boom.” It’s an open pit, a gaping wound overlooking the valley, but never actually produced any uranium because the “boom” busted before it even really began. Somehow I’m not convinced that this time will be much different.

A day in Uranium Country — Jonathan P. Thompson

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

As one might expect, the recent rains and resulting flooding boosted reservoir levels. Navajo Reservoir saw its surface level jump considerably (rising about 10 feet) due to all that water in the San Juan River. However, it’s still lower than it was this time last year.

Lake Powell, which is much, much bigger, only added 1.28 feet to its surface level, and remains 32 feet below what it was on this date last year. But as the following graph shows, the big water is still making its way into the reservoir, so its level could keep climbing.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I’m on the road right now, making my way from southern Oregon to southwestern Colorado via a circuitous route. And no, I’m not in the Silver Bullet (I’ll reveal the purpose of the trip later, along with more details about Land Desk transportation). I don’t have my good camera with me, but I’ve tried to get some snapshots anyway.

Gravestones in City Cemetery, Yreka, California. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Snow and water in the eastern Sierras. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Basin and Range country along Hwy 50. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Are nukes the solution to the data center problem?: Or are data centers the solution to the nuclear reactor infeasibility problem? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 30, 2025

“America’s Data Centers Could Go Dark,” the subject line of the email read.

If only, I mused. I’m less worried about data centers going dark than about everything else going dark because of data centers. But whatever. That’s not what the PR person (or AI bot?) who sent the email was trying to say. They were there to ask, rhetorically: “Can Microreactors Save the Day?” They then offered to connect me with James Walker, CEO of a firm called NANO Nuclear Energy, who would then try to sell me on his KRONOS MMR™, described as a “compact, carbon free” way to power data centers.

There is a lot of hysteria around data centers these days. Folks like me are worried about how much energy and water they use, and the effect that might have on the grid, the climate, scarce water supplies, and other utility customers. Others are panicking over the possibility that the U.S. might fall behind in the AI race — though I have no idea what winning the race would entail or look like.

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism — Jonathan P. Thompson

And, in our capitalistic system, where there is fear, there are myriad solutions, most of which entail building or making or consuming more of something rather than just, well, you know, turning off the damned data centers. The Trump administration would solve the problem by subsidizing more coal-burning, while the petroleum industry is offering up its surplus natural gas. Tech firms are buying up all the power from new solar arrays and geothermal facilities, long before they’re even built.

Perhaps the most hype, and the loftiest promises of salvation, however, involve nuclear power and a new generation of reactors that are smaller, portable, require less up-front capital, and supposedly not weighed down with all of the baggage of the old-school conventional reactors, which not only cost a lot to build, but also tend to evoke visions of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.

Yet for all the buzz — which may be loudest in the Western U.S. — it’s far from certain that this so-called nuclear renaissance will ever come to fruition. The latest generation of reactors may go by slick, newfangled names, but they are still expensive, require dangerous and damaging mining to extract uranium for fuel, produce waste, are potentially dangerous — and are still largely unproven.

Experimental Breeder Reactor II on the Idaho National Laboratory. The reactor was shut down and decommissioned in 1994. Now Oklo is building a new reactor, using similar technology, nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Several years ago I visited Experimental Breeder Reactor I, located west of Idaho Falls. It has been defunct since 1963 and is now a museum, and a sort of time capsule taking one back to heady times when atomic energy promised to help feed the exploding, electricity-hungry population of the post-war Western U.S. and its growing number of electric gadgets (remember electric can openers?).

The retro-futuristic facility is decked out with control panels and knobs and valves and other apparatus that possess the characteristic sleek chunkiness of mid-century high-tech design. A temperature gauge for the “rod farm” goes up to 500 degrees centigrade, and if you look closely you’ll see a red button labeled “SCRAM” that, if pushed, would have plunged the control rods into the reactor, thereby “poisoning” the reaction and shutting it down. If you have to push it, you’d best scram on out of there.

I couldn’t help but get caught up in the marvels of the technology. On a cold December day in 1951, scientists here had blasted a neutron into a uranium-235 atom and shattered it, releasing energy and yet more neutrons that split other uranium atoms, causing a frenetically energetic chain reaction identical to the one that led to the explosions that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki several years earlier. Mass is destroyed, energy created. Only this time the energy was harnessed not to blow up cities, but to create steam that turned a turbine that generated electricity that illuminated a string of lightbulbs and then powered the entire facility — all without burning fossil fuels or building dams.

This particular reactor was known as a “breeder” because its fuel reproduces itself, in a way. During the reaction, loose neutrons are “captured” by uranium-238 atoms, turning them into plutonium-239, which is readily fissionable, meaning it can be used as fuel for future reactions.

A diagram of the atomic fission and breeding process at Experimental Breeder Reactor-I in Idaho. The reactor began generating electricity in 1951. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

At first glance it seems like the answer to the world’s energy problems, and two years after EBR-I lit up, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech. Nuclear energy would help redeem the world from the terrible scourge of atomic weapons, the president said; it would be used to “serve the needs rather than the fears of the world — to make the deserts flourish, to warm the cold, to feed the hungry, to alleviate the misery of the world.”*

Now, with Arizona utilities teaming up to develop and build new reactors; with Wyoming’s, Idaho’s, and Utah’s governors collaborating on their nuclear-powered “Energy Superabundance” effort; and with Oklo looking to build a modern version of EBR-I not far from the original, it’s beginning to feel like 1953 all over again. Only now the nuclear reaction promises to serve the needs of cyberspace rather than the real world — to make AI do your homework, to cool the server banks, to feed the Instagram feeds, to send out those Tik-Toks at twice the speed.

Seven decades later, Eisenhower’s hopes have yet to be fulfilled.

It turns out a lot of people aren’t comfortable with the idea nuclear reactions taking place down the road, regardless of how many safety backstops are in place to avoid a catastrophic meltdown a la Chernobyl. Nuke plants cost a lot of money and take forever to build. They need water for steam generation and for cooling, which can be a problem in water-constrained places and even in water-abundant areas: Diablo Canyon nuke plant sucks up about 2.5 billion gallons of ocean water to generate steam and to cool the reactors, before spitting it — 20 degrees warmer — back into the Pacific. This kills an estimated 5,000 adult fish each year, along with an additional 1.5 billion fish eggs and fry and messes up water temperature and the marine ecosystem. And while nukes are good at producing baseload power (meaning steady, 24/7 generation), they aren’t very flexible, meaning they can’t be ramped up or down to accommodate fluctuating demand or variable power sources like wind and solar.

And then there’s the waste. The nuclear reaction itself may seem almost miraculous in its power, simplicity, and even purity.

But the steps required to create the reaction, along with the aftermath, are hardly magical. To fuel a single reactor requires extracting hundreds of thousands of tons of ore from the earth, milling the ore to produce yellowcake (triuranium octoxide), converting the yellowcake to uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to concentrate the uranium-235, and fabricating the fuel pellets and rods.

Each step generates ample volumes of toxic waste products. Mining leaves behind lightly radioactive waste rock; milling produces mill tailings containing radium, thorium, radon, lead, arsenic, and other nasty stuff; and enrichment and fabrication both produce liquid and solid waste. It has been about 40 years since the Cold War uranium boom busted, and yet the abandoned mines and mills are still contaminating areas and still being cleaned up — if you can ever truly clean up this sort of pollution.

Yet the reaction, itself, generates the most dangerous form of leftovers, containing radioactive fission products such as iodine, strontium, and caesium and transuranic elements including plutonium. This “spent nuclear fuel,” or radioactive waste, is removed from the reactor during refueling and for now is typically stored on site. Efforts to create a national depository for these nasty leftovers have failed, usually because the sites aren’t deemed safe enough to contain the waste for a couple hundred thousand years, or because locals don’t want it in their back yard. If it were to fall into the wrong hands, it could be used in a “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive that scatters radioactive material around an area.

Plus, breeder reactors, especially, produce plutonium, which can then be used in nuclear warheads (India used U.S.-supported breeder technology to acquire nuclear weapons). That’s one of the reasons folks soured on the technology and the U.S. ended its federal plutonium breeder reactor development program in the 1980s. The other reasons were high costs and sodium coolant leaks (and resulting fires). After the EBR-I shut down in 1963, because it was outdated, the Idaho National Laboratory built EBR-II nearby. It was shut down and decommissioned in 1994.

Nevertheless, Oklo — one of the rising new-nuke stars — is touting its use of similar technology as the EBR-II, i.e. liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor, as a selling point for the reactor it is currently developing at the INL.

The envisioned new fleet of reactors go by many names: SMRs, or small modular reactors, and advanced, fast, micro, or nano-reactors. Most of them can be fabricated in a factory, then trucked to or assembled on-site. Some are small enough to fit in a truck. They can be used alone to power a microgrid or a data center, or clustered to create a utility-scale operation that feeds the grid.

Their main selling point is that they require less up-front capital than a conventional reactor, that you can build and install one of these things for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time (once the reactors are actually licensed, developed, and produced on a commercial scale, which is still not the case).

A decade ago, companies like NuScale were also promoting them as ways to power the grid in a time of increasing restraints on carbon. Now that the feds are not only declaring climate change a “hoax,” but also forbidding agencies from even uttering the term, that no longer carries as much weight. Instead, almost every new proposal now is marketed as a “solution” to the data center “problem.” Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI, and Meta are all looking to power their facilities with nukes, if and when they are finally up and running.

The new technology is not monolithic. Some are cooled in different ways, or use different types of fuel, but they all work on the same principle as old-school conventional reactors. As such, they also require the same fuel-production process, also have potential safety issues, and also create hazardous waste.

In fact, a 2022 Stanford study found that small modular reactors could create more, and equally hazardous, waste than conventional reactors per unit of power generated. The authors wrote: “Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30 {compared to an 1,100 MW pressurized water reactor}.”

The cost thing isn’t all that clear cut, either. The smaller reactors may be cheaper to build, but because they don’t take advantage of economies of scale, they are more expensive per unit of electricity generated than conventional reactors, and still can be cost prohibitive.

In 2015, for example, Oregon-based NuScale proposed installing 12 of its 50-MW small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratories to provide 600 MW of capacity to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS (which also includes a handful of non-Utah utilities). In 2018 — after receiving at least $288 million in federal subsidies — NuScale upped the planned capacity to 720 MW, saying it would lower operating costs.

But what started out as a $3 billion project in 2015 kept increasing, so that even after it was ramped down to 421 MW, the projected price tag had ballooned to $9.3 billion in 2023 (still about one-third of the cost of the new Vogtle plant in Georgia, but with a fraction of the generating capacity). UAMPS’s collective members, realizing there were plenty of more cost-effective ways to keep their grids running, canceled the project later that year.

It kind of makes you wonder: Is this new wave of nuclear reactors solving the data center energy demand problem? Or are data centers’ energy-gobbling habits solving the nuclear reactors’ cost and feasibility problems?

Data Centers: The Big Buildup of the Digital Age — Jonathan P. Thompson

I suspect it’s a little bit of both, with the balance swinging toward the latter. In that case, nuclear reactors are not alone: The Trump administration is using data center demand as the prime justification for propping up the dying coal industry.

Before the Big Data Center Buildup, utilities really had no need for expensive, waste-producing reactors — they could more cheaply and safely build solar and wind installations with battery storage systems for backup. If needed, they could supplement it with geothermal or natural gas-fired peaker plants.

But if data centers end up demanding as much power as projected (like 22,000 additional megawatts in Nevada, alone), utilities will need to pull out all the stops and add generating capacity of all sorts as quickly as possible, or they’ll tell the data centers to generate their own power. Either scenario would likely make small nukes more attractive, even if they do cost too much, and even if it means that data centers end up being radioactive waste repositories, too.

Another plausible scenario is that the tech firms figure out ways to make their data centers more efficient; that it’s more cost-effective (and therefore profitable) to develop less energy- and water-intensive data processing hardware than to spend billions on an experimental reactor that may not be operating for years from now.

What a novel concept: To use less, rather than always hungering for more and more and more.

U.S. Representative Paul Gosar looks to eliminate two #Arizona national monuments: Plus — Mining Monitor, Hydrocarbon Hoedown, Messing with Maps — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Rock fins jutting up at the south foot of the Henry Mountains laccolith in southern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 19, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

For the most part, President Donald Trump has done everything we feared the candidate would do and then some: following Project 2025 to a T, gutting environmental and public health protections, shredding the First Amendment (to the point of even losing Tucker Carlson), threatening political opponents, and generally embracing authoritarianism.

But when it comes to public lands, there is actually one act we expected the administration to do shortly after the inauguration, but that it hasn’t yet attempted: Shrinking or eliminating national monuments, especially those designated during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. Even after Trump’s Justice Department opined (wrongly, I’d say) that the Antiquities Act authorizes a president to shrink or revoke national monuments, the administration didn’t actually do it.

I suspect this is because they realize how deeply unpopular that would be. Sure, Trump’s first-term shrinkage of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments may have garnered some support from a handful of Utah right-wingers, but they’d be behind him regardless. Meanwhile, it pissed off a lot of Americans who value public lands but might otherwise support Trump’s policies.

That’s not to say the national monuments are safe. It’s just that the administration seems to be intent, for now, to outsource their destruction to their friends in Congress. The House Republicans’ proposed budget, for example, would zero out funding for GSENM’s new management plan — a de facto shrinkage.

And now, Rep. Paul Gosar, a MAGA Republican from Arizona, has introduced bills that would nullify Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument and the Ironwood Forest National Monument northwest of Tucson. The former blocks new mining claims in an area that has been targeted for uranium extraction. And the latter, established by Bill Clinton in 2000, covers a 189,713-acre swath of ecologically rich Sonoran Desert near the gaping wound known as the Asarco Silver Bell copper mine. The national monument designation blocked new mining claims.

Ironwood Forest is immensely popular with locals, and the Marana town council in August voted unanimously to oppose efforts to reduce or revoke the monument designation.

Interestingly enough, neither of the national monuments are in Gosar’s district, which covers the heavily Republican western edge of the state, so he won’t suffer from voter blowback if the legislation succeeds.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Congressional Republicans, with some Democratic support, are again trying to pass legislation that would allow mining companies to dump their waste on public lands.

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, made it through the House Natural Resources Committee this week on a 25-17 vote. It would tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store tailings and other mining-related waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning the claimant has not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.

The bill would supplement Trump’s executive order from March invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on public lands, and his “emergency” order that fast-tracks mining and energy permitting on public lands.

***

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

IsoEnergy, the company that owns the controversial Daneros Mine just outside Bears Ears National Monument and the Tony M Mine, plans to begin exploratory drilling at its Flatiron claims in Utah’s Henry Mountain uranium district. Last year, the Canada-based company staked a whopping 370 lode claims on federal land. Along with two Utah state leases, this adds up to about 8,800 acres south-southwest of Mt. Hillers.

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown

A peer-reviewed study out of UCLA recently found that pregnant women living near the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in Los Angeles during the sustained blowout of 2015 experienced more adverse birth outcomes than expected. Specifically, the prevalence of low birthweight was 45% to 100% higher than those living outside the affected area. This should concern not only folks living near Aliso Canyon (which is still operational), but also anyone who lives near an oil and gas well or other facility.

Aliso Canyon is a depleted oil field in the hills of the Santa Susana Mountains in northern LA. Southern California Gas pipes in natural gas, pumps it into the oil field, and stores up to 84 billion cubic feet of the fuel there. In October 2015, one of the wells blew out and for the next 112 days spewed a total of about 109,000 metric tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and the main ingredient of natural gas.

That’s bad. But also mixed into the toxic soup that erupted from the field were other compounds such as mercaptans including tetrahydrothiophene and t-butyl mercaptan, sulfides, n-hexane, styrene, toluene, and benzene. All really nasty stuff that you don’t want in your air, and that is often emitted by oil and gas wells. The authors write:

“The emissions of BTEX and other HAP compounds are of particular concern as even at levels below health benchmarks they have been linked to health effects, including neurological, respiratory, and developmental effects.”

That appears to have been the case with the Aliso Canyon blowout, where “low birth weight and term low birth weight was higher than expected among women living in the affected area whose late pregnancy overlapped with the disaster.”

It’s simply more confirmation that fossil fuel development and consumption can take a big toll on the environment, the climate, and the people who live in or near the oil and gas patch or associated infrastructure. And that limits on methane emissions are important, even if you don’t care about climate change.

***

Long-time Land Desk readers might remember my story about the Horseshoe Gallup oil and gas field and sacrifice zone in northwestern New Mexico. I wrote about how the area had been ravaged by years of drilling and largely unfettered development, how the wells had been sold or handed off to increasingly irresponsible and slipshod companies as they were depleted, and how that had left dozens of abandoned facilities, oozing and seeping nasty stuff, but were not cleaned up because state and federal regulators still considered them to be “active.”

A trip through a sacrifice zone: The Horseshoe Gallup oilfield — Jonathan P. Thompson

Saga of an Oil Well (The Horseshoe Gallup Field Sacrifice Zone Part II) — Jonathan P. Thompson

The field is still there, along with most of the abandoned wells. But Capital & Main’s Jerry Redfern reports that some of the worst sites, including the NE Hogback 53, are being cleaned up. Well, sort of. The extensive reclamation of the well and the tank battery was started, only to be halted in May at the end of the state’s fiscal year. It resumed in July, and is expected to cost about $650,000.

This highlights the need for stronger enforcement and, most importantly, adequate reclamation bond requirements. At prices like that, cleaning up just the Horseshoe Gallup could cost tens of millions of dollars, and the taxpayer will be left to shoulder most of the bill.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Clarification: In Tuesday’s dispatch on the Colorado River and Lake Powell, I wrote that another dry winter would put “… the elevation of Lake Powell at 3,500 feet by this time next year. And, due to the infrastructure’s limitations, Glen Canyon Dam would have to be operated as a ‘run of the river’ facility.” That probably needs a bit more explanation.

One smart reader pointed out that even after the surface level of Lake Powell drops below minimum power pool, or 3,490 feet in elevation, the dam can still release up to 15,000 cfs from its river outlets. Technically, managers would not be forced to go to run of the river until the surface level dropped below 3,370 feet, which is known as “dead pool.”

However, the Bureau of Reclamation is very wary of relying on the river outlets, because they weren’t designed for long-term use and could fail under those circumstances. So, BoR is intent on keeping the water levels above minimum power pool so that all releases can go through the penstocks and the hydroelectric turbines. “In effect,” the authors of the paper wrote, “at least for the short term, the engineering and safety issues associated with the ability to release water through Glen Canyon Dam mean that the amount of water actually available for release from Lake Powell is only that which exists above elevation 3500 feet.”

So, as long as this is the case, the BoR will need to go to run of the river as soon as the elevation drops to 3,500 feet. I hope that helps clear things up!

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Today’s map is less about the map than it is about the publication it comes from, the USGS’s Guidebook of the Western United States Part E. the Denver & Rio Grande Western Route, published in 1922. This thing is super cool, and super detailed (it’s 384 pages long). It’s got some great photos and maps, like this one (click on the image to see it in larger size on the website).

Besides having a cool, hand drawn style, this map struck me because it was made prior to the reservoirs on the Gunnison River. And it shows how the railroad tracks used to go into the Black Canyon at Cimarron and continue along the river all the way to Gunnison (most of that section is now under water). I suppose I should have known that was where the tracks went, but it never really occurred to me before. Credit: USGS

Related to that map were these two photos illustrating the miracle of irrigation.

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

President Trump’s war on energy: If we’re in an energy emergency, why kill the cleanest, best, and fastest growing sources? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

The Route 66 Solar Energy Center near Grants, New Mexico. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 25, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a “war on energy.” It was a demonstrably false allegation. The most either of the Democrats did to attack the energy industry was to incrementally increase common sense regulations and environmental protections, which apparently did little to hamper energy development. The so-called shale revolution, when “fracking” opened up huge new reserves of tight oil and gas, began under Obama, and truly came to fruition under Biden, when domestic oil and gas production reached new record highs. Meanwhile, Biden’s Interior Department approved dozens of utility-scale solar and wind and long-delayed transmission projects on public lands.

But now the Trump administration is, in fact, waging a very real war on energy — renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. They’ve frozen and even clawed back funds for projects, killed federal clean energy tax credits, subjected wind and solar projects on public lands to heightened reviews, and eliminated wind energy leasing areas off Oregon’s coast. And they’ve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an “energy emergency.”

Now, the Interior Department has gone even further with a new order that threatens to kill all new renewable power development on federal lands. I know there are some readers out there who might applaud this, since so many of our public lands are not suited for sprawling utility-scale solar or wind developments. But this order — deceptively and cynically titled, “Managing Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environment” — would potentially replace proposed wind and solar projects with coal or uranium mines and/or power plants, oil and gas fields, or other non-renewable energy projects.

The order requires land management agencies, when reviewing proposed solar or wind energy projects, to consider “a reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.”

Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Department’s calculations (we’ll get to the flaws there in a moment), the capacity density (megawatts/acre) for various power sources are:

Advanced nuclear reactor: 33.17 MW/acre

Combined cycle gas plant: 5.4 to 24.42 MW/acre (depending on configuration)

Gas combustion turbine: 2.13 to 4.23 MW/acre

Ultra-supercritical coal plant w/out carbon capture: .69 MW/acre

Geothermal: .16

Solar PV w/ battery storage: .04

Onshore wind: .01

Offshore wind: .006

In other words, wind and solar are the big losers, taking up far more space to generate the same amount of electricity as, say, a nuclear plant. According to the new order, this raises the question of “whether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.”

This isn’t a new argument: The specter of “renewable energy sprawl” has long been wielded to push back against solar and wind development. And certainly the amount of space a project takes up should be one of many considerations in whether to permit it. But should it really have more weight than the amount of damage the project would inflict? How about pollutants emitted per megawatt, or amount of harm to people, the climate, and the environment per megawatt? Is there consideration for the fact that there is a lot of space between the turbines within a wind facility that is minimally affected? And why doesn’t their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?

Also, the Interior Department’s calculations are a bit fishy, or at least incomplete. They say they are based on a 2023 Sargent & Lundy report commissioned by the Energy Information Administration. The report is not on capacity density, but rather the costs of building and operating various power generating technologies. When determining the acreage of the nuclear and fossil fuel plants, they do not take into account the land required for fuel production, which can be extensive.

The supercritical coal plant referenced in the report, for example, would require a mere 600 acres. Yet, the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico — along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities — covers (and wrecks) some 15,000 acres. That acreage will continue to grow for as long as the plant operates, since the mine and waste dumps will continue to expand. Compare that to the 2,400 acres covered by the nearby San Juan solar plant.

I’d also argue that if the goal is to get the most energy out of every acre of public land (which is a silly goal, but whatever), then they should figure in the amount of energy the proposed project consumes. Coal mining and oil and gas drilling require large amounts of electricity and petroleum (along with human labor, which is also a form of energy), as does transporting coal and gas by train and pipeline. Uranium enrichment, which is necessary to produce reactor fuel, is extremely power-intensive.

None of this really matters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, however. That’s because he knows we’re not really in an “energy emergency,” and that it is merely a fabricated excuse to give more handouts and regulatory relief to his fossil fuel-industry buddies and to get revenge on Trump’s political opponents by punishing cleaner energy sources.

Proposed utility-scale solar and wind facilities on public lands should by all means be scrutinized and subjected to the same reviews as any other projects, contrary to what the Abundance faction might believe. The projects should be denied if their impacts outweigh the benefits, with bonus benefit-points for solar or wind projects that displace or replace coal or natural gas generation.

But judging the projects based on a virtually meaningless metric is not only spiteful, unfair, and stupid, but it also will needlessly hamper the fight against health-harming pollution and climate change. And that’s simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Speaking of fake energy emergencies … In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah’s Lisbon Valley in just 11 days. The rush, sans public input, ostensibly was necessary to get the mine online quickly to address the supposed uranium shortage.

The mine’s proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesn’t share the Trump administration’s sense of urgency. At the end of April, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining asked Anfield for more information on its application to commence large mining operations, which was deemed technically incomplete. Anfield has yet to respond. The company is also not rushing forward to get state approval for its water treatment plant permit or to reopen its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, where the Velvet-Wood’s uranium would be processed.

In other words, the fast-tracked permitting was merely a ruse, intended to bypass environmental regulations and public input, not to expedite the project, itself.

***

Photo-illustration of the Animas River a few days after the spill from the air. Jonathan P. Thompson photo and illustration.

It’s the tenth anniversary of the Gold King Mine blowout that affected the Animas and San Juan rivers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A few folks have asked if I’m going to write anything about it — since I did write a book about it — but I don’t think there’s much more to say, really.

The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water — though it is being treated before it’s released into the watershed — and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they aren’t being treated). Superfund designation hasn’t been the boon to water quality that some hoped for, nor did it stigmatize Silverton as many feared it would (property values continue to soar into the unreachable zone).

While the event did bring more attention to the problem of abandoned mine sites (even though the Gold King wasn’t technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected “acid mine drainage” into the public’s vocabulary, it hasn’t led to mining law reform or any widespread effort to address the issue. That said, Congress finally did pass a Good Samaritan bill, that might clear the way for volunteer groups to do some additional cleanup without being sued for it. Still, they need funding, and that’s in short supply these days.

If you’d like to read more on it, check out this piece by Peter Butler. And you can check out past stories in the Land Desk for more information (links below, but they are behind the paywall). Better yet, go down to your local bookstore and buy River of Lost Souls.

On Superfund and the Gold King, 9 years later — Jonathan P. Thompson

Wonkfest: Sunnyside Gold King Settlement, explained — Jonathan P. Thompson

Gold King documents and map unearthed — Jonathan P. Thompson

This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]

An image of the Sharp Fire near Cahone, Colorado, from the Benchmark fire lookout. Source: Watch Duty.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Fire season is really heating up, along with the summer temperatures. The relatively dry spring was followed by higher than normal temperatures in July and zero to minimal precipitation in many places, turning low- and mid-elevation forests to kindling. Officials working the Leroux Fire west of Paonia said the relative humidity was just 2%, contributing to rapid fire growth.

The Leroux blaze was just one of many new starts on Colorado’s Western Slope over the last several days. The Sharp Canyon Fire north of Cahone, Colorado, grew rapidly to 400 acres on Monday, forcing evacuations, but it seems to have quieted down overnight. The Lee and Elk fires in Rio Blanco County blew up to 13,000 and 7,700 acres, respectively, over a couple of days. The Middle Mesa Fire east of Navajo Reservoir and just south of the Colorado-New Mexico line grew to 2,500 acres as of Monday night.

Meanwhile, the Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has lived up to its name, reaching 126,445 acres as of Tuesday morning with only 13% containment a month after it ignited.

The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings for parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, with extreme heat warnings in parts of Arizona and southern California. The mercury in Moab is expected to reach 100° F or more every day this week, and there’s no significant rainfall in sight.

Uranium Company Receives #Wyoming’s First Fast-Tracked Mining Permits — Jake Bolster (InsideClimateNews.org)

Inside Uranium Energy Corp.’s Irigaray Central Processing Plant located in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Credit: Uranium Energy Corp.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Jake Bolster):

August 6, 2025

The state could eventually host the nation’s largest uranium production facility to use two different mining methods. Environmentalists worry that expedited permitting in the nuclear sector could threaten “safety, environmental quality and public trust.”

Uranium Energy Corp.’s Sweetwater uranium project has become the first mining proposal in Wyoming to be fast-tracked under President Donald Trump’s March executive order to increase U.S. mineral production.

The company announced Aug. 5 that it planned to expand its uranium mining operations in Wyoming’s Red Desert as a result of the expedited permitting process. The federal government expects to post a permitting timetable for the project by Aug. 15.

Through other executive orders, the dismantling of environmental regulations and the spending bill congressional Republicans passed in July, the second Trump administration has made it easier for extractive industries to receive permits for mining on public lands. Trump has classified uranium as a “critical mineral” for the U.S., which imported 99 percent of its fuel for nuclear energy in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

John Burrows, energy and climate policy director at the Wyoming Outdoor Council, saw the fast-tracking news as evidence of a pattern in the state’s nascent nuclear industry.

“Across the nuclear supply chain we’re seeing permits getting expedited and we’re having concerns around safety, environmental quality and public trust,” he said.

Last month, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission accelerated its review of an advanced nuclear reactor being built in Kemmerer, Wyoming, with an end-of-year completion goal. TerraPower, the company behind the new technology, was co-founded by billionaire Bill Gates.

Uranium Energy’s Sweetwater permits were fast-tracked by the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council. Trump’s March executive order required the executive director of the council to publish such projects on a special dashboard.

“I am excited to welcome the Sweetwater Complex to the FAST-41 transparency dashboard in support of President Trump’s goal of unlocking America’s mineral resources,” said Emily Domenech, the council’s executive director, in a statement accompanying Uranium Energy’s announcement. “The uranium that this project can produce would be game-changing for our nation as we work to reduce our reliance on Russia and China, strengthen our national and economic security, and reestablish a robust domestic supply chain of nuclear fuel.”

The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council was established in 2015 under President Barack Obama and made permanent by President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.

Pictorial representation of the In situ uranium mining process. Graphic credit: (source: Heathgate Resources)

If approved, Uranium Energy expects to begin “in-situ” uranium mining within its permit boundaries. The process involves leaching uranium from underground rock and does less surface disturbance than conventional strip-mining methods. The company already operates conventional uranium mines in Wyoming but wants to expand its claim to include nearby areas it says are suitable for in-situ retrieval methods.

“This will provide the Company unrivaled flexibility to scale production across the Great Divide Basin,” Amir Adnani, Uranium Energy’s president and CEO, said in an email.

If Uranium Energy receives its permits, which could still take years, the company said its Sweetwater facility will become the largest in the United States capable of processing both conventionally and in-situ-mined uranium. Its current licensed production capacity at the Sweetwater facility is 4.1 million pounds of uranium annually, the company said.

The US government has declared war on the very idea of #ClimateChange — CNN

Youth plaintiffs walking and chatting outside the courthouse in Montana summer 2023. Photo credit: Robin Loznak via Youth v. Gov

Click the link to read the article on the CNN website (Zachary B. Wolf):

August 1, 2025

…in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change. These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate. But that’s just one data point. There are many others:

Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.

Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.

The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.

Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.

Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.

The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.

Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.

Cuts to the federal workforce directly targeted offices and employees focused on climate change.

#Drought intensifies and spreads: Also: Introducing Data Center Watch, alfalfa exports fall, federal agency trolling — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 1, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

The monsoon is on its way, apparently, but seems to be delivering more lightning than rain to many areas that are grappling with wildfires. Meanwhile, the drought is intensifying and spreading in almost all parts of the West, especially in the deep Southwest.

Streamflows are dropping, too. The Animas River in Durango has fallen to about 200 cubic feet per second, and it’s only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexico’s, new surfing wave. The Rio Grande already dried up in Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago (but got a good boost from a thunderstorm early this morning). WyoFile reports that the Snake, Wind, and Bear Rivers are all at record low flows for this date, even though the snowpack was about average this winter.

And, of course, the wildfires continue to burn. The Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has burned through 112,000 acres so far, with only 9% containment. The Monroe Canyon Fire in southwestern Utah is at 55,642 acres with 7% containment, and is causing power outages in surrounding communities. The Turner Gulch Fire northeast of Gateway is still growing “due to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.” And the Elkhorn Fire north of Durango has settled down a bit at 317 acres, but officials worry forecasted hot and dry conditions could reawaken it.

Below are some satellite moisture index maps, with blue being moist and red indicating dryness. The top image shows Dove Creek and areas south of there. This was dryland farming country for many years (Pinto Bean Capital of the World), but irrigation from McPhee Reservoir on the Dolores River was later extended out to Dove Creek. Problem is, their water rights are junior to the farmers in the Montezuma Valley near Cortez, so when reservoir levels are low, they tend to get less irrigation water. Here you can see the difference between 2023 (on the left), when snow, river, and reservoir levels were high, and this year (right), when they are not. What stands out to me is that some fields are still being irrigated this year, despite the drought, as is indicated by the circles of bright blue. But there are more fallow fields now, and the areas around the fields are especially dry.

Here are two more images showing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farms south of Ute Mountain in 2023 compared to 2025. Again, some irrigation is still reaching the fields, but apparently far less, given the number of fields that are apparently fallow.

📈 Data Center Watch 📊

The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that I’ll be covering data centers and their economic and environmental ramifications a bit more frequently from here on out. Why? Because they currently are proliferating throughout the West: There are 93 data centers in the Phoenix area, 54 in the greater Denver area, and eight in Albuquerque, with many more on their way. And every one of them uses outsized quantities of electricity and water, straining power grids, and throwing utilities’ resource planning into disarray.

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesn’t count Meta’s $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrass’s proposed facility that would pull 1,800 megawatts of electricity from new, dedicated natural gas plants and renewable power installations (presumably solar and wind). Down in Tucson, city officials are considering Amazon Web Services’ proposed Project Blue, a massive complex that is poised to consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year and become Tucson Electric Power’s largest single customer.

In Alaska, a company is looking to build a large data center and a dedicated natural gas plant that would run off of oilfield methane. Numerous data centers can be found along the banks of the Columbia River, drawn there in part by the relatively cheap and abundant hydropower. In Montana, a proposed data center would use all of the powergenerated by NorthWestern Energy’s existing resources. And Pacific Gas & Electric expects new data centers in Silicon Valley to drive a 10 GW increase in electricity demand over the next decade, which is about one-third of today’s forecast peak demand for California’s grid.

The biggest concern with these sprawling warehouses packed with processors is their power consumption. Each one can draw as much electricity as a small city — the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the state’s households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities weren’t expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now it’s hitting hard, and coinciding with increased demand from a growing number of electric vehicles and electrified homes, and utilities are scrambling to bring new power sources online to meet the projected demand growth. This includes geothermal, wind, and solar power — each with impacts of their own — but also new natural gas plants and even small nuclear reactors. Some utilities are cancelling plans to retire coal plants to keep enough generating capacity online.

In other words, the data center boom is likely to radically reshape the energy landscape of the West, and will spur more debates over the costs of this sort of economic development and the impacts our cyber-world has on the environment and humanity.

📈 Data Dump 📊

In some ways, I guess you could say that as alfalfa is to the Colorado River, data centers are to the Western power grid: they both suck up a lot of the resources. That doesn’t make them bad. Alfalfa mostly goes to dairy cows, which make cheese and ice cream and other really good things. Data centers power annoying AI art, sure, but they also make everything internet possible, including me sending this newsletter to you.

Anyway, it’s worth tracking both — alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So here’s a quick update on hay exports from the U.S. (which includes alfalfa and other hay), as well as a look at acreage planted in alfalfa (excl. other hay) over time. Exports seem to have peaked in 2022 and are now in decline. Nevertheless, sending alfalfa and other hay overseas is big business.

🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

You might think that our federal agencies under Trump would be content to wreck the environment and trample civil liberties in a quiet, not-so-noticeable way. But no, of course not: They’re so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof — they are trolling us, in other words.

Above are just two recent examples. In the first one, the Department of Energy fawns over a sparkling chunk of coal. In the other, the Department of Homeland Security posts an 1872 painting by John Gast titled “American Progress.”

Both are gross in their own way.

What the hell kind of sexualization of coal — i.e. “She is the moment” — are they going for in that first one? Friggin’ perverts, if you ask me.

As for the second, it glorifies the crimes the American military and white colonial settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples in order to get more Lebensraum, one might say (it makes sense to use Hitler’s term given that he was inspired by the U.S.’s policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word “Heritage” in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but it’s also kind of weird to be talking about defending the “Homeland” against immigrants when, in the image, the immigrant invaders are the white settlers, and the folks trying to defend themselves and their homeland are the Indigenous people (and wildlife) fleeing from the settlers.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I don’t want to leave y’all with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.

Federal Water Tap, July 7, 2025: President Signs Budget Bill, Agencies Move to Streamline Environmental Reviews — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

Sensitive satellite-based instruments enable scientists to measure relative variations of Earth’s gravitational field. Data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is used in a new study to show that many continental regions are experiencing long-term aridification. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research

The Rundown

President Trump’s budget bill targets a few water projects while eliminating some climate and environment programs.

Agencies move to constrain environmental reviews under NEPA.

EPA says it will loosen wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants later this summer.

GAO reviews NASA’s major projects, including the third generation of a water-tracking satellite.

EPA intends to take public comments on its idea to narrow state and tribal reviews under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.

White House orders higher fees for foreign tourists visiting national parks.

And lastly, EPA’s internal watchdog notes the risks of rising seas to federally owned Superfund sites.

“If contaminants from federal facility Superfund sites are released into the surrounding communities, the health, jobs, and environment of millions of U.S. residents may be threatened. Further, the federal funds expended to implement those remedies would have been wasted.” – Report from the EPA Office of Inspector General that identifies 49 federally owned Superfund sites at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.

By the Numbers

$658 Million: Expected baseline cost of the third generation of NASA’s satellite mission that measures changes in the planet’s water storage. The GRACE-C mission is scheduled for July 2029, according to a Government Accountability Office review of NASA’s major projects. Operating for more than two decades, the GRACE satellites have been instrumental in tracking global groundwater depletion.

News Briefs

NEPA Overhaul
Cabinet and other agencies – including the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Army Corps of Engineers – announced they will revise their rules for environmental reviews of major projects and prioritize shorter and quicker assessments of potential harms.

The agencies are shortening the administrative timeline for implementing a new rule, arguing that the standard notice-and-comment process would be an unnecessary delay and “contrary to the public interest.”

The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House arm that traditionally oversees NEPA, revoked its regulations in April in response to an executive order promoting domestic energy production. The agencies, now seeking faster, more efficient reviews, are establishing their own rules.

Besides the arrival of the new administration, recent legal rulings have also rearranged the playing field for environmental reviews.

In justifying its action, each agency cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in May in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. That ruling, in a case which centered on a railroad line in Utah for crude oil, allowed for narrowly focused environmental reviews that assess only a specific project and not the actions – like upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining – it would enable.

Budget Bill
The budget reconciliation bill, which could add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, barely mentioned water directly.

Among the few call outs: The bill delivers $1 billion for surface water storage and water conveyance in the western United States. The money is for projects that increase or restore capacity of Bureau of Reclamation water conveyance systems or increase their use. Increasing reservoir storage capacity – such as raising Shasta Dam, a Republican-driven idea that’s been on the table for years – is also acceptable. The money is available through September 30, 2034.

More broadly, climate and environment programs were chopped. Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds – those not yet committed to a recipient – were yanked back for programs on climate data, environmental justice block grants, reducing air pollution at schools, and more.

National Parks Fees
President Trump ordered the Interior Department to increase national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The additional revenue would be channeled to infrastructure improvements at the parks or to increase park access.

Still Storm Watching, For Now
NOAA said it would delay by one month the termination of certain storm-tracking satellite data, the Associated Press reports.

Studies and Reports

Superfund Sites at Risk from Rising Seas
The federal government owns 157 Superfund sites. Forty-nine of those sites are at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.

The assessment comes from the EPA’s internal watchdog, which published the report to draw attention to federal liabilities related to climate change and the nation’s most toxic sites.

The at-risk Superfund sites are clustered at military sites around Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and San Francisco Bay.

Arizona Groundwater Assessment
The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on water quality in the Coconino aquifer in northern Arizona, where it could be a water source for the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation.

On the Radar

Water Quality Permitting
The EPA is considering a rulemaking that would narrow the scope of Clean Water Act reviews undertaken by states and tribes.

These Section 401 reviews have been a target of the Trump administration. Energy companies complain that states have used their review authority to block fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines.

Before the rulemaking, the EPA is asking for public input. The agency opened a docket for written submissions, and it will hold two online events at a time to be announced.

File written comments at www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0272. The deadline is August 6.

Another Slogan Commission
Through an executive order, President Trump established the President’s Make America Beautiful Again Commission.

The commission’s objectives – “promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth; expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing; encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts; cut bureaucratic delays; and recover America’s fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts” – in some ways conflict with the administration’s desire to cut budgets and greenlight fossil fuel projects.

One of the commission’s charges is to recommend to the president “solutions to expand access to clean drinking water and restore aquatic ecosystems to improve water quality and availability.” Stay tuned.

Power Plant Wastewater
Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said his agency later this summer will relax wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants that burn fossil fuel and nuclear fuel.

The Biden administration placed stricter limits on these wastewater discharges last year. In a press release, Zeldin said compliance deadlines would be extended. The agency will also reconsider technological requirements for preventing polluted discharges.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

A jarring pothole — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Josh Shipley. Credi: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

July 3, 2025

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.

On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.

“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”

The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.

“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.

“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”

Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.

The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.

“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.

“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”

Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.

“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.

“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”

Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.

“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”

Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.

The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.

Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.

Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.

The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.

States’ nuclear energy growth needs federal action to follow President Trump’s vocal support: #Colorado among Democratic states where some leaders see increasing potential for #nuclear power — Allison Prang (ColoradoNewsline.com)

September 2019 photo of Three Mile Island and Goldsboro, Pennsylvania. By Groupmesa – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82001702

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Allison Prang):

April 5, 2025

President Donald Trump and his team have signaled a strong interest in continuing to strengthen federal support for nuclear power, an energy source Democratic states are increasingly open to expanding.

The administration’s loudly pro-nuclear position creates a rare point of overlap between Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose signature legislation funded hundreds of millions in tax credits for low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear power.

Trump during his first roughly three months in office issued multiple executive orders mentioning nuclear energy, casting his broad energy strategy as a way to expand the country’s power resources and shore up its security. State lawmakers are also pushing their own policy moves, sometimes just in an effort to set themselves up to embrace nuclear power at some point in the future.

“There are a lot of really positive signals,” said Rowen Price, senior policy adviser for nuclear energy at Third Way, a centrist policy think tank.

Nuclear in Colorado

From Colorado Newsline

A new law that Colorado state leaders enacted this year, House Bill 25-1040, designates nuclear energy as clean. That means utilities can meet clean-energy targets with nuclear power, and it also allows private projects access to financing that’s earmarked for clean energy development.

But Price said she’s concerned that support for nuclear power could be swept up in bigger political fights, such as many congressional Republicans’ goal of axing clean-energy tax credits in Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The administration’s broad cuts to the federal workforce could also eventually hurt the government’s nuclear ambitions, she added.

The promise of a nuclear resurgence in the United States isn’t a new goal for the industry or its backers in Washington, D.C., but how successful efforts to expand nuclear power generation will be in the U.S. — a metric that hasn’t budged from around 20% in decades — remains to be seen.

Americans’ support for the energy source, meanwhile, is just short of its record high, a recent Gallup Poll found. And more blue states have also started to embrace nuclear power, which has traditionally been more favored by Republicans, to reach climate goals and grow electricity capacity amid anticipated increases in demand.

But even as interest in states grows, the cost of building nuclear infrastructure remains an impediment only the federal government is positioned to help scale.

‘Renaissance of nuclear’

Energy Secretary Chris Wright in April talked about the administration’s desire to elevate nuclear power by making it easier to test reactors, delivering fuel to next-generation nuclear firms and utilizing the department’s Loan Programs Office to help bring nuclear power projects online.

“We would like to see a renaissance of nuclear,” Wright said at the news outlet Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington. “The conditions are there and the administration is going to do everything we can to lean in to help commercial businesses and customers launch nuclear.”

The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan. (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission photo)

Wright said he wants the department to help launch 10 to 20 new nuclear reactors to get the industry moving again and to bring down costs. The department’s loan office could make debt investments alongside large-scale data center companies that use massive amounts of power to build nuclear projects and then exit those deals after the projects are built, allowing the office to recycle that funding, he said.

The department recently announced that it approved a third loan disbursement to reopen the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, which Holtec has been working on doing for the last few years.

Last month, the department said it was reopening $900 million in funding to help companies working on small modular reactors after changing some of the Biden administration’s guidance on the program.

Federal workforce cuts

Third Way’s Price noted that a portion of staffers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which she described as already “tightly constrained” — are eligible for retirement either now or in the next five years.

Workforce cuts at the Energy Department and elsewhere could also hurt efforts to grow the nuclear power sector, she said.

“Frankly, all of the verbal support from this administration for nuclear only matters if they’re actually going to put forward and implement policies that support it,” Price said. “We need to make sure that they do it.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said in an email that it “is conducting a department-wide review to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.”

The agency said it didn’t have a final count on how many staffers have left the department through its resignation program, but noted that it doesn’t necessarily approve all requests. The department didn’t comment on how many staffers focused on nuclear energy have been laid off.

Nuclear programs were among those affected by the Trump administration’s pausing of federal programs and funding, said David Brown, senior vice president of federal government affairs and public policy at Constellation Energy, which runs the biggest fleet of nuclear plants in the country. But Brown said that even so, the industry is coming out on top.

“I think what we are seeing is that as they work through their various review(s) of programs that they’re greenlighting the nuclear stuff,” Brown said.

Federal support crucial, but politics tricky

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill could also change the outcome for industry, for better or worse.

Wright, in his remarks last month, said he hopes Congress will take action to help expand nuclear energy, and said lawmakers could do so in the budget reconciliation package on which the U.S. House has started to work.

Republican House members have not yet released text of the sections of the package that will deal with energy policy. Wright said support for nuclear power could be included in the reconciliation package, but some advocates are also worried that the package, or the annual appropriations bills, are the exact kind of political battles that efforts to support nuclear power, like the tax credits, could get tied up in.

Some state lawmakers point to financial support from the federal government as essential for the industry to grow, even if states make their own headway to build support for nuclear power.

Colorado state Rep. Alex Valdez, a Democrat who sponsored a bill signed into law this session to include nuclear in the state’s definition of clean energy, said he hopes the administration follows through on its admiration of nuclear power with funding for states.

“Generally, states do not have the financial resources the federal government does,” Valdez said. “It’s going to be the federal government that puts their investments behind these things, and that’s what’s going to enable states as a whole to be able to move forward on them.”

‘The West will lead’: #Utah, #Idaho, #Wyoming team up on nuclear energy development — Katie McKellar (UtahNewsDispatch.com)

Utah leaders and Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner sign a memorandum of understanding at the Governor’s Mansion in Salt Lake City on April 28, 2025. (Courtesy of the Utah Senate)

Click the link to read the article on the Utah News Dispatch website (Katie McKellar):

April 29, 2025

Utah state leaders are taking the next steps in their efforts to make Utah a major nuclear energy development hub and a “national leader” in developing next-generation energy technology, reaching beyond state lines to do it.

It starts with Utah signing two memorandums of understanding with Idaho and Wyoming as part of a strategy to fire up innovation and collaboration in the region.

As part of Gov. Spencer Cox’s “Built Here: Nuclear Energy Summit,” which his office said brought together leaders from across the nuclear energy industry on Tuesday, Cox joined Idaho Gov. Brad Little and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon in signing an MOU that calls for the three states to work together coordinating nuclear infrastructure, accelerating nuclear development, and advocating for “commonsense federal policies.”

“The West will lead the next chapter of energy abundance and American prosperity,” Cox said in a statement announcing the alliance. “Today, we brought together industry leaders, investors, and policymakers to chart the course for nuclear energy. Our new compact strengthens our shared commitment to aggressively pursue more affordable, reliable energy across state lines.”

According to Cox’s office, the states agreed in the MOU to collaborate on:

Aligning energy policies to support innovation and private investment.

Coordinating the development of critical energy infrastructure.

Jointly navigating regulatory and environmental challenges.

Advocating for federal support of regional energy priorities.

Enhancing energy resilience and grid reliability.

Expanding workforce development efforts to support the growing energy sector.

Ensuring continued delivery of affordable energy to residents.

The tri-state agreement comes the day after Utah officials and the Idaho National Laboratory — one of 17 national labs in the U.S. Department of Energy complex that’s focused on nuclear research — signed a memorandum of understanding Monday evening after ceremoniously signing a slate of energy bills Utah lawmakers passed earlier this year.

The MOU between Utah leaders and the Idaho National Laboratory establishes a “formal, long-term collaboration on advanced energy research, workforce development and technology deployment — particularly on nuclear innovation,” according to the governor’s office.

“This partnership will accelerate Utah’s efforts to become the nation’s nuclear hub,” Gov. Spencer Cox said in a prepared statement issued Monday evening. “By linking our universities, labs, and industry partners with the expertise of Idaho National Laboratory, we are strengthening our ability to serve Utahns with reliable and affordable energy.”

Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner, who signed the MOU, said he and other lab officials are “excited to partner with Utah to address urgent energy needs by focusing on advanced nuclear and energy innovation.”

“This partnership establishes a cooperative framework for scientific, technological and workforce development to help Utah realize an abundant, secure, resilient and competitive energy future,” he said.

The MOU, according to the governor’s office, creates a “structural, interdisciplinary alliance” between Utah and the Idaho National Laboratory. It envisions Utah as establishing a new institute called the Advanced Nuclear Energy Institute as a “key coordinating hub” between the Idaho National Laboratory, Utah’s system of higher education, the Utah Office of Energy Development, and the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab.

“By linking the capabilities of INL with the talent and resources of Utah’s higher education institutions, this partnership positions Utah as a national leader in developing the next generation of clean, secure and resilient energy technologies,” the governor’s office said in Monday’s news release.

This new institute, state officials say, will enable Utah’s universities to collaborate with other organizations to pursue federal research grants.

“Beyond academic research, the focus is on applied innovation — ensuring resources are used effectively to develop commercially viable, scalable technologies,” the governor’s office said. “This approach will accelerate the deployment of real-world energy solutions and help build a broader, more robust nuclear energy ecosystem in Utah and the surrounding region.”

Through the MOU, state leaders say Utah and the Idaho National Laboratory will work together to:

Accelerate development of “next-generation” nuclear technologies.

Enhance scientific research in energy sectors.

Strengthen cybersecurity and physical security for energy infrastructure.

Build up the workforce needed to meet demands of a future energy economy.

The Utah Legislature’s top Republican leaders both applauded the move as crucial for Utah’s future.

“Affordable, reliable energy is the driving force behind Utah’s prosperity — powering everything from the lights in Utahns homes to the unstoppable growth of the state’s vibrant economy,” Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said in a prepared statement. “As energy demands increase and technologies rapidly evolve, we as a state are committed to staying ahead of the curve through strategic partnership that ensures both innovation and stability.”

House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said Utah “is leading the way with smart, strategic investments in our energy future.”

“This partnership drives innovation and keeps energy reliable and affordable for Utah families and businesses,” Schultz said. “It’s about long-term solutions that protect our economy and strengthen our position as a national energy leader.”

Interior eviscerates public land protections, fast-tracks mining, drilling: Plus: National monument shrinkage appears imminent — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

An oil and gas drilling operation in the Chaco region checkerboard of northwestern New Mexico. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 25, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

For the past three months and change, the Trump administration, in a series of executive orders, has been working to dismantle the administrative state, or the framework of agencies, rules, and regulations designed to protect the nation and its citizens. For the most part, however, the Interior Department — the sprawling agency that oversees much of the nation’s public lands — has been relatively (and suspiciously) quiet, refraining from big actions beyond merely repeating some of Trump’s orders.

That has rapidly changed in recent days as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — or perhaps Tyler Hassan, the DOGE minion Elon Musk appointed to reorganize Interior — set off a figurative bomb that could demolish protections for public lands.

The most alarming move, so far, is the department’s implementation of “emergency permitting procedures” for oil and gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, and critical mineral projects on federal lands. Under this order, the department will compress the entire environmental review for these projects down to 28 days or less — even for a full environmental impact statement.

“By reducing a multi-year permitting process down to just 28 days,” Burgum said in a press release, “the Department will lead with urgency, resolve, and a clear focus on strengthening the nation’s energy independence.”

If you’ve ever skimmed through an EIS, you know how insane this concept is.

The Bureau of Land Management will be packing the entire process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and other rules and regulations into an impossibly short timeframe.

By impossibly short, I mean that it is virtually impossible to comply with these laws and requirements — which include tribal consultation, archaeological surveys and mitigation, environmental and endangered species reviews, socioeconomic impact analyses, and public comment periods — in four weeks or less. So by radically compressing the timeline, Burgum is essentially telling his staff to skirt the requirements, i.e. violate the law.

Burgum uses President Trump’s claim that the U.S. is experiencing an “energy emergency,” to justify the destructive rubber-stamping, and says fast-tracking project approvals is necessary to address that emergency.

I’ve said it many times, but I will say it again: There is no energy emergency. The U.S. is pumping more crude oil than ever before from the Permian Basin and other fields, it is the largest petroleum producer in the world, it is a net exporter of petroleum products, and liquefied natural gas exports are at an all-time high. The U.S. market is glutted with natural gas and the coal supply has been outpacing demand for nearly two decades. Lithium — for electric vehicle batteries and grid-scale energy storage — is so plentiful that prices have plummeted nearly 90% since 2022. Uranium shortage? Nope.

One could certainly argue that the power grid in the West is outdated, its operation balkanized, and that it is not up to the challenges posed by growing data center electricity demand. But aside from geothermal and hydropower (solar, wind, and transmission projects are not included), none of the categories of projects on the fast-track list would do anything to fix the grid. Even if they were, it would not justify truncating environmental reviews so severely — or at all.

Environmental reviews can take a maddeningly long time, especially for big projects. But the way to speed things up is not to throw the laws and protections in the the trash bin. That will only lead to lawsuits, which likely will delay the projects even more. The only way to truly streamline permitting, while still safeguarding human health and the environment, is to beef up staffing, resources, and expertise. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Trump and Musk and Burgum are doing.

Pages from the Interior Department’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Draft Framework acquired and published by Public Domain. Note that one objective is to “release federal holdings” for housing. And that in the top one they want to “reduce the costs for grazing” on public land (can it go any lower?), while in the bottom one they want to “increase revenues from grazing … .” Uh … okay?

But wait. It gets worse.

We might take some comfort in the fact that national monuments are off-limits to the extractive industries and Trump’s energy dominance agenda, right? Maybe not for long.

Earlier this week, the folks at Public Domain acquired a copy of the Interior Department’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Draft Framework. The plan aims to, among other things: “restore American prosperity,” “assess and right-size monuments,” and “return heritage lands and sites to the states.”

The Washington Post, however, is reporting that Burgum is not necessarily waiting until next year to “right-size,” or shrink, national monuments. From the Post:

If they go through with the shrinkage of any or all of these national monuments, it would open up additional lands to oil and gas leasing and new mining claims, which would then be subject to the fast-tracked permitting.

Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon is especially rich in high-grade uranium deposits, and the White Canyon area in Bears Ears might also be targeted for uranium if the monument were shrunk. Grand Staircase-Escalante includes a large coal deposit on the Kaipairowitz Plateau, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that anyone would be interested in mining it given the faulty economics of coal.

One thing you can be sure of is that none of this will go unchallenged. The tribal nations that proposed the designation of Bears Ears and other national monuments will sue to keep them intact, and advocacy groups and land and water protectors will support them and take the administration to court over its flouting of environmental laws.

A look across Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and into Bears Ears National Monument from the Little Rockies. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

For many people, the mention of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area evokes images of Lake Powell and all that entails: boats plying the blue-sky-reflecting waters and the sandstone cliffs and formations that rise up from the murky depths. That makes sense, given that the national park unit was established because the reservoir was there in 1972.

Yet the reservoir makes up just 13% of the 1.25 million-acre recreation area. The remaining 87% contains some of the more remote and spectacular country in the lower 48, shares borders with a half-dozen other national parks and monuments, and makes up the core of the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor.

So, the manner in which the area is managed matters — a lot. And for five decades after the recreation area’s establishment, off-road vehicle travel went virtually unmanaged, allowing for a destructive free-for-all along shorelines and in remote parts of the recreation area. In 2018, the Park Service released a plan that more or less codified the pre-plan anarchy. Environmentalists sued and forced the Park Service back to the drawing board.

This January the Park Service finally issued an amended rule celebrated by conservationists for adding protections to some of GCNRA’s more sensitive areas from motorized vehicle travel (this does not affect boating, by the way). It bars OHV-riding yahoos from roaring around the lake’s shore unheeded, and restricts motorized travel in the Orange Cliffs area on the north end of the recreation area adjacent to the Maze in Canyonlands.

The off-road vehicle lobby, however, was unhappy with the added restrictions, and they took their victim-complex grievances to the Utah congressional delegation, all of whom appear to have a fetish for fossil-fueled combustion-engines. Now the plan and the recreation area are being put in jeopardy by — you guessed it — those same Utah politicians. Sens. John Curtis and Mike Lee, along with Rep. Celeste Maloy, are asking Congress to revoke the rule under the Congressional Review Act and to prohibit the Park Service from implementing similar protections in the future.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

The National Parks Conservation Association created a nifty map showing active mining claims and mines near national parks and national monuments. It gives a good sense of how vulnerable some areas might be to new mining claims and projects if the Trump administration goes ahead with shrinking the aforementioned national monuments. You can look at the interactive version here.

One note of caution: An active mining claim ≠ a valid mining claim. An active claim simply means it has been located and filed, and that the claimant has paid their annual maintenance fee. The validity of a claim, on the other hand, depends on the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit there, which must be demonstrated. Rights to mine are only attached to valid claims.

Parting Poem

Here’s another one from Richard Shelton’s Selected Poems, 1969-1981.

Can “toilet to tap” save the #ColoradoRiver?: Zombified uranium industry twitches; spring #runoff forecast looks grim — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Lake Mead and the big “bathtub ring” as seen from next to Hoover Dam. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 15, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

The 40 million or so people who rely on the Colorado River for drinking, bathing, irrigating, cooling data centers or power plants, or filling their swimming pools with have a problem. The amount of water being pulled out of the river for all of this stuff exceeds the amount of water that’s actually in the river — at least during most years in the last couple decades. And on the rare exception that supply exceeds demand, the surplus does little to dent the deficit, resulting in perennially low reservoir levels and chronically high water-manager stress levels.

Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall

There is exactly one way out of this mess: The collective users simply need to use less.

Yet while the solution may be simple, it’s not exactly easy to carry out. That’s in part because people keep moving to the region, increasing demand. Plus, as the climate warms, we need more water to keep the crops or the grass or ourselves from drying up, making cutting consumption difficult and even dangerous.

An even bigger obstacle to reducing use is the societal urge to try to solve problems by consuming more, building more, and doing more (see the rise of the “Abundance” movement among American liberals). Using less goes directly against that urge (see Trump’s recent executive order titled: Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads). That inclination drives the slew of schemes to try to produce more water, whether its by building dams, throwing dynamite into the sky, seeding clouds, desalinating seawater, or draining the Great Lakes and piping the water across the nation and over mountains to water Palm Springs golf courses. While it’s true that dams have given folks a bit more time to find a solution, building more of them now — with the exception of stormwater capture basins — won’t do any good (since even existing reservoirs are far from full).

But there is one thing we can do more of to help us consume less: recycling. While the idea of recycling water inspires turn-off terms like “toilet to tap,” the practice is actually quite common in the Colorado River states. (And, really, if you live downstream from any other community, you are probably drinking the upstream towns’ recycled wastewater, though that isn’t counted as recycling, per se.)

A new report out of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment & Sustainability gives the rundown on wastewater recycling in the Colorado River Basin, and reveals that Arizona and Nevada are way ahead of the Upper Basin when it comes to reusing water, yet still have room for improvement. And it finds that if all of the Colorado River states aside from Arizona and Nevada were to increase wastewater reuse by 50%, they would free up some 1.3 million acre-feet of water per year, which is about one-third of the way to the 4 million acre-feet of cuts deemed necessary.

Some states are on top of water recycling (way to go Arizona and Nevada!). Others not so much (we see you Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming). Source: “Can water reuse save the Colorado? An analysis of wastewater recycling in the Colorado River Basin states.” Authors: Noah Garrison, Lauren Stack, Jessica McKay, and Mark Gold Additional Research: Danielle Sonobe, Emily Tieu, Katherine Mathews, and Julia Wu”

To be clear, not all water recycling is “toilet to tap.” In fact, most is not. In Las Vegas, for example, treated effluent is used to irrigate golf courses, and it’s also returned back to Lake Mead, which is then credited against Nevada’s water allotment. And in Arizona, treated wastewater from the Phoenix-area is used for steam production and cooling at the Palo Verde nuclear plant (which evaporates a whopping 45,000 gallons of water per minute), and treated effluent is used to “recharge” groundwater aquifers (eventually ending up in taps).

While recycled water can be used to irrigate crops, you can’t really recycle irrigation water. That fact, in a way, is why Nevada is the leader in Colorado River water-recycling: Almost all of its allocation from the river goes to the Las Vegas metro area for public supply/domestic use, with virtually none of it going to irrigate crops. That means most of the water eventually goes into the sewer system, making it available for recycling. And that, in turn, makes it easier to slash water use in cities than on farms, further throwing off the balance between agricultural use and municipal use, and putting more pressure on farmers to either sell out or become more efficient, which has. Its own drawbacks.

Water recycling can have unintended side effects, too. While it’s nice that Palo Verde doesn’t rely on freshwater, the 72,000 acre-feet of recycled water it uses per year all evaporates — it is a zero water-discharge plant — meaning it does not soak into aquifers or otherwise benefit ecosystems, as it would if it were used to water parks or was discharged back into the Gila River. And, water treatment is highly energy-intensive, so the more water you want to recycle, the more power you’ll need.

Ultimately, using less water in the first place is going to be necessary. But recycling what we do use could help.

Senator Beck Basin on March 31. This is near Red Mountain Pass, one of the few SNOTEL sites in the San Juan Mountains that had a near normal snowpack on April 1. Andy Gleason photo.

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

In the days following my April 1 snowpack update, the snowpack updated itself, with a nice storm bolstering snow water equivalent levels by up to two inches in some places. But it was closely followed by an unusually warm spell, which erased all of the gains and then some. What that means is a relatively paltry spring runoff for many of the Upper Colorado River Basin streams, with water levels likely peaking earlier and at lower levels than in 2021. How much earlier and lower depends on how warm or cool (and dry or wet) the rest of the spring is, but at this point it’s safe to say it won’t be a big water year for irrigators or boaters.

I’m especially worried about the Upper San Juan River and the Rio Grande, both of which have their headwaters in the southeast San Juan Mountains, which are running close to empty, snow-wise. Yes, Wolf Creek got pounded by the April 6-9 storms, but it has also experienced some abnormally high average temperatures over the last several days — the average temperature in the Rio Grande Headwaters on April 12 was 45.5° F, compared to the median for that date of 32°. If that continues, what little snow is left will mostly be gone within weeks.

Meanwhile, the high temperature in Tucson and Phoenix, neither of which have received more than a hint of precipitation during the last eight months, exceeded 100° F on April 11, setting new daily records and further desiccating the soil.

It may seem a bit early, but I think it’s time to start predicting peak runoffs for Four Corners area rivers. I’ll start with the Animas, which I’m pessimistically predicting will peak on May 17 at 2,950 cubic-feet per-second, based on previous years’ snowpacks and peak runoffs. I say “pessimistic” because if I’m right, it would only be the fourth time this century that the Animas peaked below 3,000 cfs. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Waste rock from the Sunday Mine Complex near Slick Rock, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Is the uranium mining renaissance upon us? I don’t think so. But the industry’s zombified carcass is beginning to twitch — figuratively speaking, of course. The stirrings include:

A couple of weeks ago, the Energy Information Administration crowed that U.S. uranium production last year was the highest in six years. That sounds huge, right? Really, it’s not: Production was virtually zero from 2019 to 2023, making last year’s total of 676,939 pounds look pretty good. But as recently as 2014 — which was not boom times, by any means — production was nearly 5 million pounds. The big 2024 producers were in-situ recovery operations in Wyoming and Texas, as well as Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. It should be noted, however, that the White Mesa Mill’s production was not from the company’s mines, but from its “alternate feed program,” which is to say it extracted uranium from other folks’ waste streams.

Energy Fuels is now producing ore at its Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon and hauling it by truck across the Navajo Nation to the White Mesa Mill. The company says it plans on beginning production and shipment at its La Sal and Pandora Mines as well. This represents the first conventional ore production in the U.S. in years.

Western Uranium & Vanadium says Energy Fuels has agreed to purchase up to 25,000 short tons of uranium ore from WU&V’s Sunday Mine complex near Slick Rock, Colorado, in the Uravan Uranium Belt. They plan to begin shipping later this year.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of noise around a potential nuclear renaissance, as tech giants look to promised advanced and small modular reactors to power their electricity-guzzling data centers. But there are no reactors yet. I tallied some of that talk for High Country News.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

McElmo Car. Jonathan P. Thompson photo-illustration.

Data Dump: Making coal “beautiful” again: President Trump’s efforts to restart the dirty and declining industry won’t work again — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Dragline at the Navajo Mine in New Mexico. The Navajo Nation-owned Navajo Transitional Energy Company owns the mine along with two mines in the Powder River Basin. Navajo Nation Buu Nygren was on hand to cheer on Trump as he signed the pro-coal executive orders. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 11, 2025

The News: This week, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders that wipe away environmental protections in the name of saving “beautiful, clean” coal from what Trump and his minions call a regulatory “war on energy.” The purpose, he says, is to make the grid more reliable and to ensure there is adequate generating capacity to meet AI-powering and cryptocurrency mining data centers’ burgeoning power demand.

The orders:

Designate coal as a “mineral” so that it qualifies for regulatory relief under Trump’s pro-mining executive order, and suggest designating coal as a “critical material” due to its use in steel making. (As if that’s going to do anything?)

Orders the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and Energy to identify coal resources on federal lands and any impediments to extracting them, and propose “policies to address such impediments and ultimately enable the mining of such coal resources by either private or public actors.” (Public actors? Does this mean what I think it means: The feds are going to start coal mining? Maybe they’ll just nationalize the industry — Hello comrade Trump! — to wipe away all so-called impediments, of which there are very few, by the way.)

Orders the Interior Secretary to lift barriers to mining coal on federal lands, including definitively ending an Obama-era moratorium on new coal leasing and the Biden-era halting of new leases in the Powder River Basin. (These are only speculative “barriers” because existing leases hold enough coal to meet current levels of demand for another 40 years — and demand is likely to keep dropping, meaning coal companies probably would never be affected by the leasing freeze).

Encourages coal exports. (Umm, yeah, you should have thought about that before all of this tariff talk, dude.)

Looks to identify regions where “coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers and assess … the potential for expanding coal-based infrastructure to power data centers … .”

Exempts some coal power plants from Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for two years.

Looks to prevent large power sources “from leaving the bulk-power system or converting the source of fuel of such generation resource if such conversion would result in a net reduction in accredited generating capacity.” (He wants to block utilities from retiring or converting or old coal plants to run on cheaper, cleaner fuels.)

The Context: Let’s just get a couple things straight right off the bat. First, there are no significant regulatory barriers to mining coal. Arch, Peabody, Navajo Transitional Energy Company, and a handful of other companies have leases on and essentially unfettered access to billions of tons of coal at their gargantuan Powder River Basin mines. They could continue tearing apart the earth for decades before needing to lease more land, making Biden’s freeze on future leasing — and Trump’s unfreezing of it — speculative and symbolic.

In Biden’s case, it symbolized his desire to do something about the climate crisis and to cement a legacy as an environmentally minded president; for Trump it’s all about fossil fuel fetishization.

Coal mine production has been dropping due to declining demand: Utilities simply aren’t burning as much coal as they used to, in part because it’s dirty, but mostly because the shale revolution — i.e. “fracking” — has resulted in a natural gas supply glut, bringing the cost of the slightly cleaner-burning fuel below that of coal. More recently, increasingly affordable wind and solar power have also been displacing coal — and gas — generation from the grid.

So rolling back regulations on mining is useless if you’re trying to spur production. The only way to do that is get utilities to go against their own financial interests and burn more coal.

That’s where some of the other provisions in the orders come in. By exempting coal plants from the MATS rule for two years, Trump is opening the door for facilities such as the Colstrip coal plant in Montana to continue to operate without expensive new pollution control equipment. Colstrip is considered one of the dirtiest facilities in the nation, spewing harmful emissions from its smokestack and in the form of coal combustion waste.

The Cholla coal plant near Joseph City, Arizona. Trump said his executive order would save it from destruction. But its operator has already shut it down and shows no interest in burning coal there. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Trump mentioned the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, as one that he would “save” from “destruction,” adding, “We’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.” But its operator, Arizona Public Service, said it has already procured cleaner, cheaper replacement generation for the plant, and indicated it has no desire to keep burning coal there. Meanwhile, even before the orders, PacifiCorp backed off on plans to retire some of its coal plants in the next several years, citing projected increased demand and easing regulations.

The big question mark is how the provision aiming to prevent coal plants from shutting down will play out. It seems illegal to force a utility to keep a power plant running, but then that hasn’t gotten in Trump’s way before. Still, the most all of these efforts can hope to achieve is to slow the decline of the coal industry for a few years. It’s certainly not going to bring back the Navajo Generating Sation, the Nucla Station, the San Juan Generating Station, the Escalante coal plant, or the Mohave plant from the dead.

Now for the data! Click on the images to see a larger version.

The rise and fall of the U.S. thermal coal industry. For five decades, coal consumption was directly tied to electricity generation, with both peaking in 2007. But the financial crisis slowed electricity demand, and opened the door for burgeoning new supplies of increasingly affordable natural gas to dethrone King Coal from the energy mix, decoupling coal consumption from electricity demand, and it’s been downhill for the industry ever since, with the steepest declines coming during the first Trump administration. Data source: Energy Information Administration. Graphic: Land Desk.

Coal fueled the colonization and industrialization of the Western U.S., but by the 1950s it was in serious trouble as locomotives switched to diesel, homes and businesses chose to cook and heat with natural gas, and utilities opted for hydropower. Government intervention helped spur coal’s revival (see next graph for Wyoming figures and annotations). Source: USGS and EIA. Graphic: Land Desk.

One of the reasons folks like coal is because it’s labor intensive and offers relatively stable, high-wage employment to a lot of people in rural areas without too many other opportunities. But coal industry employment doesn’t always match up with production thanks to automation and efficiency upgrades. Annotations are below. Data Sources: Wyoming State Geological Survey, EIA, Wyoming Workforce Services. Graph: Land Desk.

1920: Wyoming coal industry hits peak employment, with 9,000 employees working in coal mines during a time when less than 200,000 people lived in the state. A few years later, a Wyoming newspaper noted: “Next to food, coal and iron are of first importance to mankind.”
Drilling for natural gas gets underway in New Mexico and Texas, and the gas is piped into towns for heating and cooking, displacing coal. A 1927 Steamboat Pilot headline about a gas pipeline from Texas to Denver, Colorado, read: “Natural gas would injure coal industry.”
1940: Electro Motive Division of General Motors unveils a diesel freight locomotive, but it is slow to catch on and in 1944 the steam engine still dominated, with the railroad industry consuming 152 million tons of coal per year.
Heightened industrial activity during World War II briefly drove up coal consumption and production.
Late 1940s: Development of high-voltage transmission lines that can carry electricity long distances, which will ultimately be a boon for coal power.
1950s: Coal consumption in the West plummets by 40 percent as highways replace rails, and diesel locomotives replace coal-fired ones. More long-distance gas pipelines are built from Texas and New Mexico oil fields to population centers, making it easier for residents and institutions to ditch coal for heating and cooking. More than half of the West’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams, with coal only providing 10%. The coal industry had made a lot of cash and built up a lot of political power over the years, however, which they used to lean on government to look for new markets for their product.
1952: Bureau of Reclamation releases A Study Of Future Power Transmission in the West, calling for the buildup of large coal-fired power plants in the Interior West, which would then send electricity to faraway population centers. It said, “… the growth of power in the West will be so great that increasing dependence on its main fuel resource, coal, is inevitable.”
1960: Congress establishes the Office of Coal Research “to encourage and stimulate the production and conservation of coal in the United States…” and to “maximize the contribution of coal to the overall energy market.”
Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups join with the coal industry and coal-state leaders in opposition to new hydroelectric dams. The Sierra Club actively supports the construction of Navajo Generating Station as a preferable alternative to a new dam in the Grand Canyon. Several other coal-fired plants are built across the West.
The Clean Air Act is passed, actually helping Western coal because it’s low in sulfur, and therefore emits less sulfur dioxide when burned.
Energy Crises erupt, spurring calls for “energy independence.” This includes mining for coal and government subsidies to develop synfuels, or gasoline or diesel from coal and other materials, like oil shale.
1977: ARCO opens Black Thunder mine in the Powder River Basin. It will become the largest coal mine in the world and the first to transport 1 billion tons of coal.
1978 Industrial Fuels Power Act more or less kills the construction of new natural gas power plants, locking in coal as the fuel of choice for electricity generation for the long-term.
Even as coal production climbs, the number of employees in the industry drops due to mechanization and the migration of coal-mining from more labor-intensive underground mines to larger, surface strip mines such as those in the Powder River Basin.
Reagan opens up foreign markets, kills subsidies, stops price controls and government prop-ups. Oil, natural gas, and uranium development crash, spreading economic malaise across the West. Coal falters in many parts of the West, including Wyoming, but the mines of the Powder River Basin continue to produce steadily.
1987: The Industrial Fuels Act is repealed, allowing for the buildup of natural gas plants. This doesn’t have an immediate effect on coal because natural gas is still far more expensive, but it sets the stage for utilities to switch fuels in the decades to come.
Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which limit emissions of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide, give a big boost to Western coal because of its relatively low sulfur content. Wyoming surpasses Appalachia as the nation’s number one coal producer.
2001: Demand for electricity, and therefore for coal, climbed steadily nationwide for 50 years, experiencing just a few small hiccups in 1982, 1986 and, most dramatically, in 2001, due to a national recession. But it quickly recovered.
2008: The national financial crisis hits, putting a huge dent in consumption of both electricity and coal. At the same time, the price of natural gas plummets when the market is glutted with newly accessed gas from shale formations in Texas, North Dakota and the East.
2011: Wyoming hits peak coal-mine employment, even though electricity demand and coal consumption has yet to rebound.
2012-2016: Although electricity demand has plateaued, coal production goes into freefall as utilities start getting more and more power from natural gas plants and solar and wind. Mass layoffs hit Wyoming’s coal industry, including in the Powder River Basin.
2018: U.S. electricity demand finally bounces back to pre-2008 levels. It doesn’t help coal at all.
2017-2024: Despite the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up the coal industry by meddling in markets and rolling back environmental, public health and worker safety regulations, coal consumption, production and employment continue to fall. Biden’s “war on coal” doesn’t affect the slide.

Wyoming leaders cheered Trump’s pro-coal executive orders, in part because the industry plays such a large role in its economy. But things are changing, even in the Cowboy State. Construction, retail trade, health care, government work, and leisure and hospitality all outpace mining and drilling in terms of employment numbers. Graphic credit: The Land Desk

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

Yesterday, Kathleen Sgamma withdrew her name from consideration to run the Bureau of Land Management. Was it because the oil and gas lobbyist and advocate had a conflict of interest? Nope. Was it because she has spent much of her career battling the very agency she was chosen to helm? Nope.

Sgamma resigned because a watchdog group scandalously revealed that she actually has an inkling of morality. In the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and invasion of the U.S. Capitol, Sgamma wrote that she was “disgusted by the violence” and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.” She was hoping for a “resurgence of sanity.” That right there is enough to disqualify you from serving in this administration.

I’m anxiously awaiting to see whom Trump picks now.

President Trump’s administration thaws frozen IRA money: But will #Colorado’s electric cooperatives get all the money they were promised? The answer remains unclear — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

The main street in Nucla, located in western Montrose County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

March 28, 2025

Electrical cooperatives in Colorado were informed before Joe Biden left the White House that they would be getting about $3.5 billion from the federal government via programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Will they? U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced Tuesday that her department was releasing funds previously committed but also described a “course correction.” Just what constitutes a “course correction” will likely not become fully apparent for weeks, perhaps months.

The release said that electrical cooperatives must first revise their project plans to “remove harmful DEIA and far-left climate features.” DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

The announcement by the USDA —the department houses the Rural Utility Services, the agency that works with cooperatives — also said electrical cooperatives would be asked several questions and would need to provide a short narrative description of any proposed changes in their projects.

The revised projects must also align with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 called “Unleashing American Energy.” Just exactly what those revisions need to look like remains unclear. In that executive order Trump rescinded a long list of executive orders issued by former President Joe Biden, including 10 that had to do with climate change.

Trump’s order made no mention of renewable energy but did order agency heads to identify actions that “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources – with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources…”

“We are as interested to find out as you are,” replied Alex Shelley, who has the public information job at San Miguel Power Association, when I called him Wednesday afternoon. San Miguel expected to get a $9.8 million grant from the New ERA program to construct a 20-megawatt solar project in western Montrose County. That area of Montrose County includes Nucla, Naturita, and Uravan. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association operated Nucla Station, a coal burning plant, until 2019.

In a statement posted on Jan. 23, Brad Zaporski, the chief executive of San Miguel Power, called the project a “shining example of partnership in action to help bolster our rural communities.”

The project, said Shelley, is to be on private land that is not useful for agriculture or anything other than light industry.

Brighton-based United Power was to get $262 million for six solar projects in its service territory in northern Colorado and one other project involving hydroelectricity. About 40% of the service territory is in Wattenberg Field, Colorado’s primary oil and gas producing area.

“I think the story is that the RUS wants to get the money moving to help rural communities,” said Mark Gabriel, the chief executive. “We were given the opportunity to make any edits or resubmit, and we chose not to (make changes to our application).”

The original application, he added, made no mention of diversity or inclusion. It asserted the desire to make United’s members more reliant on local resources and with lower-cost electricity.

Tri-State G&T has the most skin in this game. It provides wholesale electricity for 40 electric cooperatives in a four-state area, including 15 in Colorado. Tri-State in 2024 said it was getting a financial package worth $2.5 billion, most of that in loans of less than 2%. Those low-interest loans will allow it to get out from under higher-interest financing as it prepares to close its coal units in Colorado and Arizona during coming years.

In an October announcement, Tri-State said New ERA funding would support financing for 1,280 megawatts of energy from solar, wind and wind-storage projects, and more than 100 megawatts of stand-alone energy storage.

The company also plans a natural gas plant, preferably in northwest Colorado or conceivably southwest Wyoming.

Tri State expects to reach 70% clean energy by 2030. Within Colorado, this will be an 89% reduction as compared to a 2005 baseline.

“We appreciate the work of Secretary Rollins and her team to advance the program, and we will be reviewing the USDA’s guidance and look forward to continuing our work through their process,” said Tri-State CEO Duane Highley in a statement posted on Wednesday.

In Fort Collins, Jeff Wadsworth was cautious about what the final tally will look like. He’s the chief executive of Poudre Valley REA, which is in line to get $9 million to help pay for two solar-and-storage projects. The grant was through Powering Affordable Clean Energy, or PACE, another program funded by the IRA.

“We are thrilled about this development and look forward to collaborating with the dedicated team at the USDA,” he said initially when asked for a response. In a telephone conversation the next day, however, he said that the full story remains to be written.

Wadsworth is optimistic that Poudre Valley will get its money. Demand for electricity has continued to grow for multiple reasons, and these projects will help Poudre Valley meet that demand. But this grant is not the end-all, be-all for Poudre Valley as it moves forward, he said.

“It helps our ratepayers, who are part of rural Colorado, We are excited about that,” said Wadsworth. “But our path is pretty clear as we move forward.”

Still another perspective comes from Eric Frankowski, the executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign. He believes that despite the “problematic” language of the announcement, the guidance that RUS has issued for the cooperatives has eased a lot of concerns.

“It appears that the process is completely voluntary and that co-ops do not need to do anything. The language says that RUS will NOT approve proposed modifications ‘that affect the scoring of projects that were competitively scored.’ Since community benefits, decarbonization and lowering rates were all integral to how proposals were evaluated, I think we can take that as a good sign,” he wrote in an e-mail.

That guidance can be found here.

“The guidance also says that if awardees do not respond within 30 days requesting a revision, ‘it will be considered that they do not wish to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after the 30 days.’ (emphasis added) It also says that awardees can respond that they are not changing their proposal and processing of payments will begin immediately. Also good signs,” said Frankowski.

“There doesn’t seem to be a pathway where co-ops are punished for staying the course on their clean energy plans,” he added. “Who knows what happens after the 30-day window, but things seem good for now.”

Granby-based Mountain Parks Electric in January announced that it had executed a letter of commitment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a grant prog ram of $100 million across the next 20 years. The announcement said that the money will be used to help procure power through power-purchase agreements and to advance and promote scholarships and apprenticeship programs. The announcement was made two weeks before Mountain Parks left Tri-State and began getting its wholesale power from Guzman Energy in a 20-year agreement.

Sedalia-based CORE Electric Cooperative hopes for $225 million and Steamboat Springs-based Yampa Valley Electric $50 million. Grand Junction-based Grand Valley Power Lines also expected to get federal funds.

In his statement, Highley credited the work of U.S. Representatives Jeff Hurd, Gabe Evans, Lauren Boebert, all from Colorado, and Gabe Vasquez, of New Mexico, as well as Colorado Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet. Bennet, in particular, had gone to bat for the New ERA provision for cooperatives in the IRA. He spoke in October at Tri-State’s headquarters when a finalized announcement was made.

Take your children out into these landscapes” — Kevin Fedarko

My friend Joe’s son and the Orr kids at the top of the Crack in the Wall trail to Coyote Gulch with Stevens Arch in the Background. Photo credit: Joe Ruffert

Kevin Fedarko was the keynote speaker at the symposium and he is as inspirational a speaker as you could ask for. It doesn’t hurt that the landscape that he spoke about is the Grand Canyon. He urged the attendees to, “Take your children out into these landscapes so that they can learn to love them.” He is advocating for the protection of the Grand Canyon in particular but really he is advocating for the protection all public lands.

Kevin Fedarko and Coyote Gulch at the Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium hosted by the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center at Adams State University in Alamosa March 29, 2024.

What an inspirational talk from Kevin. I know what he is saying when he speaks about the time after dinner on the trail where the sunset lights up the canyon in different hues and where, he and Pete McBride, his partner on the Grand Canyon through hike, could hear the Colorado River hundreds of feet below them, continuing its work cutting and molding the rocks, because the silence in that landscape is so complete. He and I share the allure of the Colorado Plateau. Kevin was introduced to it through Collin Flectcher’s book The Man Who Walked Through Time, after he received a dog-eared copy from his father. They lived in Pittsburgh in a landscape that was industrialized but the book enabled Kevin to imagine places that were unspoiled.

My introduction to the Colorado Plateau came from an article in Outside magazine that included a panoramic photo of the Escalante River taken from the ledges above the river. Readers in the know can put 2 and 2 together from the name of this blog — Coyote Gulch — my homage to the canyons tributary to Glen Canyon and Lake Foul.

Stevens Arch viewed from Coyote Gulch. Photo via Joe Ruffert

Kevin’s keynote came at the end of the day on March 29th after a jam-packed schedule.

Early in the day Ken Salazar spoke about the future of the San Luis Valley saying, “Where is the sustainability of the valley going to come from.” Without agriculture this place would wither and die.” He is right, American Rivers and other organizations introduced a paper, The Economic Value of Water Resources in the San Luis Valley which was a response to yet another plan to export water out of the valley to the Front Range. (Currently on hold as Renewable Water Resources does not have a willing buyer. Thank you Colorado water law.)

Claire Sheridan informed attendees that their report sought to quantify all the economic benefits from each drop of water in the valley. “When you buy a bottle of water you know exactly what it costs. But what is the value of having the Sandhill cranes come here every year?”

Russ Schumacher detailed the current state of the climate (snowpack at 63%) and folks from the Division of Water Resources expounded on the current state of aquifer recovery and obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.

The session about the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement Program was fascinating. Nathan Coombs talked about the combination of SNOTEL, manual snow courses, Lidar, radar, and machine learning used to articulate a more complete picture of snowpack. “You can’t have enough tools in your toolbox,” he said.

Coombs detailed the difficulty of meeting the obligations under the Rio Grande Compact with insufficient knowledge of snowpack and therefore runoff volumes. Inaccurate information can lead to operational decisions that overestimate those volumes and then require severe curtailments in July and August just when farmers are finishing their crops. “When you make an error the correction is what kills you,” he said.

If you are going to learn about agriculture in the valley it is informative to understand the advances in soil health knowledge and the current state of adoption. That was the theme of the session “Building Healthy Soils”. John Rizza’s enthusiasm for the subject was obvious and had me thinking about what I can do for my city landscape.

Amber Pacheco described how the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable and other organizations reach out to as many folks in the valley as possible. Inclusivity is the engine driving collaboration.

Many thanks to Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center director Paul Formisano for reaching out to me about the symposium. I loved the program. You can scroll through my posts on BlueSky here

President Trump hands public lands to the mining industry: Plus: Using public lands for housing — again — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

March 25, 2025

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

Satellite image of a portion of the Morenci Mine in Arizona. Source: Google Earth.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order — his 150th so far this term, by my rough count — invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on federal lands. The wording of the order suggests that the aim is not just to cut through some of the red tape hindering proposed projects, but to incite the industry to mine areas that it may not have been considering previously.

The order has understandably alarmed public lands advocates, but it has also spawned some misconceptions, particularly concerning the 1872 General Mining Law.

Green River Basin oil shale deposits via the Bureau of Land Management

While Trump’s attacks on the nation and public lands have been of unprecedented scope and scale so far, his use of the Cold War-era DPA is not unprecedented or even all that unusual. The Carter administration used it to justify pouring billions of dollars of subsidies into “synfuel” production as part of its quest for “energy independence.” This sparked massive oil shale operations in western Colorado (which crashed spectacularly). And Biden used the Act to encourage mining for so called “green metals,” such as lithium, boron, and manganese. He also streamlined permitting for the proposed Hermosa manganese mine in southern Arizona, and loaned the contested Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada $2.6 billion.

But Trump’s order goes much further than Biden’s. He is expanding the list of target minerals to just about everything, including “critical minerals, uranium, copper, potash, gold, and any other element, compound or material as determined by the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, such as coal.” While Biden wanted a survey of the nation’s mineral production capacity, and promised to adhere to all existing environmental laws and consult with tribal nations, Trump is ordering his agencies to:

Compile a list of all proposed mining projects “in order to expedite the review of those projects in coordination with the National Energy Dominance Council.”

Amend or revise land use plans under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act as necessary to “support the intent of this order.”

“Identify as many sites as possible that might be suitable for mineral production activities that can be permitted as soon as possible.”

Prioritize mineral production activities over other types of activities on federal lands.

Provide financing, loans, and investment for new mines, including from a “dedicated critical minerals fund established through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.”

“New recommendations will be provided to Congress regarding treatment of waste rock, tailings, and mine waste disposal under the Mining Act of 1872.”

Instead of adhering to environmental laws, Trump would simply alter them to support mining. He not only wants to help out proposed projects with regulatory and financial subsidies, but also wants to spur on new projects on “as many sites as possible.” And he is prioritizing mineral extraction over all other activities on federal lands, a blatant violation of the Federal Land Policy Management Act’s multiple-use mandate.

That would mean not only that mining would take precedence over conservation and recreation, but also livestock grazing and other extractive uses. The OHV crowd that’s worried about the BLM closing a few roads to motorized vehicles around Moab might just find themselves ousted from a lot more areas by potash ponds, uranium mines, or lithium operations.

Trump’s recommendations to Congress likely will be to tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning that they have not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.

It’s around the General Mining Law that misconceptions have arisen. The folks at More Than Just Parks say the new order “doesn’t create a new legal framework. It exhumes an old one — a fossil from the 19th century … It’s the Mining Act of 1872, back from the dead, and now wearing body armor.” Which is a nice way to put it, but the Mining Act never died, so this order can’t revive it.

The other misconception appeared in Lands Lost, another great Substack focusing on public lands, which wrote: “… there are no meaningful environmental safeguards in place because public land mining is a free-for-all governed only by an 1872 law that’s never been modernized.”

It’s true that the 1872 Mining Law is inadequate, allows mining companies or individuals to stake a claim to any public land without public input or environmental review, conduct exploratory work with a minimum of review, and pay no royalties on hardrock minerals they extract. However, the federal agencies do have additional regulations governing mining. Before a company can do any actual mining, it must get an operating permit from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, or Department of Energy (depending on the land’s jurisdiction), which includes an environmental review (either an EA or a more extensive EIS, depending on the scope of the project). A mine may also need a Clean Water Act permit for any water discharges, including draining adits, and many states require additional permits as well.

By ordering the agencies to alter the FLPMA land-use plans to accommodate mining, Trump is essentially doing away with these additional safeguards, which really is scary. That would take us back to a time when the 1872 Mining Law was the only federal regulatory framework, which would give mining companies a free rein to trash public lands. However, Trump can’t do much about state requirements, except to try to bully them out of existence. [ed. emphasis mine]

The order applies only to federal lands, so mining projects that are on patented mining claims — which are entirely on private — would not be affected (although they might be eligible for the government handouts).

Proposed projects this fast-tracking could affect include:

Resolution Copper’s proposed massive copper mine at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, aka Oak Flat, in central Arizona.

Copper World Complex née Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, Arizona. After a judge kiboshed Canada-based Hudbay’s plan to dump mine waste on U.S. Forest Service land, the firm decided to base the initial phase on patented, i.e. private, mining claims and later expand to public lands.

South32’s proposed Hermosa Mine in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. Biden already fast-tracked permitting for this battery-grade manganese mine, but Trump’s order could speed it along even more.

Energy Fuels’ Roca Honda uranium mine and Laramide Resources’ La Jara Mesa uranium project, both on Forest Service land near Grants, New Mexico.

Anson/A1’s proposed lithium extraction projects and American Potash’s lithium and potash projects on BLM land east and north of Moab and south of Green River, Utah.

Lithium, copper, and uranium projects on BLM land in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah.

Numerous proposed uranium mining projects on Energy Department leases and BLM land in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado.

Atomic Minerals’ uranium prospects on Harts Point, just outside the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument.

Metallic Minerals is only doing exploratory drilling on its mining claims in the La Plata Mountains of southwestern Colorado, and have yet to make any mining plans public, so it’s not clear whether Trump’s order would affect this contested project.

Learn more about these and other projects with the Land Desk’s Mining Monitor Map.

Those links up ^^ there? A lot of them are to paywalled Land Desk archives. Break down the paywall and support oligarch-free journalism by becoming a paid subscriber now.

Satellite image of Phoenix-area sprawl and adjacent BLM land. Source: Google Earth.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Also last week, in a short-on-details Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner unveiled a plan to transfer or lease “underused” public lands to states or localities for affordable housing. An Interior official then told Bloomberg Law’s Bobby Magill that the Bureau of Land Management is considering selling about 400,000 acres of federal land within 10 miles of cities and towns with more than 5,000 people for housing development.

This isn’t surprising: Republicans and Democrats have both been itching to grab some public land for housing for a while. And the stated intent, to add affordable housing to increasingly unaffordable public lands-gateway communities, is noble.

And yet, the plan — as scant in particulars as it is — is still riddled with problems.

Burgum has made it clear that he distinguishes between “special” and “our most beautiful” public lands, i.e. those that are in national parks or national monuments, and the remaining “underused,” “inhospitable or unoccupied” lands. The lands on the urban fringes he intends to take out of the American public’s hands belong to the latter category, apparently.

But those same lands are valuable, especially to the nearby communities. They provide an easy-to-access refuge — for humans and wildlife — from the urban din, as well as recreational opportunities. In fact, the close proximity of these public lands makes the communities more desirable and therefore more expensive: think Animas Mountain in Durango, the Slickrock Trail in Moab, Jumbo Mountain in Paonia, the Lunch Loop trails in Grand Junction, the Buckeye Hills near Phoenix, or the Juniper Woodlands trails outside Bend. Now imagine them covered in houses.

Because BLM lands are almost always outside the urban boundaries, developing them will lead directly to sprawl and all of its impacts, including more traffic and associated pollution and safety issues.

So far, the Interior Department hasn’t given any indication that it would require the land to be used for affordable housing. And, as Center for Western Priorities points out in a statement on the plan, the administration hardly seems interested in fixing the housing crisis, given that it is planning to eviscerate HUD and has frozen some $60 million in funding for affordable housing.

Which leads me to think they are using Sen. Mike Lee’s stalled HOUSES Act, which also calls for putting houses on “underutilized” federal land, as a model. But that legislation has no affordability restrictions and its density requirement — a mere four houses per acre — is just more sprawl.

That’s because Lee and company are going with the supply side theory, which posits that simply building more houses will lower costs enough to make them affordable. While this theory does hold in certain cases, it does not apply to most Western public lands-gateway, amenities communities, where seemingly unlimited demand is always bound to outpace supply. And that means this plan is just another scheme to take public lands out of Americans’ hands and give them to the private sector.

On the housing supply-side theory JONATHAN P. THOMPSON SEPTEMBER 19, 2023: https://www.landdesk.org/p/on-the-housing-supply-side-theory

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

LOVE windmill. Near Leupp, Arizona. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Tommy Beaudreau on “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now”: Challenges to Energy Transition on Public Lands — Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly (Getches-Wilkinson Center) #ActOnClimate

Tommy Beaudreau at the 2025 Schultz Lecture in Energy. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson Center

Click the link to read the article on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly):

March 20, 2025

On Tuesday, February 25th, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, delivered the Schultz Lecture, offering a sobering analysis of the structural, legal, economic, and political hurdles to the energy transition on public lands. His talk, “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now,” constituted a tribute to the late Charles Wilkinson’s coined phrase. Harkening back to Wilkinson’s work, Beaudreau traced these contemporary challenges to the legacy of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement, illustrating how outdated laws and entrenched interests continue to shape today’s energy policies.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. By John Gast – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID 09855.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=373152

Beaudreau framed public lands as a political flashpoint in the energy transition. While state and private lands—particularly in North Dakota and the Southwest—have played significant roles in the oil and gas boom, debates over renewables, permitting, and leasing disproportionately focus on federal lands. Ironically, legal tools once used to block fossil fuel projects are now being turned against renewables, complicating efforts to decarbonize.

Beyond regulatory hurdles, fossil fuel revenues remain deeply embedded in state economies, funding schools, public safety, and infrastructure. Many Tribal nations, too, rely on fossil fuel revenues, balancing economic interests with environmental concerns. Beaudreau stressed that a “just transition” must provide financial alternatives before communities can fully embrace renewables.

Outdated laws, like the 1872 Mining Law, remain a major obstacle to energy reform. Beaudreau highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a key step in shifting energy policy, but legal battles persist over leasing rights, mineral access, and state-federal control. He pointed to Louisiana’s lawsuit over the Biden administration’s oil and gas lease moratorium, which raised critical questions about governmental statutory and commercial contractual rights in energy development.

Economic arguments also dominate the debate. Critics claim renewables are too costly for federal subsidies, mirroring past fights over offshore oil incentives. Meanwhile, global competition—especially China’s control of solar panel and battery supply chains—adds geopolitical complexity to the transition.

Despite these challenges, Beaudreau offered a measured note of optimism. He pointed to Western landowners and ranchers, historically conservation advocates, as potential allies in sustainable land management. Their interest in wildlife migration corridors and outdoor access could foster new conservation coalitions.

This map shows land owned by different federal government agencies. By National Atlas of the United States – http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/fedlands.html, “All Federal and Indian Lands”, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32180954

Ultimately, Beaudreau underscored that energy transition requires modernizing laws, addressing economic realities, and building broad political consensus. As attendees left Wittemyer Courtroom, they carried with them a clear message: the road ahead is uncertain, but public lands remain central to shaping America’s energy future and, as Wilkinson’s “lords of yesterday” remain, the imperatives of change have arrived.

The recording of the 16th annual Schultz Lecture can be found here.

Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty

From email from the Getches-Wilkinson Center (Annie Carlozzi):

Thank you for joining the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Center of the American West for the Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25th! We are so grateful to Tommy Beaudreau for making time in his schedule to spend lunch with our law students and the evening with all of our attendees in person and online.

We have a few things to share with you:

Conference Photos

Barb Colombo of 11:11 Productions Photography has provided us with wonderful images of the lecture with Tommy Beaudreau. We’ve added them to a Flickr album for easy viewing here.

Conference Recordings

The Law School IT Team has released the recording from the lecture.

GWC Blog
Current Colorado Law students Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly shared their reflections on Tommy Beaudreau’s visit to the Colorado Law School on the GWC blog. You can read their piece here.

Upcoming Event

We hope you will consider joining us for the annual Colorado River Conference co-convened by GWC and the Water & Tribes Initiative. You can find more information on our website regarding this year’s theme: Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads.

A Sagebrush Rebel returns to Interior: Karen Budd-Falen has spent her career fighting the agency; Mining Monitor; “Avalanche” comes out from behind the paywall — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Ryan Bundy speaks at the 2014 Recapture rally to protest federal land management, which took place just days after armed insurrectionists threatened federal officers who had tried to detain Cliven Bundy’s cattle, which had long been grazing on public lands illegally. Karen Budd-Falen — reportedly appointed to be the number three at Interior — represented Bundy years before the standoff, but later condemned his response. Nevertheless, her writings and court cases provided an ideological underpinning for the Bundys and their fellow insurrectionists. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

March 7, 2025

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has given another indication of how he plans to oversee public lands with the reported appointment of Karen Budd-Falen, a Wyoming property rights lawyer and rancher, as associate deputy Interior secretary, the department’s third in command. This will be Budd-Falen’s third stint at Interior: She worked under James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s notorious Interior secretary, and served as deputy Interior solicitor for wildlife and parks under the first Trump administration. Budd-Falen revealed the appointment to Cowboy State Daily this week, though the administration has yet to announce it.

Budd-Falen has spent much of her five-decade-long career fighting against federal oversight and environmental protections — she has been called an “architect of the modern Sagebrush Rebellion” — and is a private property rights extremist (except when they get in the way of public lands grazing).

In 2011, Budd-Falen divulged her core philosophy — and her distorted view of the U.S. Constitution — in a keynote speech to a meeting of Oregon and California county sheriffs, many of who adhered to the “constitutional sheriff” creed. She told them that “the foundation for every single right in this country, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote, our freedom to petition, is all based on the right of ownership of private property.”

While this is obviously a messed up interpretation, it is an honest reflection of her worldview, and she has often stuck with it even if it meant going after extractive interests. In the 1990s, for example, Budd-Falen represented the legendary, stalwart Republican-turned-anti-oil-and-gas activist Tweeti Blancett in her attempt to get the Bureau of Land Management to clean up the mess its industry-friendly ways had facilitated on and around her northwest New Mexico ranch. And Budd-Falen’s law firm often worked with landowners to get the best possible deal from energy companies that developed their property.

But more often than not, Budd-Falen’s vision of private property rights extends beyond a landowner’s property lines and onto the public lands and resources — at the expense of the land itself, the wildlife that live there, and the people who rely upon it for other uses.

In a telling article in the Idaho Law Review in 1993, Budd-Falen and her husband, Frank Falen, argued that grazing livestock on public lands was actually a “private property right” protected by the Constitution. If you were to extend this flawed logic to oil and gas and other energy leases and unpatented mining claims, then corporations and individuals would have private property rights on hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. This may sound alarmist, but the fact is, the federal land management agencies often adhere to this belief. Once an oil and gas lease is issued, for example, a BLM field office is unlikely to deny a drilling permit for the lease, since doing so would be violating the company’s private property rights. Who needs public land transfers when this sort of de facto privatization is commonplace?

Many of Budd-Falen’s cases relied on a similar argument: That private property rights can apply to public resources. She defended Andrew VanDenBerg, for example, who bulldozed a road across the Whitehead Gulch Wilderness Study Area in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains to access his mining claim — just one of many times she wielded RS-2477, the 160-year-old statute, to try to keep roads across public lands open to motorized travel and bulldozers. She represented big landowners who felt that they had the right to kill more big game — a public resource — than the law allowed, because they owned more acreage.

Budd-Falen was instrumental in crafting a slew of ordinances for Catron County, New Mexico, declaring county authority over federally managed lands and, specifically, grazing allotments. While the ordinances and resolutions focused on land use, they also contained language influenced by the teachings of W. Cleon Skousen, an extreme right-wing author, Mormon theologian, and founder of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, née the Freeman Institute, known for its bestselling pocket-size versions of the US Constitution.

The ordinances were “about the legal authority of county governments and the legal rights of local citizens as regards the use of federal and state lands.” They were intended to preserve the “customs and culture” of the rural West, which apparently included livestock operations, mining, logging, and riding motorized vehicles across public lands. And the Catron County commissioners were ready to turn to violence and even civil war to stop, in the words of the ordinance, “federal and state agents” that “threaten the life, liberty, and happiness of the people of Catron County … and present danger to the land and livelihood of every man, woman, and child.” The National Federal Lands Conference, a Utah-based organization launched in the late 1980s by Sagebrush Rebel Bert Smith, a contemporary and philosophical collaborator of Skousen’s, peddled similar ordinances to other counties around the West.

Budd-Falen has been especially antagonistic toward the Endangered Species Act, often representing clients hoping to reduce the law’s scope or to water down its enforcement or applicability. In 2013, for instance, she filed an amicus brief in support of People for the Ethical Treatment of Property Owners’ claim that the ESA should not apply to Utah prairie dogs because the species’ range was confined to one state. The property owners lost and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Occasionally Budd-Falen has veered away from defending property rights, however, if it means keeping cows on public lands. After Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, the Grand Canyon Trust bought out grazing allotments in the monument from willing sellers with the intention of retiring the permits for good. It was a win-win situation, one that allowed ranchers to bring in a pile of cash and maybe retire or move operations to a more cattle-appropriate area, and it protected sensitive areas from the ravages of grazing.

Nevertheless, Kane and Garfield County commissioners didn’t like the deal, mostly because they didn’t like the monument. So they sued to block the permit retirements, in an attempt to undercut the transactions, and Budd-Falen stepped in to represent them. She said she was trying to ensure the survival of the “cowboy’s Western way of life,” apparently even if it was against the cowboys’ own wishes. “I think it’s important to keep ranchers on the land,” she told the Deseret News. She definitely will not do anything to reform public lands grazing during her tenure, but then that’s no different from any other administration so far, Republican or Democrat.

In the early 1990s Budd-Falen represented a number of southern Nevada ranchers —including Cliven Bundy — in their beef with the feds over grazing in endangered desert tortoise habitat. Budd-Falen was quick to condemn the Bundys’ armed insurrection against the federal government when BLM rangers tried to remove their cows from public lands, where they had been grazing illegally for years. And she also spoke out against the Bundy-led armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Still, one can’t deny that her work and words — often hostile and aimed at environmentalists and federal land agencies — provide an intellectual underpinning for the Bundy worldview. She is an alumni of the Mountain West Legal Foundation, the breeding ground for the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use movement that helped launch the careers of Watt and Gale Norton, the Interior secretary under W. Bush. And in 2007 Budd-Falen told High Country News’s Ray Ring that her most important case was when she used RICO, and anti-racketeering law, to go after BLM agents who had cited her client for violating grazing regulations.

Her rhetoric outside the courtroom not only inflames, but also provides justification for those who may be inclined to take up arms against their purported oppressors. She has referred to federal land management agencies as “a dictatorship” wielding its “bureaucratic power … to take private property and private property rights.” She once made the spurious claim that “the federal government pays environmental groups to sue the federal government to stop your use of your property.”

Seems pretty crazy to put someone like that near the top of a federal land management agency, but then, that’s par for the course for Trump and company.

The tally at Interior now includes, in addition to Budd-Falen:

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has close ties to oil tycoon Harold Hamm, and who suggested using “inhospitable or unoccupied” public lands to pay down the federal debt.

BLM director Kathleen Sgamma, an oil and gas industry lobbyist who has sued the agency she is now tapped to lead.

Deputy Interior Secretary Katharine McGregor, who served the same position during the final year of Trump’s first term, and was most recently the VP of Environmental Services at NextEra Energy in Florida.

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

It appears that Trump’s executive orders are beginning to change the way regional public lands offices operate. Patrick Lohmann with Source NM reports, for example, that Cibola National Forest Service employees — at least the ones that weren’t fired by DOGE — were ordered to prioritize “mission critical” activities, including reviews of proposed uranium mines, to comply with Trump’s energy orders.

There are currently two proposed uranium mines on the forest, which includes Mount Taylor and surrounding areas near Grants, New Mexico. Energy Fuels — the owner of the Pinyon Plain uranium mine and the White Mesa uranium mill — is looking to develop the Roca Honda mine on about 183 acres. And Laramide Resources wants to build the La Jara Mesa mine. Both projects would be underground, not surface mines, and were originally proposed over a decade ago, but stalled out when uranium prices crashed. Now that prices have increased, the firms have expressed renewed interest.

The dots show abandoned uranium mining and milling sites.

The Grants and Mount Taylor area was ravaged by Cold War-era uranium mining and the wounds from the previous boom continue to fester. That include the remnants of Anaconda Minerals Company’s Jackpile-Paguate Mine on Laguna Pueblo land, which was once the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine, producing some 24 million tons of ore.

Miners were exposed to radioactive and toxic heavy metals daily, even spending their lunch breaks sitting on piles of uranium ore. Blasting sent tremors through the pueblo’s adobe homes, and a cloud of poisonous dust drifted into the village of Paguate, just 2,000 feet from the mine, coating fruit trees, gardens, corn, and meat that was set out to dry. A toxic plume continued to spread through groundwater aquifers, and the Rio Paguate, a Rio Grande tributary, remains contaminated more than a decade after the facility became a Superfund site, despite millions of dollars in cleanup work. Laguna residents and former mine workers still suffer lingering health problems — cancer, respiratory illnesses and kidney disease — from the mine and its pollution.

Now the feds are saying approving new uranium mines in the same area is “mission critical.”

***

In December, the Biden administration began the process of halting new mining claims and mineral leasing for the next 20 years on 165,000 acres in the upper Pecos River watershed west of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This included holding meetings to gather public input on the plan. But the BLM canceled the first such meeting, scheduled for late February, and has not announced a new date, sparking fears that the new administration may be withdrawing plans for a mineral withdrawal.

Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868

Included within the acreage are more than 200 active mining claims held by Comexico LLC, a subsidiary of Australia-based New World Resources. For the past several years, Comexico has been working its way through the permitting process to do exploratory drilling at what it calls its Tererro mining project. It has met with stiff resistance from locals and regional advocacy groups, partly because mining has a dark history in the Pecos River watershed. In 1991, a big spring runoff washed contaminated mine and mill waste from a long-defunct mine into the upper Pecos River, killing as many as 100,000 trout. That prompted a multi-year cleanup of various mining sites.

***

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

And now for a special treat, or maybe torture, but either way it might help take your mind off the dismantling of Democracy for a few moments. It’s my blow-by-blow analysis of the 1978 movie Avalanche, starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow. Normally this would be behind a paywall, like all of the other Land Desk archives. But I’m opening up to everyone for a limited time only in honor of the snowslide-triggering storm that is pounding the San Juans as I write. Enjoy. And, while you’re at it, check out our interactive map of long-lost ski hills in southwest Colorado.

AVALANCHE: A blow-by-blow analysis of the 1978 disaster flick — Jonathan P. Thompson, February 9, 2022

I was drawn in by the close-up winter aerial shots of ridges and peaks of the San Juan Mountains—Look, there’s Vestal! I yelled to my non-existent viewing companions as Rock Hudson’s name flashed on the screen. And Arrow! And Mount Garfield! I kept watching the lost-to-obscurity 1978 disaster film,

Read full story

Copernicus: January 2025 was the warmest on record globally, despite an emerging #LaNiña — World Meteorological Society #ActOnClimate

Surface air temperature anomaly for January 2025 relative to the January average for the period 1991-2020. Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Click the link to read the report on the Copernicus website:

February 6, 2025

January 2025 – Surface air temperature and sea surface temperature highlights

Global Temperatures

January 2025 was the warmest January globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.23°C, 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average for January.

January 2025 was 1.75°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 18th month in the last nineteen months for which the global-average surface air temperature was more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.

The last 12-monthsperiod (February 2024 – January 2025) was 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average, and 1.61°C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level.

*Datasets other than ERA5 may not confirm the 18 months above 1.5°C highlighted here, due to the relatively small margins above 1.5°C of ERA5 global temperatures observed for several months and differences among the various datasets.

Europe and other regions

The average temperature over European land for January 2025 was 1.80°C, 2.51°C above the 1991-2020 average for January, the second warmest after January 2020, which was 2.64°C above average.

European temperatures were most above the 1991-2020 average over southern and eastern Europe, including western Russia. In contrast, they were below average over Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northern France, and northern Fennoscandia.

Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over northeast and northwest Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. They were also above average over southern South America, Africa, and much of Australia and Antarctica.

Temperatures were most notably below average over the United States and the easternmost regions of Russia, Chukotka and Kamchatka. The Arabian Peninsula and mainland Southeast Asia also had below-average temperatures.

Sea surface temperature

The average sea surface temperature (SST) for January 2025 over 60°S–60°N was 20.78°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, 0.19°C below the January 2024 record.

SSTs were below average over the central equatorial Pacific, but close to or above average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, suggesting a slowing or stalling of the move towards La Niña conditions. SSTs remained unusually high in many other ocean basins and seas.

Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to January 2025, plotted as time series for each year. 2025 is shown with a thick red line, 2024 with a thick orange line, 2023 with a thick yellow line, and all other years with thin grey lines. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service /ECMWF.

According to Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF:

“January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and their temporary cooling effect on global temperatures. Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.”

January 2025 – Hydrological highlights

January 2025 saw predominantly wetter-than-average conditions over regions of western Europe, as well as parts of Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries; heavy precipitation led to flooding in some regions.

Conversely, drier than average conditions established in northern UK and Ireland, eastern Spain, and north of the Black Sea.

Beyond Europe, it was wetter than average in Alaska, Canada, central and eastern Russia, eastern Australia, south-eastern Africa, southern Brazil, with regions experiencing floods and associated damage.

Drier than average conditions established in southwestern United States and northern Mexico, northern Africa, the Middle East, across Central Asia and in eastern China as well as in much of southern Africa, southern South America and Australia.

January 2025 – Sea Ice highlights

Arctic sea ice reached its lowest monthly extent for January, at 6% below average, virtually tied with January 2018.

In the Arctic region, sea ice concentration anomalies were well below average in the eastern Canadian sector, including Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea, and in the northern Barents Sea.

Antarctic sea ice extent was 5% below average and thus relatively close to average compared to other recent years. This contrasts with the record or near-record values observed in 2023–2024.

In the Antarctic region, sea ice concentrations were above average in the Amundsen Sea and generally mixed in other ocean sectors.

More information about climate variables in January and climate updates of previous months as well as high-resolution graphics can be downloaded here.

Other useful links:

Answers to frequently asked questions regarding temperature monitoring can be found here.

Follow near-real-time data for the globe on Climate Pulse here.

More on trends and projections on Climate Atlas here.

U.S. Supreme Court kills #Utah land grab — Jonathan P. Thompson

A bunch of Utah public lands. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on the Landdesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 14, 2025

The latest public-land grab attempt is dead — at least for now. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to seize control of 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. This effectively ends Utah’s bid to take its case directly to the Supreme Court1, albeit not before it had spent over $1 million of the state taxpayer’s cash on legal expenses and a goofy PR campaign that included this bizarre ad aimed at inducing nostalgia for an era that never really was.

One might hope that this defeat at the hands of a conservative court would teach Utah’s elected officials to give up and be grateful for the abundance of public land in their state, which is actually the envy of folks everywhere. But alas, I kind of doubt they’d be that wise, because, well … Utah. So after licking their wounds, they’re likely to come back with some other strategy for purloining public lands.

Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the Wyoming legislature, which just introduced a resolution “demanding that the United States Congress … extinguish federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” Which is to say that Wyoming is ordering the U.S. — i.e. all Americans — to surrender public lands within the state, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state, thus opening it up to be privatized.

Yes, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has taken control of the Wyoming legislature and, according to reporting by WyoFile, they plan to introduce “bold policies that probably have never had the opportunity to see the light of day” and that are based upon “godly principles.”

This would include public land grabs and repealing gun-free zones because, you know, Jesus was all about AR-15s. And it includes the — I kid you not — “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again” law that would bar the state from designating or treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It would also nix Gov. Mark Gordon’s efforts to establish the state as a leader in carbon capture and sequestration technology and actually would relinquish any primacy over carbon storage to the feds. Go figure.

And just in case Congress isn’t cowed by the threat of a Wyoming-lawmaker-led revolt, then Rep. Harriet Hageman will step in with her own federal legislation. While it doesn’t attempt to transfer public land, it is aimed at neutering the Bureau of Land Management by nullifying management plans that have been years in the making. Hageman recently introduced a bill that would block implementation of the Rock Springs and Buffalo field office resource management plans.

Stay tuned. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of these shenanigans.

#Utah goes for the ultimate public land grab: Lawsuit would seize control of 18.5 million acres of your land — Jonathan P. Thompson (www.landdesk.org)

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The Paradox Valley in western Colorado. The proposed Mustang, née Piñon Ridge, uranium mill would be located on the far side of the valley (center right in the picture). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

For the past few years, Western Uranium & Vanadium, based in Canada and Nucla, Colorado, has been making a lot of noise about plans to bring its Sunday Mine Complex in the Uravan Mineral Belt into production. It’s also proposing to establish a new uranium mill just outside Green River, Utah — thereby furthering the industrialization of the melon-farming town. So far, however, the mine has not produced any ore, nor has the mill progressed beyond the “baseline data collection” stage.

But that hasn’t stopped the company from keeping the hype going. Yesterday it announced it would begin data collection at the former Piñon Ridge uranium mill site in the Paradox Valley, which it’s now calling the Mustang Mineral Processing Facility.

You may recognize the Piñon Ridge name. Back in 2007, Energy Fuels — the current owner of the White Mesa Uranium Mill — purchased the site and proposed building a uranium mill there. At the time, George Glasier, who currently helms Western Uranium & Vanadium, was Energy Fuel’s CEO. A lot of locals were not so psyched about having a new radioactive site in their midst, and opposition to the proposed mill was fierce.

A twisted saga ensued, finally ending when the state revoked the mill’s permit in 2018. In the interim, Glasier had stepped down from the helm of Energy Fuels, which had acquired the White Mesa Mill, started his own company, and purchased the Piñon Ridge project. Last year, Western U&V acquired the Piñon Ridge project from Glasier’s company. And now Glasier seems to think he can get a newly designed mill permitted (he has yet to apply for a permit). Or maybe he’s just fishing for more investors’ dollars. In any case, the folks who led the resistance to the mill last time are ready to push back once again if necessary.

📖 Reading Room 🧐

Here come those Santa Ana winds again …

The National Weather Service has issued an extreme fire danger bulletin for a good chunk of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, through tomorrow as the Santa Ana winds kick up again. This as the Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn, having already taken 24 lives and an estimated 12,300 structures.

It’s been stunning to watch the destruction from afar and heartbreaking to imagine the collective sense of loss rippling across the sprawling metropolis of 18 million. The immensity of it all, the rate at which the fires spread, and the way the Santa Anas send flaming embers into the air to spawn their own blazes miles away is horrifying. Equally baffling is the way the tragedy seems to have opened up a firehose of stupidity, finger-pointing, and grandstanding, issuing forth from the President-elect, Elon Musk, political pundits, and and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California? They know how to do it.”2

I considered spending a bunch of words explaining how and why these folks are wrong. But even acknowledging their existence and repeating their inane lies makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, and trying to debunk even a fraction of the claims is to play a futile game of whack a mole, though that’s not stopping California’s government from trying. As an antidote, I’ve been reading some smart things about the fires, the Santa Ana winds, and Los Angeles, and I figured it would be nice to share some of them with you.

Start out with Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Ana winds, in which she reminds us that this month’s raging Santa Anas aren’t entirely unprecedented. A two-week long Thanksgiving-time Santa Ana event in 1957 included 100-mph gusts that toppled oil derricks, propelled heavy objects through the air (some of which killed people), and drove a blaze through the San Gabriels for well over a week. She writes:

Then check out the opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind (and how can you stop reading after this!?):

And the late Mike Davis’s “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” should be required reading in these times. And yes, it’s quite a bit more nuanced than the title might suggest. Davis gives a good history of post-colonial fires in the Malibu area and explains how in 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for turning 10,000 acres there into a public park (that could have burned in natural cycles, without destroying homes).

Alas, that didn’t happen. Instead, Malibu was developed, and fires roared through there in 1930, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. The city had the opportunity to acquire 17,000 acres for just $1.1 million and turn it into a preserve in 1938 — it passed up the chance. Housing came, instead, along with more destructive fires. He writes:

Each fire, then, was followed by reconstruction on a larger, more exclusive scale. Malibu went from being a ranching, rural area, to a bohemian enclave, to a high-end suburb. “Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire:,” Davis writes, “those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”

Joshua Frank mentions Davis’s essay in a poignant piece for CounterPunch in which he asks folks to stop their victim-blaming and have a bit of compassion, even if they don’t like L.A.. He writes:

At his Public Lands Media Substack, George Wuerthner talks about how these are really urban wildfires, not forest fires, and so the old mitigation and prevention techniques don’t necessarily apply.

He argues that prescribed burns and thinning wouldn’t have worked, because the fires started in the chaparral, which has a natural fire regime of about 30 to 100 years. Prescribed burns tend to eliminate native species that are then replaced by more flammable grasses.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne also talk about how these fires don’t fit into conventional notions of wildfire. In both the Palisades and Eaton fires, there were unburned trees sitting right next to homes that had been totally destroyed. Cohen:

Here’s hoping for an ember-free day for Los Angeles.

1 This was corrected from saying it effectively ended their legal bid. As reader Slickrock Stranger pointed out, that’s not necessarily the case. Utah could still take its case to the lower courts and keep losing until it ends up at the Supreme Court (which could again decline to hear the case, or something else). But SCOTUS did shoot down this particular strategy of going straight to the Supreme Court for a decision.

2 Oh, that’s right, because “they” modified the weather so that Hurricane Helene would wreck the southeast and keep all those Republicans from voting. Yeah. No. First off, Marge, while the theory behind cloudseeding is legit, there is scant evidence that it significantly increases precipitation. And, even so, it only works if there are already moisture-laden clouds present to seed. Thus the name. Now, maybe if They sent a hurricane to L.A. blowing inland from the Pacific, it would cancel out the Santa Anas, which blow toward the ocean, and then we’d be fine. Alas, They can’t control the weather.

Lawmakers say no to storing nuclear waste in #Wyoming: Distrust over the federal government’s ability to build a permanent repository played a critical role in committee’s decision to kill controversial ‘temporary’ storage bill — Dustin Bleizeffer (WyoFile.com)

A barrel of radioactive waste is visible through a catwalk at the Smith Ranch-Highland in-situ uranium mine in Wyoming. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile.com website (Dustin Bleizeffer):

January 30, 2025

Despite growing support for nuclear energy nationally and here in Wyoming, there are simply too many concerns to entertain the possibility of opening the state to the country’s growing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel waste, some lawmakers say.

House Bill 16, “Used nuclear fuel storage-amendments,” touted by its backers as a tool to initiate a larger conversation, died Wednesday morning in the House Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee.

In addition to being flooded with emails and phone calls from constituents opposed to warehousing the deadly, radioactive material, several lawmakers on the panel were not convinced that a “temporary” storage facility would, in fact, be temporary. They noted that the federal government has tried and failed for decades to establish a permanent nuclear waste repository that would give some legitimacy to the “temporary” storage concept.

“This appears to be a huge game of hot potato,” Gillette Republican Rep. Reuben Tarver said.

Reacting to several claims during the hearing that the storage of radioactive nuclear fuel waste poses no human health or environmental risks, Rep. Scott Heiner of Green River listed a litany of reported leaks from the same type of “dry cask” containers in other states that would come to Wyoming.

TerraPower’s proposed Natrium nuclear power plant will be located outside Kemmerer. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

“They’re still cleaning that up,” Heiner said. “Multi-billion-dollar environmental cleanup — to take decades. So even though there’s a lot of safety precautions in place, we can’t guarantee [storage is] 100% risk-free.”

What was in the bill

The push to open the state to spent-nuclear fuel waste has persisted for decades, including a years-long effort in the early 1990s, which ended when then-Gov. Mike Sullivan vetoed a similar measure, noting that the issue was simply too divisive and fraught with unanswered questions.

Since then, Wyoming lawmakers have tinkered with state statutes, notably a few years ago to accommodate limited storage at the site of nuclear power generation to help clear the way for TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant project near Kemmerer. But state law still prohibits high-level radioactive waste storage, as envisioned in HB 16, unless the federal government establishes a permanent repository.

House Bill 16 would have set the stage to remove that statutory barrier in anticipation of a permanent, federal waste storage repository, Lander Republican Rep. Lloyd Larsen said.

“That seems to be in the works now,” he told committee members.

The legislation also sought to change language throughout Wyoming law referring to radioactive material as “waste” to “used nuclear fuel” — an attempt to alter public perception, as well as promote the idea that the materials might one day be reprocessed for re-use.

In fact, former Republican Rep. Donald Burkhart Jr. of Rawlins, when he introduced the bill to the committee in July, said if Wyoming takes on temporary nuclear fuel waste storage it would prime the state to eventually win a lucrative industry in reprocessing.

“Currently, the United States does not reprocess nuclear fuel,” Burkhart told committee members then. “I feel that within the next five years, that will change, and when it changes, wherever the fuel is stored is where they will do the reprocessing.”

Lack of public engagement

Burkhart’s rollout of the measure last year was also a major point of contention for the committee and several people who testified on Wednesday.

Rep. Donald Burkhart, Jr. (R-Rawlins) at the State Capitol in 2022. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile)

Burkhart, who did not run for another term, waited until the final minutes of a two-day hearing in Casper in July to introduce the draft measure to the Minerals Committee. He also forbade the Legislative Service Office from sharing the draft measure publicly until days before an October hearing, leaving scant opportunity for the public to digest the proposed law and research its implications.

“So many questions,” Gillette Republican Rep. Christopher Knapp said. “I think that part of this is because, although this says it came out as an interim bill, you really didn’t discuss this during the interim. This came as a last-minute bill in front of us, and here we sit in a committee meeting that probably should last for days with questions to get this through.”

Lawmakers on the panel also expressed suspicions that long-time backers of nuclear waste storage already have potential locations in mind, including perhaps sites on or near the Wind River Indian Reservation — without consulting the tribal communities.

We must protect our sacred lands: To meet the crisis of our time and help address past wrongs, we need bold action from decision makers — Clark Tenakhongva (High Country News)

Gila National Forest Historic Photo Collection. The view from Mogollon Baldy. USFS photo by E. W. Kelley, 1923 FS # 175804

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Clark Tenakhongva):

January 29, 2025

I write with a steadfast commitment to Hopi – the land, animals and people that have been in so-called Arizona since life began. We Hopi claim responsibility not just for Arizona life, but for biodiversity throughout the world, endowed to us by the Creator. In my political and nonprofit positions, I’ve worked to protect Bears Ears National Monument, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, and Chaco Canyon. In my current role as a consultant on land protection campaigns with WildEarth Guardians, I am engaged in the Greater Gila campaign, protecting Hopi ancestral homelands in the Gila National Forest and Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Unrelenting uranium mining, fracking, livestock grazing and recreational abuse have decimated the land as well as our sacred sites. Tribes, nonprofits and community members cannot afford to backslide during this second Trump administration, and we cannot give away our power by waiting four years.

Through my work with environmental nonprofits and elected officials, I have witnessed small strides toward LandBack, tribal sovereignty and less extractive management of public lands. While I am certainly grateful for actions to protect places sacred to the Hopi and other tribes, I am deeply concerned about this second Trump administration, and the disturbing pattern of Democrats crafting campaigns that are disconnected from the poorest in this country – in rural America and on tribal lands. To address the polycrises of the current moment, we need bold action from decision makers. Standing in the middle of the road will only continue to perpetuate the harms of colonization.

The founding of the United States, and its subsequent accrual of wealth and power, were built on slavery and genocide. Most Native people have never fully recovered from this, continuing to live without access to running water, concerned about our water rights in general, and well aware that the federal government could break treaties at any time – a practice that has never stopped or been fully remediated. We do not need more apologies or statements. We need meaningful, direct action – legislative and community-led, before the Trump administration begins eviscerating the work we have done.

My work with WildEarth Guardians relies on decolonization and addressing past harms – including those done by the conservation movement – to ensure they are not repeated in the future. From the Native perspective, we have always cared about the land, through common teachings, oral history, ceremony and relationships. From the nonprofit perspective, conservation has historically been rooted in science and law. Steps towards honoring and uplifting traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom through co-stewardship, co-management and LandBack efforts must not be abandoned. Courageous allyship from our public servants – congressional and state officials alike – in dismantling an oligarchic takeover of both parties is imperative. We invite you to stand arm in arm with us in a bold renunciation of campaign contributions from entities that enable genocide (both at home and abroad), empower the fossil fuel industry, and generally create more poverty, climate change, racism and extinction. It will not be possible to achieve the continuation of life while also prioritizing re-election through corporate contributions and political vanity.

Clark Tenakhongva, former vice chairman of the Hopi Nation and former co-chairman of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition via his Facbook page.

To protect our sacred lands and, at minimum, hold the line on what tribes have fought for (and won), there must be a bold alternative to Trump’s authoritarianism.To meet these trying times, members of Congress, federal and state agencies, and state legislatures must:

Protect and defend the existing boundaries of the most vulnerable national monuments, including Bears Ears, Ancestral Footprints, Grand Staircase, and others targeted by the Trump administration.

Recognize that water is life. Contamination of our rivers and streams and underground aquifers are a perpetual problem. Hopi people have significant rates of cancer due to uranium poisoning.

Congress must reform the archaic 1872 Mining Law, which gives free reign to corporations (many of them foreign) to exploit our lands and poison our bodies.

Congress must also ratify and fund the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024. This urgent matter has already cost our tribes millions of dollars as we’ve searched for an agreement. Securing these water rights is potentially the most important thing Congress can do to immediately benefit the Hopi.

The U.S. government must fully fund agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Lack of capacity and law enforcement has led to increased vandalism, looting and illegal ATV use, as well as recreational overuse. The Schultz Fire, in the Coconino National Forest, was started by an abandoned campfire. The 15,000-acre burn destroyed much of our sacred Douglas Fir that we use for ceremonies, and resulted in a new, bureaucratic process for Hopi with the U.S. Forest Service. Permits are now required in a place our ancestors had gathered freely for centuries. This is one example of how an underfunded, understaffed agency, coupled with a push for more tourism, had devastating and far-reaching consequences.

The Biden administration’s Executive Order 13175 mandatesthat federal agencies consult with tribes regarding land management. Congress should uphold this mandate and, in fact, increase contact with tribal governments and communities in order to honor all perspectives. This mandate has not yet resulted in deep or meaningful changes. Support and directives for agencies to meaningfully engage with tribes, even under a second Trump administration, is critical.

As a veteran, I support our troops and responsible military behavior. But low-level military flights over current and ancestral Hopi lands have resulted in poor nesting conditions and survival outcomes for golden eagles and hawks. Military flights have increased over the tribal and ancestral lands of the White Mountain Apache, San Carlos Apache, Tohono O’odham, Hopi and others. We ask that Congress continue to hold the Department of Defense accountable for reckless overflights, dropping flares (which have caused forest fires) and dropping chaff (toxic military training material which contains PFAS and other contaminants).

It is my hope that if elected officials, community members and agencies truly act out the values they purport, we can start down a path of healing. I close this letter with a sincere prayer and a reminder that life is precious.

EPA takes unprecedented step to remove uranium waste from the Navajo Nation: The decision opens the door for new ways to manage uranium pollution on tribal land — Natalia Mesa (High Country News)

Red Water Pond Road Community leader, Larry King, addresses plans to relocate the Quivera Mine Waste Pile that is located about 1,000 feet from the closest residence. Shayla Blatchford

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Natalia Mesa):

January 17, 2025

As a child, herding her grandmother’s sheep, Teracita Keyanna unknowingly wandered onto land contaminated with radioactive waste from three abandoned uranium mine and mill waste sites located near her home on the Navajo Nation.

Keyanna and other Diné citizens have been living with the consequences of uranium mining near the Red Water Pond Road community since the 1960s. But now, uranium waste rock that has sat for decades at a Superfund site will finally be moved to a landfill off tribal land.

“This is a seismic shift in policy for Indigenous communities,” said Eric Jantz, an attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.

On Jan. 5, in a first-of-its-kind move, the Environmental Protection Agency signed an action memo to transport 1 million cubic yards of low-grade radioactive waste from the Quivira Mining Co. Church Rock Mine to a disposal site at the Red Rock Regional Landfill. The Northwest New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority owns and operates the landfill, which is located about 6 miles east of Thoreau, New Mexico.

“I feel like our community has finally had a win,” Keyanna said. She is a member of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association, a grassroots organization made up of Diné families that have been advocating for the waste removal for almost two decades. “It’ll help the community heal.”

Companies extracted an estimated 30 million tons of uranium ore on or near the Navajo Nation from 1944 to 1986, largely to fuel the federal government’s enormous nuclear arsenal. When the mines were abandoned in the 1980s, the toxic waste remained. Today, there are hundreds of abandoned mines in plain sight on the Navajo Nation, contaminating the water, air and soil. Altogether, there are an estimated 15,000 uranium mines across the West — 1,200 of them on the Navajo Nation alone — with the majority located in the Four Corners region.

The impact of all this mining on Diné communities has been devastating. A 2008 study found uranium contamination in 29 water sources across the Navajo Nation, while other studies show that people living near waste sites face a high risk of kidney failure and various cancers.

At Quivira, the cleanup is set to begin in early 2025 and will continue for six to eight years, according to an EPA news release. The permitting process, which will provide opportunity for public comment, will be overseen by the New Mexico authority that manages the proposed waste site and is responsible for its long-term safety monitoring.

Mine Waste Area with Limited Vegetation. Photo credit: EPA

The EPA had considered multiple options for waste remediation. But for years, Red Water Pond Road advocates and other local organizations continually pushed it to simply remove the waste, a course of action that the EPA has never taken before, even though the Navajo Nation has repeatedly called for the federal government to move all uranium waste from Diné tribal land.

Throughout the Navajo Nation, said Jantz, “prior to this decision, EPA’s primary choice in terms of remediation of mine was to bury the piles under some dirt and plant some grass seeds on top, called cap in place.” But studies have shown that this approach is not effective at containing radioactive waste in the long term, he said.

The agency took a similar approach when addressing the other uranium waste in the Church Rock area. In 2013, the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees uranium mine-waste cleanup, dumped 1 million cubic yards of waste from the Northeast Church Rock Mine — a different waste site, roughly 3 miles from the Quivira Mine — on top of existing tailings located half a mile from the Red Water Pond Road communities.

But the EPA plans to handle the Quivira Mine’s waste differently, placing it in geoengineered disposal cells with a groundwater leak protection system after it is moved off-site, an approach that Jantz called “state-of-the-art.”

The Quivira Mine cleanup is part of the 2014 Tronox settlement, which provided $5.15 billion to clean up contaminated sites across the United States. The settlement allocated $1 billion of those funds to clean up 50 uranium mines across the Navajo Nation.

There is a lot more to be done, said Susan Gordon, coordinator for the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, a grassroots organization led by uranium-impacted communities. Hundreds of abandoned mines pepper the Navajo Nation, and the EPA has not formulated a broader plan to clean up the majority of them. Funding is also an issue, she added.

What the EPA’s decision means for the future of uranium mine waste remediation is unclear. Under other circumstances, Jantz said that the decision would signal a sea change for the EPA’s policy of removing waste from the Navajo Nation. But the incoming Trump administration has not indicated its policy on hazardous waste disposal.

As Jantz put it, “All bets are off.”

Graphic credit: Environmental Protection Agency

Cleanup of abandoned uranium mines set to start after Navajo Nation, EPA reach agreement — AZCentral.com

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:

January 8, 2025

After years of demanding the cleanup of uranium waste at the Kerr-McGee Quivira Mines on the Navajo Nation community advocates got the news this week that the Environmental Protection Agency will remove waste rock from three areas of the site and move it to a new off-site repository. The removal of over 1 million cubic yards of radioactive waste from the sites about 20 miles northeast of Gallup will begin in early 2025, the EPA said. The waste will be taken to a new off-site repository at Red Rocks Landfill east of Thoreau, N.M. The process, including permitting, construction, operation and closure of the repository, is expected to take 6-8 years.

“I feel as though our community finally has something of a win,” said Teracita Keyanna, a member of the executive committee for Red Water Pond Road Community Association. “Removing the mine waste from our community will protect our health and finally put us back on a positive track to Hózhǫ.”

Commercial exploration, development, and mining of uranium at Quivira Mines began in the late 1960s by the Kerr-McGee Corporation and later its subsidiary. The mine sites are the former Church Rock 1 (CR-1) mining area; the former Church Rock 1 East (CR-1E) mining area; and the Kerr-McGee Ponds area. The mines were in operation from 1974 to the mid-1980s and had produced about 1.2 million tons of ore, making them among the 10 highest producing mines on the Navajo Nation…From World War II until 1971, the U.S. government was the sole purchaser of uranium ore, driving extensive mining operations primarily in the southwestern United States. These efforts employed many Native Americans and others in mines and mills. Between 1944 and 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands under leases with the Navajo Nation. With over 500 abandoned uranium mines — many say the total could be in the thousands — clean up of mines has always been a battle.

Why we need the interstate highways of electricity — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #ActOnClimate

Colorado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

December 19, 2024

Transmission line in southeast Colorado a cause for guarded optimism among utility leaders

Interstate highways have transformed Colorado and America altogether. People growing up in the 1950s rarely had fresh fruit or vegetables in winter. Now, broccoli beheaded yesterday in a field near Yuma, Ariz., can be on a store shelf in metro Denver within a day or two. Much of that journey will be on an interstate highway.

High-voltage transmission lines are our four-lane highways of electricity. They worked well enough when giant coal plants provided most of our electricity. Now, as Colorado and other states strive to replace fossil fuels with renewables, new connections must be built, to knit us together across broader areas.

A federal agency this week delivered cause for cautious optimism. The Department of Energy has picked three transmission corridors among 10 national candidates for advanced work. One of them, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, would begin in southeast Colorado near Lamar, and work south into New Mexico and then somewhat west.

The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized the secretary of energy to designate any geographic area as a national interest electric transmission corridor. The energy department has found that absence of transmission harms consumers. With more transmission, we can share low-cost renewable generation across broader areas. We need an electric grid larger than one weather system and covering more than one time zone.

The existing transmission network is akin to our highways of 50 to 60 years ago. We have transmission, but it’s as if Interstate 70 stopped at the state line. In fact, transmission lines do. Colorado is in the Western electrical grid of 10 states and some adjoining areas. This grid, however, is better understood as a collection of 34 different islands connected by narrow causeways.

“A cautious hurrah,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power when I asked his reaction. The Brighton-based electrical cooperative supplies 113,000 members from the foothills to Weld County’s oil and gas fields, including many new industrial centers along I-76.

“Anything that promotes additional transmission is a good thing,” said Gabriel. “However, the challenge remains in actually getting something constructed in a reasonable period of time to make a difference.”

Gabriel pointed out that more than $40 billion in transmission projects have been announced. “Only a fraction are actually being built.”

Permitting has been the bane of many transmission projects. For example, it took 18 years before the TransWest Express Transmission project that will ferry wind-generated electricity from southern Wyoming to Utah and West Coast markets finally broke ground in 2023. It nicks the corner of northwest Colorado.

A bill being negotiated in Congress would ease federal permitting requirements to allow more rapid creation of transmission lines. Other provisions of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 would also benefit oil and gas extraction.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale provider for 17 of Colorado’s 22 electrical cooperatives, pointed to the need for streamlined permitting in its reaction to the transmission line in southeastern Colorado.

Transmission doesn’t come cheap. And just as interstate highways have their unsavory aspects — my companion and I can routinely hear I-70 roaring a mile away — transmission lines have their downsides. Who wants one in their backyard?

Baca County has Colorado’s best wind resource and it gets plenty of sunshine. Lacking has been transmission. Top photo transmission in Colroado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Some want to believe nuclear energy will solve all of our problems. The Pueblo City Council, while saying nice things about nuclear, intends to scrap a goal of 100% renewables by 2035. Maybe nuclear will be an answer, but recent projects have had eye-bulging costs. Natural gas has problems, too, as was evident in Winter Storm Uri of February 2021 when costs soared.

Chris Hansen, as a state legislator from Denver, sponsored key legislation to push transmission planning in Colorado. Now in Durango as CEO of La Plata Electric, he has started working on guiding his electrical cooperative to 97% emission-free electricity in the next decade. Transmission, he says, will be crucial.

Capacity of existing transmission lines can be expanded by reconductoring and other technology. But we altogether need to be better connected east and west, north and south.

One crucial question, says Hansen, is whether Denver-based Chris Wright, the choice of Donald Trump to be secretary of energy, will support continued transmission planning. His Colorado-based career has been in oil and gas. Wright sees renewables as a distant solution.

Southeastern Colorado brims with renewable energy potential. Baca County has Colorado’s best wind, according to a 2017 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It also has strong solar. That’s why corn grows so well there — assuming it has water. The water of the Ogallala Aquifer won’t last, but the solar and wind almost certainly will. What it lacks now is a farm-to-market transmission highway.

On Biden’s Energy Dominance: The U.S. is the globe’s biggest oil and gas producer — without the drill, baby, drill BS — Jonathan P. Thompson #ActOnClimate

Pumpjack in the Aneth Oil Field in southeastern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 27, 2024

📈 Data Dump 📊

The Land Desk is taking a break from its regularly scheduled programming to set something straight. It has come to our attention that one or more of our readers don’t realize that under the Biden administration the United States has become the planet’s leading oil and gas producing powerhouse. Well, it has, mostly on the strength of a drilling frenzy on public, private, and state land in the Permian Basin of New Mexico and Texas.

For those who pay attention, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But apparently it is news to those who have been duped by President-elect Trump’s claims that his “drill, baby, drill” agenda will bring an end to Biden’s alleged “war on energy” and make America energy-dominant again. There is no war on energy, and under the Biden administration the U.S. has been more “energy dominant” than ever before. In fact, it is the globe’s leading producer (and consumer) of petroleum and natural gas.

The United States’ crude oil and petroleum production surpassed both Saudi Arabia’s and Russia’s in 2013, during the Obama administration, and has continued climbing ever since. Now the U.S. produces more crude oil than any nation in history. This is largely due to advances in drilling technology opening up new sources of hydrocarbons, but is also driven by global oil prices. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

This is not something to celebrate, or for the outgoing administration to take pride in — all that oil and gas gets burned, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and exacerbating the climate crisis. It’s just the facts, which include:

U.S. oilfields are producing more crude oil and natural gas than ever before, and production continues to increase steadily, particularly from the Permian Basin.

13.4 million barrels per day: Crude oil production from U.S. oil fields in August 2024. In August 2008 it was 5 million barrels per day.

The U.S. is the globe’s leading producer of crude oil, extracting as much crude oil and other petroleum liquids as Saudi Arabia and Russia combined.

21.91 million barrels/day; 11.13 million b/d; 10.75 million b/d: U.S.; Saudi Arabia; and Russia crude oil and other petroleum liquid production in 2023. They are the world’s top three producers.

The U.S. is even more methane-dominant, producing 25% of the globe’s natural gas.

Natural gas production and consumption for various regions. Source: Statistical Review of World Energy.

The U.S. is exporting more liquefied natural gas, crude oil, and petroleum products than ever before, becoming one of the world’s leading exporters of hydrocarbons.

The United States exports nearly as much LNG, or liquefied natural gas, as all Middle Eastern producers combined. Source: Statistical Review of World Energy.

The U.S. is a net exporter of crude oil and other petroleum products, making it more “energy independent” than it has been since the early 1900s — if you fall for that sort of thing.

While the U.S. continues to import millions of barrels of crude oil each day, it exports substantially more petroleum products as a whole, making it a net exporter to the tune of over 5 million barrels per day. Source: Energy Information Administration.

The U.S. also continues to import large volumes of crude oil, because oil is a global commodity and many of the nation’s refineries are equipped to handle “sour” crude from the Middle East.

Oil and gas corporations have enjoyed tremendous profits during the Biden administration.

ExxonMobil pulled in $13.2 billion in operating profit during the third quarter of this year. Source: Tradingeconomics.com

Whether this is because of or in spite of or totally unrelated to the Biden administration’s policies is open to debate. Biden revived or implemented a handful of new regulations on oil and gas drilling during his term, some of which have only just begun to take effect. And the Bureau of Land Management offered less acreage for federal oil and gas leasing than previous administrations. But the agency also handed out about as many drilling permits, on average, as the Obama and Trump administrations.

That the oil and gas industry was able to reap such bounty regardless is partially due to the fact that, intentionally or not, Biden’s policies were crafted to allow drilling to continue at a rapid pace while still giving the taxpayers a better return and protecting more fragile areas. This included designating (intentionally or not) the Permian Basin as a de facto oil and gas sacrifice zone. A huge majority of the drilling permits issued under Biden were for federal land on the New Mexico side of the Permian Basin, and the Environmental Protection Agency delayed its response to rising pollution in the area, allowing drilling to go on unfettered. Nearly all of the domestic crude oil and natural gas production growth of the last several years has come from the Permian Basin.

The Biden administration issued around the same number of drilling permits, on average, as the Obama and first Trump administrations. But it handed out far more permits in New Mexico’s Permian Basin than ever before. Source: BLM.

The incoming Trump administration has announced plans to roll back Biden-era environmental protections and expedite oil and gas drilling permitting and leasing on federal lands shortly after taking office. This will almost certainly include opening up more acreage in Wyoming, Utah, and Alaska to leasing. And they’ll try to issue more drilling permits in those places, too.

But even if companies lease more land or pull more permits in Wyoming, they won’t necessarily put them to use— most oil and gas leasing is speculative, anyway, meant to build up a corporation’s land-holdings to entice more investment. And petroleum firms currently are sitting on thousands of unused federal drilling permits. These days the industry has shown little interest in developing areas outside of the Permian Basin, and the Biden administration has more or less let it run rampant down there, leading to the current state of U.S. energy dominance.

Oil and gas production from the Permian Basin will continue to increase for the foreseeable future regardless of who is in the White House. But you shouldn’t expect Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to further increase drilling or oil and gas production — or to lead to lower gasoline prices. In fact, Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada will actually increase gas prices in some parts of the U.S., because we get quite a bit of crude oil from them. Besides, his policies are not really aimed at bolstering production or bringing down your prices. They are intended to cut costs for petroleum corporations, thereby increasing their profits, which are already ridiculously high. And it will come at the expense of human health and the environment. [ed. emphasis mine]

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

Drilling material near Slick Rock, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

My email box has been hopping with press releases from various lithium and uranium mining companies tooting their horn about their latest acquisition or exploratory drilling campaign in the Four Corners Country, which tends to get my hackles up. And yet, among the noise is still very little news about actual mining. I have to admit I’m a bit surprised by the lack of ore production, given all of the hype over the last few years.

I did visit one of the more contentious exploratory drilling projects just outside Slick Rock, Colorado. They weren’t drilling when I was there, but a flatbed trailer loaded down with drilling material was on hand, right next to the radioactive-symbol signs warning folks of the presence of a uranium mill tailings repository. Anfield, one of the bigger companies operating in the area, is behind that project.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of the hype — and a bit of whatever the opposite of hype is:

Thor Energy says it has begun drilling at its Wedding Bell Project, which sits right near the San Miguel-Montrose county line in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado. The area has seen heavy prospecting (and a bunch of road-building) in the past.

Pegasus Resources says it has secured drilling permits — contingent upon posting a reclamation bond — for its Energy Sands and Jupiter claims along the San Rafael Swell, west of Green River, Utah, and just north of I-70 where it intersects the Swell. They’re planning on drilling 48 exploratory wells on 50’x50’ pads.

C2C Metals acquired five groups of uranium mining claims in the Uravan Mineral Belt, including the Eula Belle and Mum-Whitney claims in Montrose County and the Norther, Spud Patch, and Dulaney extension in San Miguel County. The claims cover a total of about 5,400 acres.

American Battery Materials says it has received the “necessary agency approvals” — pending the posting of a financial bond — to reenter an old oil and gas well in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah to search for lithium.

And then there’s the anti-hype: Even as all of these projects appear to be ramping up the exploratory phase, one of the few companies that’s actually producing lithium is shutting down. That’s right. U.S. Magnesium, which extracts lithium and magnesium and other materials from Great Salt Lake brine, is idling its operations and laying off 186 employees, according to KUER. They cite “deteriorating market conditions for lithium carbonate.” That is, the price for the stuff isn’t high enough to make mining it profitable.

More information and locations of most of these projects can be found at the Land Desk’s Mining Monitor Map.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I guess this sort of thing was inevitable? The Family Farm Alliance is now offering “Make Alfalfa Great Again” hats. It makes me wonder what that would mean, exactly? Maybe they want to genetically engineer it to use less water? Hmmm…

Credit: Family Farm Alliance via The Land Desk

Trump 2.0: What to expect regarding public lands and the environment: Time to prepare for another four years of “drill, baby, drill” — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ActOnClimate

Just a nice picture of a spectacular place. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 8, 2024

On Nov. 5, more than 73 million Americans — or just over half of those who voted — chose to send Donald J. Trump to the White House for a second time. Trump garnered a smaller percentage of votes in my southwestern Colorado hometown. Still, four out of ten Durangatans opted for a candidate who stands diametrically opposed to the values I hold dear. And some of those folks are friends or people I admire.

Surely many of them disapprove of Trump’s behavior and many of his policies, but voted for him anyway simply because he’s a Republican, because he’s not the status quo or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or a Clinton, because they’re fed up with “wokeness,” because they believe he’ll lower the price of eggs and gasoline, or because he’s the only viable white male on the ballot. Others may have chosen him or not voted at all to protest Biden’s tacit support for the atrocities in Gaza, or his failure to end oil and gas drilling on federal land, or because they believe that Democrats and Republicans are all cut from the same power-hungry cloth.

I suppose I should be reassured by this, and feel happy for these Trump voters since their side won — as if it were a football game and the Cowboys had crushed the Broncos. But this isn’t a sporting event. And as much as the media may treat elections as horse races, they are not. They have consequences, potentially huge ones, and regardless of why someone may have voted the way they did, the results are the same. This election was a referendum on civility and decency, on compassion and the rule of law, on human rights and equality; and all of those things lost. Corporate power, fear, vindictiveness, and the oligarchy won.

So no, it’s not going to be “okay.” And no, I’m not going to feel happy for folks who voted for Trump, because even though their “team” may have won, they will likely end up losers — unless they are oil companies or billionaires, that is.

Beauty will persevere, regardless of who is in the White House. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

When Trump was elected in 2016, it was a shock, of course, but also a bit of a mystery: No one knew what kind of president he’d be or what sort of policies he’d push. Now we have a far clearer sense of what the next four years might look like.

I’m not convinced Trump will carry out all the threats he made on the campaign trail. Call me a pollyanna, but I doubt he’ll rule as an all-out fascist dictator, as some fear. He probably won’t try to prosecute Liz Cheney and Joe Biden, or sic the military on the “enemies within,” or overtly punish members of the media. His pledge to round up and deport 11 million human beings who came to the U.S. to escape persecution or pursue economic betterment will run up against reality: The nation can’t afford to live without immigrants, whether they are here legally or not.

But judging from Trump’s platform, promises, and his first-term record, we do know he and his minions will set out to dismantle the administrative state, which is to say gut federal agencies, replace experienced staffers with Trump loyalists, and remove government protections on human health, the environment, and worker safety. Elon Musk, who bought himself a cabinet-level position in the administration, will do his damnedest to slash $2 trillion in government spending, which will include unraveling the already frail social safety net.

While that image might appeal to those of you with an anarchist or libertarian bent, I can assure you these guys aren’t doing this in the name of Liberty or Freedom. The administrative state may be bloated, inefficient, sometimes ineffective, and often irritating, but its aim is to protect Americans and keep corporations in check. And when Trump and company look to destroy it, they are doing so to clear the way for the super-rich to become even wealthier, for the corporations to pull in more profit, and for Trump and his cronies to evade accountability for wrongdoings — all at the expense of you and me. A Trump administration will be a government by the narcissistic oligarchs, for the narcissistic oligarchs.

Shiprock and a moody sky. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Meanwhile, the MAGA movement’s theocratic strain will decimate the liberties of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Conservative congress members will push for a federal abortion ban, and Trump may go along with it to pay back his christian-nationalist voters. Trump will give Netanyahu the green light to decimate Gaza and the people who live there, and will similarly step aside and let Putin have his way with Ukraine.

Then there’s the question of what another Trump administration will mean for public lands, the environment, energy development, and the West’s air and water. Again, we can determine a lot by what he did — or attempted to do — during his first administration, along with plans laid out in Trump’s own Agenda 47 and Project 2025. Trump tried to distance himself from the latter during the election, but it was crafted by dozens of his former staffers and associates and is generally seen as the playbook for a second Trump administration. Trump’s public lands agenda will become clearer as he starts to line up cabinet appointments in the coming months. But regardless, I fear our public lands and environment and climate — and by extension all of us humans — are going to suffer. [ed. And countless species will suffer]

First dusting of snow on the Abajos and a windmill. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

The following is a list of potential Trump targets relating to public lands and the environment. It’s important to remember that a president doesn’t have the power to kill just any rule and regulation with the stroke of a pen, but that didn’t stop Trump from trying to do so during his first administration.

Trump will work to implement his “drill baby drill” and “energy dominance” policies by opening up more public land to oil and gas leasing and removing regulations on public land drilling. He is likely to roll back Biden’s leasing reforms, which included higher royalty rates — to get a better deal for taxpayers — and stricter reclamation bond requirements to help ensure companies would clean up their messes.

Biden banned new oil and gas leasing on lands around Chaco Culture National Historical Park and on the Thompson Divide in western Colorado. Trump and whomever he appoints as Interior secretary will almost certainly try to reverse these bans. In the short-term, lifting the ban wouldn’t be too harmful: There is little interest in drilling either of these places currently. But if oil and gas prices climb, all bets could be off for these special places.

The Biden administration’s public lands rule, which aims to put conservation on a par with extractive uses, will probably go on the chopping block. If Trump doesn’t kill it, Congress will.

After being closed to drilling for decades, in 2017 Congress and Trump mandated oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Biden administration revoked the leases, then issued a new environmental review, offering the bare minimum of acreage required by law. Expect Trump to significantly expand the acreage available for drilling.

The first Trump administration revoked or attempted to revoke the Obama administration’s methane emissions regulations. They’ll probably try the same with Biden’s rules.

New EPA rules aimed at reducing coal plants’ greenhouse gas and mercury pollution are in Trump’s crosshairs. If they are revoked, it would allow the Colstrip power plant in Montana to continue spewing toxic and planet-warming emissions for years to come.

Trump will end the Bureau of Land Management’s proposal to end new federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin. The ban wouldn’t come into play until current leases are depleted decades from now. Chances are the market for coal will dry up before then, making both the leasing ban and the rollback fairly irrelevant.

Trump dramatically shrunk Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments during his first term, in part to curry favor with the late Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who held a lot of sway in Washington. Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump acolyte, may push for a repeat. It would be even more consequential now: high uranium prices have unleashed a flurry of new mining claims and exploratory drilling on all sides of Bears Ears National Monument.

Trump is likely to shrink or revoke the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, thereby re-opening more than a half-million acres of uranium-rich lands to new mining claims. The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada seems to be safer, simply because the only corporations interested in developing the land are solar and wind companies — and Trump’s no fan of clean energy.

Project 2025 calls for revoking the Antiquities Act, which has been used by presidents to protect natural and cultural sites as national monuments since 1906, with many going on to become national parks, the list includes: El Morro National Monument, Petrified Forest National Park, Muir Woods National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park … I could go on and on.

You can forget about mining law reform under a Trump administration and GOP-controlled Senate. And global mining corporation Rio Tinto, which is behind the proposed Resolution copper mine at Oak Flat in Arizona, is already urging the incoming Trump administration to weaken environmental laws and expedite permitting for mines.

Trump and the GOP dominated Congress will work to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

The list, unfortunately, goes on …

During his first term, Trump’s mission was hampered by his own lack of preparation, his incompetence, and his chaotic approach. This time he and an army of professional ideologues are prepared to march into the White House with Project 2025 in hand to lay waste to government as we know it. And they will have the support of a GOP-dominated Congress and a conservative Supreme Court.

It’s depressing and scary and discouraging. But it is not hopeless. The Biden administration prepared for this possibility by working to make regulations — and national monuments — more resilient to future challenges. Democratic leaders in Western states are already preparing to defend their environmental laws and climate programs against inevitable Trump administration attacks. And environmental groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, the Western Environmental Law Center, and many others are ready to challenge Trump at every turn.

Meanwhile, the Land Desk vows to stay on top of it all, and keep its special community of readers informed.

Work to start on powerful new laser facility funded by public-private partnership — #Colorado State University

Artist rendering of the new laser research facility which will be located on Foothills Campus and is set to finish in 2026. A major topic of research in the facility will be laser-driven fusion as a viable clean energy source. Credit: Colorado State University

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado State University website (Josh Rhoten):

October 2024

Construction activity will start this month on a powerful new laser research facility located on Colorado State University’s Foothills Campus. Set to come online in mid-2026, the facility is the combined result of 40 years of laser development research at CSU in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences program in the Office of Science and a strategic $150 million public-private partnership with industry leader Marvel Fusion that launched in 2023. 

Geraldine Richmond, the DOE undersecretary for science and innovation, spoke at the groundbreaking event for the Advanced Technology Lasers for Applications and Science (ATLAS) Facility. Photo credit: Colorado State University

The new building will be known as the Advanced Technology Lasers for Applications and Science (ATLAS) Facility. A major topic of research there will be laser-driven fusion as a viable clean energy source. CSU President Amy Parsons hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the facility on Wednesday that included comments from Geraldine Richmond, under secretary for science and innovation at the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, and Marvel Fusion CEO Moritz von der Linden, among other CSU leaders.

Fusion energy is a form of power generation that aims to recreate the process that powers the sun by fusing atomic nuclei together. If successful, laser-driven fusion energy promises to safely generate practically unlimited, sustainable, carbon-free energy. When finished, the facility will feature an upgraded version of an existing ultrahigh power laser developed at CSU in combination with two new lasers provided by Marvel Fusion. The new structure will be located near existing laser research-focused buildings and will house related labs and offices. Taken together, the project is a major expansion of space and capabilities for the university. 

The ATLAS Facility will be a unique cluster of high-intensity, high-repetition rate lasers that can be configured to fire simultaneously at a single fusion target. That burst will deliver nearly 7 petawatts of power – over 5,000 times the electrical generation capacity of the U.S. – into a focal spot roughly the width of a human hair for approximately 100 quadrillionths of a second. The trio of ultra high-power lasers can also be used independently and in other combinations to study questions beyond fusion energy, including key topics in fundamental research.

Parsons said the university has been at the forefront of laser research for many years and the facility would support leadership in this space for many more to come. 

“As a top institution recognized both for research and for sustainability, CSU is a fitting home for this facility,” she said. “We have been a leader in laser research for decades, and our faculty are advancing critical technologies. This new facility will house one of the most powerful lasers in the world and establishes CSU as a nexus for laser fusion research.”

Beyond fusion and basic science research, the ATLAS Facility will also support interdisciplinary work into topics like medicine, where lasers could be used to deposit energy in a very localized region for tumor treatment. Other potential research at the facility includes microchip lithography and design and detailed X-ray imaging of rapidly moving objects, such as airplane engine turbines in full motion. The facility will also broadly support fundamental science research. 

The combined existing and new facilities will now be known collectively as the Advanced Laser for Extreme Photonics (ALEPH) Center.

Undersecretary Richmond highlighted the DOE’s extensive partnership with CSU around laser research in her comments at the event – particularly through the Fusion Energy Sciences program. The agency recently awarded the university $12.5 million through its LaserNetUS program in addition to another award of $16 million to start an Inertial Fusion Science and Technology hub. Those grants support research using the existing facilities on campus, including upgrades of the high-powered ALEPH laser. The DOE funding also enables outside researchers to access research facilities for free, whether they are working on fusion or any other topic – supporting activity across many key fields.

“I’m excited for the important research through this private-public partnership happening with Marvel Fusion at Colorado State University,” said Richmond. “We are eager to leverage these opportunities. Laser development and experiments fit within our long-term goal of reaching fusion energy, but equally important is uncovering what we will learn in this process that will help us ultimately achieve that goal.”

Laser research facility will aid work in fusion, medicine and fundamental science 

Construction activity will start this month on a powerful new laser research facility located on Colorado State University’s Foothills Campus. Credit: Colorado State University

CSU’s leadership in laser research is primarily due to work by University Distinguished Professors Jorge Rocca and Carmen Menoni. Both are part of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, while Rocca also holds a position in the Department of Physics, and Menoni has a position in the Department of Chemistry. The pair have been leading interdisciplinary research on this topic at the university for years. Their existing and fruitful research partnerships with Marvel Fusion was the key reason the company chose to further invest in the university with the project, said CSU Vice President for Research Cassandra Moseley. 

From left: CSU President Amy Parsons, DOE Under Secretary for Science & Innovation Geraldine Richmond, and CSU Vice President for Research Cassandra Moseley speak after the event Photo credit: Colorado State University

“CSU is a leader in laser research and technology, which has led us to break ground on a building that will bring that impactful research to the next level,” said Moseley, who also spoke at the groundbreaking. “We celebrate today with the scientists whose teams helped get us to this point, and with excitement for the research power and discovery that will take place in this facility.” 

Allen Robinson, dean of the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, echoed those sentiments and said the new facility is a remarkable step forward for the university in terms of entrepreneurship. 

“We are incredibly proud of the decades of success of professors Rocca and Menoni that is culminating in the construction of this world-class facility,” said Robinson. “This partnership with industry and CSU STRATA is a natural extension of the culture of entrepreneurship and technology transfer that is widespread in the college and at CSU.” 

Robinson added that the exponential growth of laser-based research around the world has resulted in a large and unmet need to prepare the next generation of scientists, technicians and suppliers within the fusion industry. He said the new facility will address that need by offering both undergraduate and graduate students at CSU a chance for hands-on experience with the latest technology – fulfilling the university’s commitment as a land-grant institution to support workforce development in crucial STEM fields. 

Heike Freund, the chief operating officer of Marvel Fusion, said the company was excited to continue to partner with CSU in this research space. 

“This groundbreaking marks an exciting new chapter in the partnership between Marvel Fusion and Colorado State University as we move forward with constructing a facility that will drive the future of fusion energy,” Freund said. “Fusion energy has the potential to revolutionize the approach to sustainable power, providing a virtually limitless, clean energy source. This collaboration sets CSU and MF at the forefront of cutting-edge research, paving the way for transformative advancements that could redefine global energy solutions.” 

Construction on the project will be managed by Tetrad Corporation with McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. serving as the general contractor and SWBR leading design. The 71,000-square-foot facility will feature over 7,500 cubic yards of concrete – including 5-foot-thick shielding walls around the target bay and a three-foot-thick slab below the laser and target bays for vibration isolation. The lab spaces will feature clean rooms up to ISO 6 / Class 1,000, and the HVAC systems will maintain extremely tight temperature and humidity tolerances to keep the laser systems functioning properly.

#Utah has the last conventional uranium mill in the country. What does it do?: The mill’s owner and regulators say there’s no evidence its uranium processing is causing contamination. But a nearby tribe and others fear the impacts of increased demand — The Salt Lake Tribune

Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill from inside Bears Ears National Monument. Photo credit: Jonathan Thompson

Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Anastasia Hufham). Click through for all the detail, here’s an excerpt:

October 7, 2024

It was one of nearly two dozen conventional mills in the U.S. when it opened in 1980, just south of Blanding, and it’s now far past its projected 15-year lifespan. Demand for uranium fell — aside from some spikes — over the decades, and mill owner Energy Fuels pivoted to also processing leftover radioactive materials from other countries, rare earth elements and producing medical isotopes. But with the growing global push for clean energy and recent international instability, demand has skyrocketed for the “yellowcake” that the mill creates. Uranium averaged about $40 a pound in 2022. It reached over $100 per pound in January and is valued at $80 per pound today, according to Business Insider…

Here’s what the mill does, and why it’s controversial…The mill currently accepts uranium ore trucked from two mines also owned by Energy Fuels: the La Sal Mines Complex near La Sal, Utah, and the Pinyon Plain Mine, located in the Kaibab National Forest near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Here’s what the mill does, and why it’s controversial…The mill currently accepts uranium ore trucked from two mines also owned by Energy Fuels: the La Sal Mines Complex near La Sal, Utah, and the Pinyon Plain Mine, located in the Kaibab National Forest near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. After uranium ore and other materials arrive at the mill site, they’re organized by type into separate piles to await processing.

Lawmakers advance measure opening Wyoming to possible #nuclear fuel waste storage — @WyoFile #ActOnClimate

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Christopher T. Hanson (fourth from right) is with other NRC staffers and licensee personnel in protective gear inside Unit 3 containment at the decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. (courtesy of Southern California Edison/FlickrCommons)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Dustin Bleizeffer):

October 8, 2024

With a handful of dissenting votes, a legislative panel has advanced a draft measure that proponents say merely provides the opportunity to discuss changing Wyoming statutes to enable temporary storage of high-level radioactive fuel waste from nuclear power plants.

The Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee on Tuesday voted in favor of the draft bill Used nuclear fuel storage-amendments, which means the committee will sponsor the measure when the full Legislature convenes in January.

Committee Co-chairman Rep. Donald Burkhart Jr. (R-Rawlins), a longtime proponent of bringing nuclear fuel waste into the state, first rolled out the potential for new legislation regarding the matter in July, but neither he nor the committee shared a draft of the proposed legislation until weeks before the October meeting. The bill draft would amend past legislation mostly to align existing state statute with updated language regarding commercial nuclear waste storage with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, Burkhart said.

“This is not a discussion of why or why not to have this,” Burkhart said at the onset of the discussion, adding that the committee took up the issue at the request of the Legislature’s Regulatory Reduction Task Force. “This is simply to amend the current statute.”

A spent nuclear fuel cask is moved at the Surry Power Station nuclear plant in Virginia in 2007. (Nuclear Regulatory Commission/FlickrCommons)

Burkhart was clear in July when he notified his fellow committee members of the pending proposal in draft form — which he shared with them, but not with the public — that nuclear storage held financial promise. The outlook for Wyoming’s fossil fuel-dependent budget is trending downward, and the state could reap more than $4 billion a year from nuclear waste storage, “just to let us keep it here in Wyoming,” he said then.

Also in July, Burkhart said he’d recently visited with a private landowner in Fremont County who, as in the past, is interested in selling land for such a storage facility. The land purchase would cost an estimated $2 million, Burkhart had said, and it would cost about $400 million to build the facility. “None of which would come from the state,” he said. “It would all come from private enterprise.”

#Westminster pulls out of Rocky Flats tunnel and bridge access project, citing health concerns: Council’s 4-3 vote means the city will not contribute nearly $200,000 it owes for the project — The #Denver Post

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (John Aguilar). Here’s an excerpt:

September 29, 2024

Westminster is making it clear the city doesn’t want to increase access to hikers and cyclists visiting the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge — the one-time site of a Cold War nuclear weapons plant that continues to spark health worries 30 years after it closed. The city last week became the second community surrounding the 6,200-acre federal property to withdraw from an intergovernmental agreement supporting construction of a tunnel and bridge into the refuge, home to more than 200 wildlife species, including prairie falcons, deer, elk, coyotes and songbirds. Broomfield exited the $4.7 million Federal Lands Access Program agreement four years ago, and both cities point to potential threats to public health from residual contamination at the site — most notably the plutonium that was used in nuclear warhead production over four decades — for their withdrawal…

Westminster’s withdrawal comes less than a month after a federal judge denied several environmental organizations a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the project cold. The plaintiffs had sued federal agencies in January, claiming the refuge is not fit for human use.

As part of the City Council’s 4-3 vote last week, Westminster will not pay the nearly $200,000 it owes to the project. The city also will no longer complete a 0.4-mile trail segment in its Westminster Hills Open Space property that would bring hikers and cyclists traveling from the east to the bridge to cross into Rocky Flats.

On Trump’s dystopian Agenda 47, Freedom Cities — Jonathan P. Thompson (The Land Desk)

Even AI can’t capture the absurdity of Agenda 47’s “Freedom Cities.” Credi: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 2, 2024

The News: Agenda 47 — the Trump campaign’s platform — promises to develop 10 “Freedom Cities” on “empty” public lands in the Western United States if he is elected president.

Context: After Trump lost the 2020 election, the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation, along with help from dozens of former Trump administration staffers, set about to create Project 2025, a “playbook” for Trump just in case he managed to win this November’s presidential election.

Suffice it to say, Project 2025 is downright terrifying, as this excellent analysis by Michelle Nijhuis and Erin X. Wong reveals. In fact, it’s so weird — and so unpopular — that Trump has scrambled to distance himself from the whole endeavor, even claiming he doesn’t know anything about it or the people pushing it. That’s despite having praised the plan during a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2022, despite the fact that many of the plan’s architects were in his administration, and despite the fact that his VP candidate J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book.

But it doesn’t really matter, because Trump has his own authoritarian plan. It’s called Agenda 47, and serves as a template for the only slightly less creepy sounding Republican Party Platform. Agenda 47 is a bit shorter and less detailed than the 900-page Project 2025, which maybe makes it slightly more palatable to certain voters, but is equally nuts and just as scary. It vows to protect freedom of speech and cut funding for any school that teaches “inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” If elected, Trump and company would also “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.” Nothing fascist about that!

When it comes to public lands and the environment, Trump plans to do more of what he did last time he was in the White House — which is to say eviscerate environmental, health, safety, and worker protections in the name of “energy dominance” and corporate profit. The GOP platform also calls for using federal land for housing development. In theory this would bolster supplies of housing, thereby reducing prices and alleviating the housing crisis. The theory is deeply flawed, however, and though it may sound well-intentioned, ultimately it is just another ploy to privatize public land.

On this and other initiatives both Agenda 47 and the GOP platform (which are near-mirrors of each other) are scant on details. Hoping to learn more, I delved into Trump’s Agenda 47 archives and … holy crapoli! I had to wonder if Trump’s running for president or for the mayor of Crazytown — he’s the hands-down favorite for the latter.

Last March the Trump campaign unveiled its Agenda 47. Apparently it wanted to modernize the old “make America great again” slogan, so it went instead with:

Agenda47: A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living.

Despite making no sense, you gotta give them credit for having a forward-looking slogan rather than the backward-looking one (which they have since reverted to, by the way). Indeed, it’s so forward-looking that they would “create a new American future.” Silly ol’ me thought that the future was always new on account of being, you know, the future and all.

And what will this new future look like? Freedom Cities!

You’re probably thinking: Why the hell would anyone want to build ten new cities in the drought-stricken West when there’s not enough water to go around now? What’s the point anyway? To make a few real estate developers incredibly rich? To realize a megalomaniac demagogue’s dream of building new cities to match some bizarre ideological vision? Will Trump resurrect Albert Speer to design the new cities?

Apart from the big picture flaws, this whole thing is riddled with wrong from start to finish. Let’s break it down:

“… open up the American frontier.” Are you friggin’ kidding me? Is this from the Trump campaign or the Andrew Jackson’s Corpse campaign? Referring to the Western U.S. as the “frontier” was racist and ignorant in the 19th century. It was intended to portray the region — and the Indigenous people who live there — as a wild and savage place that needed to be tamed and/or killed by EuroAmerican invaders so they could steal the land and put it into the public domain so some dumbass could come along and build some Freedom Cities there a couple centuries later so they could create a new American future. Using the term now is still ignorant and racist and just downright stupid.

“Hundreds of millions of these acres are empty.” Oh, really? Well, let’s see, the Bureau of Land Management oversees about 248 million acres and the Forest Service another 193 million acres. So, basically, Trump’s saying that at least half of America’s public lands are “empty.” This is age old code (also see “underutilized”) for describing landscapes that haven’t been industrialized, drilled, mined, grazed to death, or otherwise ruined. Of course, none of the public lands are actually empty, but I think y’all know that.

Trump assures us these cities won’t be built on “national parks or other natural treasures.” Thing is, if Trump and his ilk get their way, there will be precious few natural parks or monuments or ‘natural treasures’ remaining. Certainly you remember how the Trump administration eviscerated Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. There’s zero reason to expect him not to do the same if he were elected again — only to a further degree.

If this whole Freedom Cities thing sounds like something a couple sixteen year olds would dream up while getting stoned while sitting on some desert butte (Free Doritos for everyone, brah!), then just read on. Trump would also “modernize transportation,” not by building trains and buses or even electric cars, but by bolstering efforts to develop “vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals.” And to help make these and all of America’s cities “beautiful,” they’ll build “towering monuments to our true American heroes.” Does anyone else catch a whiff of Nicolae Ceausescu or even Albert Speer while reading this?

So these brand new cities, built on public land, would be swarming with people-carrying quad-copters swerving to miss one another and the monumental statues of Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson and Tucker Carlson. And how will they people these cities after carrying out the “largest deportation in American history”? They’ll offer “‘Baby Bonuses’ for young parents to help launch a new baby boom.”

If that seems zany, now imagine having one of these metropolises plopped down smack dab in one of your favorite swaths of “empty” public lands. Eek! Sounds like fodder for a dystopian horror film, working title: Agenda 47.

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

Sign in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

When two trucks hauling uranium ore rumbled out of Energy Fuel’s Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon Tuesday on their way to the White Mesa Mill in Utah, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren sent law enforcement officers to stop them. The trucks managed to get off tribal land before the police could catch them, but the next shipments are likely to be stopped. It’s the latest episode in a long-simmering battle between the tribe and the uranium industry — and a test case for tribal sovereignty.

Whether the U.S. uranium mining industry is experiencing a full-on renaissance or is merely having zombie-dream twitches isn’t yet clear. But the ore shipments represent the clearest sign of life, yet, since it is the first time freshly mined ore will be processed in years. Tribal nations, advocates, and lawmakers have pushed back against both the mine and the mill for years due to the potential for contaminating groundwater aquifers.

In 2012, the Navajo Nation banned uranium shipments across tribal lands. But it is not clear whether it applies to the federal and state highways used by Energy Fuels’ trucks.

Energy Fuels had previously agreed to give the Navajo Nation and other stakeholders a two-week notice before shipping any ore; they actually didn’t notify anyone until after the trucks left the mine. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes got involved, and issued a statement reading: “Hauling radioactive materials through rural Arizona, including across the Navajo Nation, without providing notice or transparency and without providing an emergency plan is unacceptable.”

And now Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has helped broker a pause in shipments to give the Navajo Nation and Energy Fuels a chance to work things out.

***

The Pinyon Plain Mine and White Mesa Mill get all of the attention, but the mining industry — uranium and otherwise — is also stirring elsewhere. Some quick hits:

Energy Fuels is also doing work at its Whirlwind Mine right on the Colorado-Utah border above Gateway and on its La Sal Complex, which sits less than a mile away from the community of the same name — and a school. Energy Fuels is also looking to develop the Roca Honda Project on Forest Service land near Mt. Taylor in New Mexico.

Utah regulators have accepted Anfield Energy’s application to restart its Shootaring Canyon mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which means the state can now begin its review. Anfield hasn’t had as much luck with its operating plan for its Velvet-Wood Mine in the Lisbon Valley: The BLM’s Monticello Field Office deemed it incomplete, and wouldn’t even consider it until Anfield filled in numerous blanks.

Egad! The BLM is actually raising mining claim maintenance fees. That’s the amount one has to pay when staking, or locating, a claim and once every year after that. It was $165. Next month it will shoot up to $200 per claim (plus a $25 processing fee and $49 location fee tacked onto the initial payment). That’s a whopping 20% increase, but still seems to be a pretty darned good bargain and is unlikely to dissuade speculators.

The Energy Permitting Reform Act, a bill making its way through Congress, would codify mining companies’ ability to stake mining claims on public lands to use as waste dumps and for other ancillary purposes. It’s just one of the ways the legislation, which is being pushed as a way to speed up clean energy projects, would benefit the extractive and fossil fuel industries. Originally pushed by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, some Democrats, including Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, have signed on in support.

You can find most of these projects on the Land Desk Mining Monitor Map and the Land Desk’s Uranium Mining in the Four Corners Map.

The water nexus in #Colorado’s energy transition — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #YampaRiver #GreenRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification #SouthPlatteRiver #ArkansasRiver #ActOnClimate

Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

August 17, 2024

Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. It’s harder to say in the long term. Here’s why.

Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative.
But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.

The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.

What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.

While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.

This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.

Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.

Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.

Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.

Emissions Goals

The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.

Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.

Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.

Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.

Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.

A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.” House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.

Possible Water Dividends

The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.

Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.

In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.

Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.

Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.

Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?

“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.

Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.

“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.

Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.

Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.

The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.

The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.

The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.

That’s why this year’s bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.

The Future of Energy

Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock

What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.

Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.

You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.

One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.

Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water

Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.

Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.

Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.

A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.

Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.

“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.

Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.

Gov. Polis’ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.

Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.

Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.

Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.

Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.

New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.

With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com

Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.

Into The Future

The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.

Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?

What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.

What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.

The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”

Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.

Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website

Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.

However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.

One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.

Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?

The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.

“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,” says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”

A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.

Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”

A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.

No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.”

Radioactive tailings near the #ColoradoRiver close to full removal: Nearly 14.8 million tons removed in more than decade-long effort — The Deseret News #COriver

Moab tailings site with Spanish Valley to the south

Click the link to read the article on The Deseret News website (Amy Joi O’Donoghue). Here’s an excerpt:

August 6, 2024

Sixteen million tons of radioactive uranium tailings once sat near the banks of the Colorado River, putting the waterway in peril of contamination on the outskirts of Moab. Removal began in 2009 and was halted for a time due to lack of funding for the U.S. Department of Energy cleanup project, but work is continuing at a steady clip — with nearly 15 million tons shipped by rail to a disposal cell about 30 miles away at Crescent Junction. At this rate, the tailings removal may be completed by next year, but much work remains to be done afterward for full remediation of the area in which the uranium mill operated for nearly three decades…

Mary McGann, a Grand County commissioner who heads up the steering committee involved in the project, said she envisions something similar to Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction, Colorado. It, too, was a remediation site for tailings removal and it, too, is adjacent to the Colorado River…

Contamination from what the locals call “The Pile” has been a problem for the Colorado River in Grand County — before the establishment of the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action, or UMTRA, Project. But the project established groundwater wells to prevent the leaching and to serve other useful purposes.

During the reporting period, which ran in mid-July of 2023 to mid-July this year, officials noted there were over 1,036,719 tons of uranium mill tailings shipped by rail four times a week. To date, the project has shipped more than 14.8 million tons, or about 92% of the total estimated 16 million tons in the tailings pile to be moved. During that same reporting period, more than 151,162 tons of debris was placed in the disposal cell — also shipped by rail. That includes the successful removal of 14 autoclaves — each weighing 16,000 pounds, according to project spokeswoman Barbara Michel.

Opinion: ‘#DoloresRiver Canyons very foundation of Ute Mountain Ute identity’ — The #Durango Herald

Dolores River near the confluence with the San Miguel River. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Click the link to read the guest column on The Durango Herald website (Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk). Here’s an excerpt:

The Dolores River Canyons represent a significant portion of the cultural heritage for the Ute People that serve as a place of spiritual connection, a place to connect with our ancestors’ stories and traditional practices. These lands are not merely scenery; they are the very foundation of the Ute Mountain Ute identity. Increased mining would not just disrupt the delicate balance of the ecosystem, it would sever the cultural ties that bind my people to part of our ancestral home.

The future of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Indigenous communities across the country, lies in the enduring strength of our cultural heritage. Protecting the Dolores River Canyons is not just about safeguarding the environment; it’s about ensuring that future generations of Indigenous youth can grow up connected to their land, steeped in the traditions of their ancestors. Imagine the richness of a future where Ute children learn about their history by exploring the canyons, not by reading about the environmental devastation wrought by a bygone mining industry.

Let us choose the path that honors the past, protects the present and secures a brighter future for generations to come. Let us choose to leave a legacy of respect and cultural preservation, not one of environmental destruction and broken promises.

Some thoughts on the bid to protect the Lower #DoloresRiver — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Boulders in the Dolores River downstream from Bedrock. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

July 30, 2024

The News: Western Colorado’s Mesa and Montrose counties propose a 30,000-acre national conservation area for the Lower Dolores River corridor as an alternative to the proposed 400,000-acre national monument. While this may look like a peace offering or compromise of sorts from counties that have opposed protections of any kind, it is just as likely an attempt to block any sort of designation and will probably only further fan the flames of controversy. It’s the latest volley in a half-century-long battle over the fate of the beleaguered river.

The Context: The current controversy over the Dolores River takes me back to when I was a youngster in the early ‘80s. McPhee Dam was under construction on the Dolores River, its proponents having vanquished a movement that sought to block the dam and keep the river free. My parents had been on the losing side of the fight, and I can distinctly remember my father blaming the defeat, at least in part, on outsider environmentalists — including Ed Abbey — deriding the pro-dam contingent as a bunch of “local yokels.

I’m sure my dad took it personally. He was a fourth-generation rural Coloradan, had graduated from Dolores High School, and his mom and sisters still lived in Dolores — apparently making him a “yokel,” even though he opposed the dam. But also he saw it as a major strategic misstep. Not only were these people insulting locals, but they were falling into the pro-dam contingent’s trap, bolstering the dam-building effort in the process.

More often than not, these land protection fights are framed as well-heeled elitist outsiders and Washington D.C. bureaucrats imposing their values on and wrecking the livelihoods of rural, salt-of-the-earth local ranchers and miners. And in almost every case it is a gross oversimplification, at best, and at worst is an inaccurate portrayal and a cynical attempt to disempower locals — and anyone else — who favor land protection. So when those anti-dam folks caricatured the pro-dam contingent as local yokels, they were not only alienating locals who may have been on their side, but also validating the false depiction of the situation.

Fresh snow on Bears Ears. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

We saw this play out in the battle over the Bears Ears National Monument designation and Trump’s shrinkage of it in a gross way. The anti-monument contingent insisted that all “locals” were opposed to the monument — and the media largely bought into it — never mind the fact that effort to establish a monument in the first place was driven by local Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Ute citizens, and was taken up by tribal nations who have inhabited the landscape in question since time immemorial. Never mind that the anti-monument “locals” were backed by mining corporations, right-wing think tanks, and conservative politicians from all over (including a Manhattan real estate magnate and reality TV personality who became President). Utah’s congressional delegation even had the gaul to attempt to disenfranchise and silence the voices of tribal leaders because they happened to be based on the other side of a state or county line that was arbitrarily drawn based on arbitrary grids by dudes in Washington D.C.

The movement to protect the Dolores River has been portrayed in much the same way over the last several decades. It has its roots in 1968, when U.S. Rep. Wayne Aspinall, a Democrat from Colorado’s Western Slope, pushed through the Colorado River Basin Project Act, authorizing the construction of five Western water projects. One of them was the Animas-La Plata Project, a byzantine tangle of dams — including one on the Animas River above Silverton — along with canals, tunnels, and even power plants. Another was the Dolores Project, which included building McPhee Dam several miles downstream of the town of Dolores, which would impound water to lengthen the irrigation season for the Montezuma Valley and allow water to be sent, via canal, to the dryland bean farmers around Dove Creek.

The Dolores River, below Slickrock, and above Bedrock. The Dolores River Canyon is included in a proposed National Conservation Area. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.

The prospect of another river being stilled by another giant monolith sparked a movement to block the dam and to designate the Lower Dolores River corridor as a Wild and Scenic River, which would have prohibited mining and oil and gas leasing, while also ensuring enough water would be left in the stream to keep the river “wild and scenic,” which is to say a lot more water than zero, which was the lower river’s flow from mid-summer into fall due to irrigation diversions.

Local farmers were generally in favor of the dam — and against Wild & Scenic designation, since it would likely deprive them of some irrigation water during dry times. But their cause was also backed by powerful agricultural interests on the state level, the pugnacious Durango attorney Sam Maynes, Sen. Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, and, probably most importantly, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, which would receive a portion of the vast amounts of water to which they were entitled from the Dolores Project. The project was ultimately authorized (though I doubt the local yokel comment had all that much to do with it, really). Construction of McPhee Dam began in 1979 and the reservoir began filling in 1983.

La Plata Mountains from the Great Sage Plain with historical Montezuma County apple orchard in the foreground.

No matter how one feels about dams, you have to admit it had some benefits. In 1978 the federally funded Dolores Archaeological Program was launched to survey, excavate, and study the rich cultural sites that were spread out across the area to be inundated by the reservoir. It was a huge project that brought a slew of researchers to the area, significantly advanced scientific knowledge of the Ancestral Puebloan people who inhabited the region for centuries, and provided the seeds for future archaeological work and organizations, including the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

And, contrary to opponents’ fears, the dam didn’t kill the river. Rather it was like putting the river’s manic-depressive flows on lithium. The massive spring runoffs were tempered, but water managers released enough water in most years to scour beaches and preserve Snaggletooth’s whitewater snarl. And for the first time in a century the lower Dolores didn’t run dry in July. In fact, the year-round flows were enough to build and sustain a cold-water fishery for trout in the first dozen or so miles below the dam and a habitat for native fish below that. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe got both drinking water from the project as well as enough to irrigate a major agricultural enterprise near the toe of Ute Mountain, providing much needed economic development. The Town of Dove Creek receives water from the project as do the formerly dryland farmers, allowing them to diversify their crops. The dam’s completion happened to coincide with the demise of the domestic uranium mining industry, meaning that threat mostly went away as well, along with the need for added protections.

The Dolores River at its confluence with the San Miguel River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Unfortunately, drier times set in and the current megadrought, now going on a quarter century, has depleted the river’s flows and reservoir levels. In order to keep the irrigation ditches flowing as deep into the summer as possible, dam managers have released almost no water during 14 of the last 24 years, essentially desiccating the stream bed below the dam and throwing the riparian ecology out of whack. In the midst of it all the uranium industry made a short-lived comeback between 2006 and 2012. Now it seems to be emerging from its zombified state once again and is targeting numerous sites along the Dolores River. The river runs through the Paradox Formation, as well, meaning it could be targeted by lithium and potash miners. Meanwhile, visitation to the Lower Dolores River has ramped up — along with the impacts — as social media posts reveal the canyons to more people and as the Moab crowd seeks new places to play.

All of that spawned new Wild & Scenic campaigns for the Lower Dolores, but after it became clear they couldn’t get past political hurdles, stakeholders came together to work on a compromise, resulting in a proposal to create a national conservation area on 60 miles of river corridor below the dam, which would withdraw the land from new mining claims and oil and gas leases, bring more attention to the plight of this sorrowful and spectacular river, and possibly more funding to river restoration efforts. But it would leave another 100 miles of the Lower Dolores unprotected, in part because Mesa and Montrose Counties withdrew their support for the plan. Thus the proposal for President Biden to designate 400,000 acres as a national monument.

That proposal, perhaps predictably, has sparked a backlash and an anti-national monument campaign partly fueled by disinformation. And, just as predictably, it’s being falsely framed as a fight pitting locals vs. outsiders. It’s true that a survey commissioned by Mesa County of about 1,200 registered voters in Mesa, Montrose, and San Miguel Counties found that 57% of respondents oppose the national monument proposal. That shows that more locals oppose it, but that quite a few support the initiative, as well. And Center for Western Priorities director Aaron Weiss found that the survey may be biased since its creators consulted with national monument opponents, but not proponents, about which questions to ask and how to word them. And it shows.

For example, the survey precedes one set of questions with: “Currently, uranium mining in the Dolores River Canyon area in the west end of Montrose County impacts the local economy by providing tax dollars and jobs. The current national monument proposal would allow some but not all existing permit holders to continue to operate, but it has not been decided if the proposal would allow new permits or permit renewals in the future.” But this is misleading, because the uranium mining industry remains virtually dead, so the economic impact is zero to negligible. Furthermore, a national monument grandfathers in all existing valid mining claims and has no effect on patented (private) claims. So even if there were operating mines, a monument wouldn’t hamper operations. [ed. emphasis mine] Other questions were similarly misleading by implying that a national monument designation would remove management from the BLM or Forest Service.

Tellingly, the survey also found that 72% of respondents support existing national monument designations “such as Browns Canyon, Chimney Rock, and Colorado National Monument.” Why? Because they value conservation and they’ve seen that national monuments don’t hurt the economy or agriculture or significantly restrict access. That they are less sure about a new national monument might have something to do with the opponents’ simplistic and unfounded argument against it, which is that it could “impose severe economic hardships,” without explaining how.

Nevertheless, Mesa County used the survey to justify a resolution opposing the national monument and supporting its proposal for a vastly scaled down national conservation area. Again, this tactic is an echo of ones used by Bears Ears National Monument opponents. National Conservation Areas don’t inherently offer more or less protections or restrictions than national monuments, but they do need to be passed by Congress. Given how dysfunctional our Congress is, that could take years or even decades.

Yet the Lower Dolores River needs help now. No, a national monument won’t solve all its problems; it may not help the river, itself, at all. Already the fight over the proposal has shone a spotlight on a remote, largely unknown area, which will surely draw more visitors and more damage. A national monument designation at least would provide the possibility of protection against future development and burgeoning crowds.

Our River of Sorrow Jonathan P. Thompson October 27, 2021

Dolores River near Lizard Head Pass. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Read full story

The Dolores River between Rico and Dolores in southwestern Colorado on Memorial Day 2009. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

What was left unsaid in Pueblo? — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #ActOnClimate #nuclear

Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

June 26, 2024

In one sense, Adam Frisch was an anomaly on the agenda of an energy conference held in Pueblo last Friday. He’s a Democrat, making a second run for Congress after narrowly losing in 2022 to Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Republican-leaning 3^rd Congressional District. The district’s largest city, Pueblo, once was reliably Democratic but has become a political toss-up.

Republican legislators, both current and former, were present at the conference, but I didn’t notice any Democratic legislators, even from Pueblo. Why that is, it’s hard to say.

Credit Frisch with knowing how to play to his crowd. He tipped his hat to natural gas several times even as he talked about how geothermal would use much the same skills sets and machinery.

He talked extensively about domestic energy mining and energy production. “There’s no green energy without mining, just none,” he said. He suggested that even now, burning wood may produce more energy than solar – although he did acknowledge Colorado has far more solar capacity than the national average. He took swipes at the “Colorado Capitol,” a reference to the Democrats who have run the show since the 2018 election and who have passed dozens of bills with the intent of pushing and pulling Colorado into a giant pivot that will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For the conference on the Pueblo campus of Colorado State University, Frisch dressed in a style that suggested allegiance to his party: blue jeans, blue shirt and blue sports jacket. But he has some tip-toeing to do in this Congressional district. He’s an Aspen resident, a member of the city council when that city’s municipal utility, Aspen Electric, succeeded in achieving 100% renewables. And Frisch by no means disavows climate change.

“Whether I’m in Durango or Boulder or up in Rangely, Colorado, I would say the same thing, that there is a climate crisis,” he said at the outset of his remarks in the conference’s opening session. “It’s hotter and drier. Everybody knows this. People are planting at different times, they’re harvesting at different times, they’re hunting at different times. But we need to figure out if we truly want to try to solve this problem.”

When running as an “outsider,” it’s useful to point to perceived hypocrisies among the elites. In Colorado, the prime candidate is Boulder.

“I need to poke fun a little bit at my former zip code, because in 2019 Boulder County, of the 3,147 counties in the country, (had) on a per-capita basis the most greenhouse gas emissions per person in the country.”

Congressional candidate Adam Frisch explains why generation will be important. Photo/Allen Best

True? Well, not really. It wasn’t Boulder County but one zip code within the county that spawned many stories in 2020. And it wasn’t total greenhouse gas emissions per capita, but only those provoked by buildings. For that matter, the University of Michigan researchers reported that were able to include only two-thirds of the nation’s counties in the study.

With those caveats in mind, they did find that the buildings in zip code 80510 produced 23,811 pounds of carbon dioxide per person. That zip code is in and around Allenspark, along the road between Boulder and Estes Park. It’s a place of knotty-pined cabins that burn a lot of propane gas as well as newer and some very large homes that likely use electricity.

The methodology of the researchers also examined the sources of electricity, and by that measure the heavy coal in the electrical mix bumped the figures higher. That area is served by a member cooperative of Tri-State Generation and Transmission or Xcel Energy, and in 2019 both were still very heavily invested in coal — including coal burned at Pueblo.

One other detail: that same study found that a zip code in San Francisco, the bastion of woke politics, actually had the nation’s lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions for buildings.

Details, details, details

That was par for the day. Just as important as who was at this energy summit and the information they shared was who was not there and what was not said.

The event was sponsored by Action Colorado, formerly known as Colorado 22, a reference to the counties of southwestern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that are included. Think of it as patterned after the much older Club 20.

The morning agenda had various speakers, but most notable was a defense of natural gas in buildings. The afternoon was almost entirely about the promise of nuclear energy.

Interspersed through the day were speakers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW. They told about their lives and about their work. They spoke very well, very effectively. I spent eight years in Toastmasters trying to smooth my tongue of rusted iron into moments of silver. These guys were like professionals as they talked about growing up on ranches, about the dangers of working with electricity, about building better lives for themselves and their families.

The background question for the day’s conversation was what will happen when the last of Pueblo’s three coal-burning units becomes quiet. One of the three coal-burning units at Comanche Generating Station has closed, another will in 2025, and the third is to become silent no later than Jan. 1, 2031, as per the decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

(In my message to Big Pivots subscribers of June 13, I vaguely and imprecisely referred to 2030. To add some confusion, Gov. Jared Polis last week said 2029.)

What will replace the tax base and jobs in Pueblo and Pueblo County?

President Joe Biden visited the CW Wind factory in Pueblo, the world’s largest manufacture of towers for wind turbines, in November 2023. Photo/Allen Best

Pueblo is a river town, bisected by the Arkansas River. It’s a transportation hub for both highways and rail. It is above all a place that makes things. I am sure it has Ph.D.s among its 111,000 residents, but it has blue-collar DNA. Work gloves could be the city’s logo.

The steel mill was first and maybe even now remains foremost, hulks of rust rising above I-25 even as a new mill is now taking shape. The mill began producing rail in 1882, and that’s still the primary product, if the lengths have been extended to quarter-mile sections. It was called CF&I when I was young, and although I have no personal memories, Pueblo was still a rich ethnic stew in the mid-20^th century, a cauldron of immigrants who labored under a film of coal smoke. You don’t have to go far to find people whose fathers and grandfathers and perhaps great-grandfathers had walked to the mill, lunch buckets in hand, from their houses in the Bessemer and other close-by neighborhoods.

That includes the former mayor, Nick Gradisar, and the fellow I had lunch with at the conference, Joseph Griego. Gradisar, a former board chair for Action Colorado, the organization sponsoring this conference, had a vison of pivoting Pueblo to a green-energy economy. He was handily defeated in the election last year.

Some of that pivot, however, had already started before he even became mayor.

On Saturday morning, after the conference, I awoke in our motel room on Pueblo’s north side soon after daybreak and set out to get photographs. I drove south on I-25, pausing during shift change at the gates of the steel mill, which is now owned by EVRAZ North America. Based in London, majority ownership was held by Russian oligarchs, cronies of Putin, most notably Roman Abramovich, who alone owned between a quarter and a third of the company. Evraz said in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it would sell its North American assets, but nothing has come of that. As best I can tell, Putin cronies still have a stake in Pueblo.

Continuing south out of the city, I turned off from I-25 at the Stem Beach turnoff, then headed northeast on Lime Creek Road, putting Greenhorn Mountain in the rearview mirror.

Greenhorn was originally Cuerno Verde, the name given by Spanish colonizers to two leaders, the father and son, of a band of Comanches. They were known for their distinctive headdress.

The younger Cuerno Verde was killed there in 1779 by the Spanish troops led by Juan Batiste de Anza and their Apache, Ute and Pueblo allies. And with the Comanche weakened, the Great Plains in Colorado with their plentiful bison became more available to some other immigrants, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe.

The alignments of what became Colorado were, in the 18^th century, as convoluted as they are in the 21^st century, but the conflicts for the time being now draw only figurative blood. By that measure, these disagreements about the energy transition are mild indeed even if one former legislator at the Pueblo conference described the politics he left behind at the Colorado Capitol as “toxic.”

The Lime Creek Road constitutes Pueblo’s industrial alley. First in this sequence is the former wind turbine factory formerly owned by the Danish company Vesta but purchased in 2021 by CS Wind, a South Korean company. The factory produces towers that are 90 meters tall and weigh 240 tons. President Joe Biden was there last November to give a pep talk about the clean energy agenda.

A little farther along is a turnoff to another set of gray industrial buildings rising up from the plains, the GCC cement plant and limestone quarry, one of two remaining cement plants in Colorado with the recent closure of a plant at Lyons.

The day before, a speaker at the conference – in the morning, non-nuclear session — representing a company called Carbon America, had spoken about the hopes to sequester carbon dioxide under cap rock in a geologic formation northeast of Pueblo. Two potential partners exist in the Pueblo area, this one and another near Florence. They manufacture cement from lime.

Carbon America sees carbon dioxide created in this process –none of it through combustion — as being one market for carbon sequestration along with the almost pure stream of carbon dioxide being emitted by corn ethanol plants. The company’s office is about a mile from my own in suburban Denver.

As I continued north, the three giant smokestacks of Comanche 3 rose higher. Before I got there, though, I first saw the low-rising rows of solar panels, a virtual sea of them amid the cacti.

The first solar farm, located directly east of the coal plant, was developed by Eric Blank, who has now become the chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Then, in 2021, completion of a far larger array of solar panels was completed. This project, Bighorn, was on land owned by Evraz around Comanche Station. It can generate 300 megawatts of direct current or 240 megawatts of alternating current. Through the artifice of credits, the solar production allows the steel mill to proclaim it has solar-made steel. (It also matters that the plant works with recycled steel, which requires less heat).

Still heading toward Comanche, I drove under transmission lines. whether generated by solar or for by coal units. However electricity is generated, it must be transmitted to metro Denver and wherever else. Will a nuclear plant transmit electricity at Comanche sometime in the 2030s?

The Pueblo area has Colorado’s two remaining limestone quarries and cement kilns, including this one along Lime Creek Road. Photo/Allen Best

The tone for the conference was set by the panel that followed Adam Frisch.

The panel consisted of representatives of three of Colorado’s four privately-owned utilities that sell methane, the primary constituent in natural gas, to consumers for building heat and water cooling.

Curbing methane emissions from Colorado’s buildings may be Colorado’s most difficult nut to crack. We don’t swap out buildings the way we do cars or cell phones.

Ken Fogle is a marketing vice president for Atmos Energy, one of Colorado’s two regulated gas-only utilities, meaning that they don’t also sell electricity. Black Hills Energy does sell both electricity and gas, but not necessarily in the same place. It was represented by Tom Henley, the senior public affairs director. And there was Michael Sapp, the state public affairs director for Xcel Energy, with sells both gas and electricity, and in largely the same areas.

The Monday prior to the conference, the Colorado PUC commissioners had issued their formal 141-page decision about Xcel’s proposed clean heat plan. The PUC commissioners rejected a lot of Xcel’s ideas.

The plan was in response to legislation adopted in 2021 that said that the gas utilities needed to figure out how to start reducing emissions from the natural gas they delivered to their customers for heating of space and water. It’s one of maybe a half-dozen bills taking aim at methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that the Environmental Defense Fund says is responsible for about 30% of today’s global warming driven by human action.

“For those of you don’t know, natural gas has been kind of under the microscope, shall we say, for a number of years now down at the state capitol,” said Black Hills’ Henley.

The panelists in Pueblo said they thought the clean-heat legislation adopted in 2021 required too much, too soon. A major grievance is that the legislation required a 4% reduction in emissions by 2025 compared to a 2015 baseline – but ignoring the role of population growth. In effect, said several panelists, this means a 20% reduction.

Nobody argued whether climate change is real or the role of greenhouse gas emissions in causing climate change. That debate has, at least formally, passed. The argument is whether the reduction goals are realistic.

It’s a legitimate question. But this was not a panel created to further the dialogue. Instead, aided by softball questions, the remarks drifted toward preserving the status quo. These are companies who don’t want to change their business models in light of the evidence of climate change.

“How do we support legislators who favor an all-of-the-above energy mix,” they were asked.

“We’ve got to talk to people that are electing their officials to make sure they know what their officials are doing in Denver,” said Fogle, the Atmos representative. “I don’t think a lot of folks would agree with what’s happening in Denver when you go to these places like the Western Slope or Southeastern Colorado. I don’t think they’d agree with what’s happening in Denver. So you got to get the people involved and activate the base.”

Then another question. “Dems control the House, Senate and governor’s office, how do you navigate policies that are aimed at mandated, forced beneficial electrification, and what strategies do you try to deploy to work with that agenda?”

The key strategy that emerged in the remarks of panelists is to emphasize cost of adopting other technologies that will end the need for natural gas in buildings. Going electric is expensive, and natural gas is affordable. And there’s truth to that. Staying the course is the cheapest alternative. Cost can matter.

Ironically, along the way in this discussion about natural gas, there was a plug for nuclear. But when the agenda moved to nuclear that afternoon that cost almost entirely disappeared from the conversation.

That seems to be a pattern.

Former PUC commissioner Frances Koncilja explains the task force perspective as to what Pueblo needs after all the units in the Comanche Generating Station close. Photo/Allen Best

While some reading this might conclude otherwise, I am actually neutral about nuclear as a long-term solution. As I’ve written before, one of the leading climate change scientists, James Hansen, has embraced the need for nuclear. I know people in Boulder County – yes, in that place that many want to see as a hotbed of cross-breeding of privilege and wokeism — who believe it is necessary.

It would certainly solve a lot of problems. Even now, 20% of U.S. power comes from nuclear power plants.

Then there’s the matter of Colorado’s declared intention of not leaving behind coal communities in this transition. Frances Koncilja, a former PUC commissioner, in 2023 co-chaired a task force created by Xcel Energy that produced a report in January. The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee Report heartily recommended a nuclear power plant to replace Comanche.

Pueblo County has done its part to reduce emissions, she said. Pueblo County will be responsible for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by Xcel Energy and 20% statewide from the electric sector.

She emphasized the obligation of Colorado. “Just transition means that coal communities should not only be no worse off with the closure of coal facilities but also replace the coal generation with high-paying and highly-skilled jobs and lost tax base so that coal communities have an opportunity to prosper, grow and reimagine their local economies.”

Koncilja did not specifically cite the 2019 law, which in my read is a little more fuzzy than how she summarized it. Colorado does not owe Pueblo a one-for-one replacement.

The law says the “effects of coal plant closures on works and communities have the potential to be significant if not managed correctly.” It also mentions the state’s intention to “assist workers and communities impacted by changes in Colorado’s coal economy.” It also mentions a “moral commitment.”

The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee she co-chaired recommended nuclear because of the 300 jobs with a salary range of $60,000 to $200,000 and annual tax payments of $95 million. In 2021, Xcel and its two co-owners of Comanche 3, one of the coal-burning units, collectively paid $31 million.

She also pointed to strong comparisons in wealth to other counties in Colorado, specifically Aspen/Pitkin County, Vail/Eagle County, Boulder County and Denver.

Exploitation of fossil fuels has left Pueblo far, far behind these other locations.

One unit of Comanche Generating Station has ceased operation and the other two will before 2031 gets underway. Photo/Allen Best

The afternoon was rich with speakers with a wealth of information about different types of nuclear technology that are in some stage of development. There were many details, but almost entirely absent were those most useful for relevancy in Pueblo and Colorado altogether. That begins with cost.

One speaker said his company’s technology will be able to deliver electricity for 3 cents a kilowatt-hour – making it competitive with renewables. But, of course, it has not been deployed yet.

When the representative from nuclear powerhouse Westinghouse concluded, she took several questions. The first was: What is the cause of the most significant pushback you get?” Cost, she replied.

Cost infamously rose to $35 billion, more than double original projections, on the two Vogtle units that have come on line recently in Georgia.

But what about the advanced nuclear designs? True enough, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in early 2023 approved the design of small modular reactors. But NuScale, the company that had sought the approval for deployment at Idaho Falls, just a few months later cancelled the order. The problem? Escalating costs.

Can Bill Gates disprove us naysayers? He was in Wyoming on Monday to help break ceremonial ground for a nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. The company has a pending application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the plant design. Gates and company hope for completion in 2030, a brisk pace.

Gates has put in $1 billion into TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy has $2 billion promised for the project. Gates, in an interview on Face the Nation on Sunday morning (see transcript), said he expects to invest several billion more. He estimated completion price at $10 billion. He also said he hopes to 100 projects using the same nuclear technology “to really make an impact.”

A sea of solar panels exists around Comanche Generation Station along with many transmission lines that export the power to Xcel Energy’s customers. Photo/Allen Best

In a seminar several weeks before, Duane Highley, chief executive of Tri-State Generation and Transmission, said he thought the price will not be bent down until about 2035 or beyond to a point where it can be justified for his members in places like the San Luis Valley and the corn-and-millet and wheat-and-ranch country of eastern Colorado.

To be fair, Highley said the cost of geothermal for electrical production is no better at this point. The comparison may not be the most useful. The technologies compete in two different cost arenas. Simply put, nuclear is a bigger gamble, the entry bid at a higher level.

But the larger point is that we have a whole host of technologies competing to be the final answer to 100% emissions-free energy — and nuclear is just one.

So why the bandwagon for nuclear? Will Colorado really throw cost considerations out the window and became the test lab for advanced nuclear technologies?

Highley, in his interview,(which you can read elsewhere in this issue), said he wished the federal government would bankroll the next-generation nuclear technology, such as for use on military bases. That would get us over this gigantic hump of price.

It would still leave us with puddles of radioactive waste hither and thither with that huge issue unresolved. Our past recklessness in places such as Rocky Flats, between Arvada and Boulder, leaves many uncomfortable.

And finally, there is this question: Why do nuclear advocates in Colorado think they can continue to make their case without addressing these hard questions.

The best I can figure is that nuclear has become a stand-in for coal and a political statement that borders on religion. Because Aspen, Boulder and Denver likes renewables, we need to be for nuclear. That’s why I found the talking points of the congressional candidate from Aspen so interesting. (And, to be honest, speaking to a Pueblo crowd and leading with the fact that you’re from Boulder likely would not be the wisest way to introduce yourself).

But what was Xcel Energy up to in creating this task force? What did it truly hope to accomplish? A mere distraction, a way to gain leverage against the Democratic majority at the Colorado Capitol?

I’m still scratching my head. I probably will be still until Xcel submits its proposal to the PUC in five weeks.

‘Time is running out’: Navajo Nation urges Congress to act on Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expansion bill — #Utah News Dispatch

Navajo miners near Cove, Arizona in 1952. (Photograph by Milton Jack Snow, courtesy of Doug Brugge/Memories Come To Us In the Rain and the Wind)

Click the link to read the article on the Utah News Dispatch website (Shondin Silversmith):

May 16, 2024

Kathleen Tsosie remembers seeing her dad come home every evening with his clothes covered in dirt. As a little girl, she never questioned why, and she was often more excited to see if he had any leftover food in his lunchbox.

“We used to go through his lunch and eat whatever he didn’t eat,” Tsosie said, recalling when she was around 4 years old. “And he always had cold water that came back from the mountain.”

Tsosie’s father, grandfather, and uncles all worked as uranium miners on the Navajo Nation near Cove, Arizona, from the 1940s to the 1960s. The dirt Tsosie’s father was caked in when he arrived home came from the mines, and the cold water he brought back was from the nearby springs.

Tsosie grew up in Cove, a remote community located at the foothills of the Chuska mountain range in northeastern Arizona. There are 56 abandoned mines located in the Cove area, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the late 1960s, Tsosie said her grandfather started getting sick. She remembers herding sheep with him and how he would often rest under a tree, asking her to push on his chest because it hurt.

Tsosie said she was about 7 years old when her uncles took her grandfather to the hospital. At the time, she didn’t know why he was sick, but later on, she learned he had cancer. Her grandfather died in October 1967.

Over a decade later, Tsosie’s father also started getting sick. She remembers when he came to visit her in Wyoming; she was rubbing his shoulders when she felt a lump. She told him to get it checked out because he complained about how painful it was.

Her father was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 and went through treatments, but died in April 1985.

“When my dad passed away, everybody knew it was from the mine,” Tsosie said. He was just the latest on a long list of Navajo men from her community who worked in the uranium mines and ended up getting sick and passing away.

She recalls how her father used to tell her that, one day, it may happen to him, but she did not want to believe him. Her dad worked in the uranium mines for over 20 years.

The sickness did not stop there. In February of 2007, Tsosie was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she would spend years in treatment and eventually go into remission in December 2007.

But, this year, Tsosie got the news in February that her cancer has returned, and she is now taking the steps toward getting treatment.

Tsosie’s family history with uranium mining and growing up in an area downwind from nuclear testing sites is similar to many Navajo families in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Her family is among the thousands potentially impacted by radiation from nuclear weapon testing, according to National Cancer Institute research.

Because of that history, Tsosie became an advocate for issues related to downwinders and uranium mine workers from the Navajo Nation, including the continuation of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, provides a program that compensates individuals who become ill because of exposure to radiation from the United States’ development and testing of nuclear weapons.

RECA was initially set to expire in 2022, but President Joe Biden signed a measure extending the program for two more years. Now, it’s set to expire in less than a month.

Tsosie first heard of the program in the 1990s after her mother applied for it because her father was a uranium mine worker. She remembers the day her mother got a compensation check for $100,000 and handed it to her.

“She gave it to me, and she said, ‘This is from your dad,’” Tsosie said, adding that her mother didn’t go into many details at the time, only saying that families with loved ones who died of cancer were getting checks.

Tsosie said she was upset about the check because her father had died, and $100,000 was nothing in comparison.

“I was really mad, and that’s just how the federal government thinks of us as Navajo people,” she explained.

The second time she worked with RECA was for her own case. After her cancer treatments concluded in December 2007, she took some time to heal before determining in March 2008 whether she qualified for RECA. She did qualify and received compensation.

Since RECA was passed in 1990, more than 55,000 claims have been filed. Of those, more than 41,000 claims, or about 75%, have been approved — and roughly $2.6 billion had been paid out as of the end of 2022.

Claims for “downwinders” yield $50,000. For uranium mines and mill workers providing ore to construct nuclear weapons, claimants typically receive $100,000.

Proving that exposure to nuclear waste and radiation causes cancers and other diseases is difficult. However, the federal program doesn’t require claimants to prove causation: They only have to show that they or a relative had a qualifying disease after working or living in certain locations during specific time frames.

In July 2023, the U.S. Senate voted to expand and extend the RECA program, and it was attached as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the Department of Defense.

It could have extended health care coverage and compensation to more uranium industry workers and “downwinders” exposed to radiation in several new regions — Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, and Guam — and expanded coverage to new parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

The defense spending bill for 2024 was signed into law on Dec. 22 by Biden, but the RECA expansion was cut from the final bill before it landed on his desk.

When she heard that the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act amendments failed to pass, Tsosie said it really impacted her, and she cried because so many people deserve that funding.

“I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to suffer,” she said.

Without an extension, RECA is set to expire in June, and the deadline for claims to be postmarked is June 10, 2024, according to the DOJ.

Navajo leaders advocate for RECA

The sunset of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act is approaching fast, and leaders from the Navajo Nation are urging Congress to act on the expansion bill that has been waiting for the U.S. House of Representatives to take it up for more than two months.

“Time is running out,” Justin Ahasteen, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office, said in a press release.

“Every day without these amendments means another day without justice for our people,” he added. “We urge Congress to stand on the right side of history and pass these crucial amendments.”

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley from Missouri introduced S. 3853 – The Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act, which funds RECA past its June sunset date for another six years.

The bill passed through the U.S. Senate with a bipartisan 69-30 vote on March 7. But since being sent to the House on March 11, the bill hasn’t moved.

The RECA expansion bill would include more communities downwind of nuclear test sites in the United States and Guam. It would extend eligibility for uranium workers to include those who worked after 1971. Communities harmed by radioactive waste from the tests could apply for the program, and expansion would also boost compensation payments to account for inflation.

“The Navajo Nation calls for immediate passage of S. 3853,” Ahasteen said in a press release. “This is to ensure that justice is no longer delayed for the Navajo people and other affected communities.”

Ahasteen told the Arizona Mirror in an interview that congressional leaders holding the bill back due to the program’s expense is not a good enough reason not to pass it.

“They keep referencing the cost and saying it’s too expensive,” he said. But, he explained, the RECA expansion is only a sliver of U.S. spending on foreign aid or nuclear development.

And it shouldn’t even be a matter of cost, Ahasteen said, because people have given their lives and their health in the interest of national security.

“The bill has been paid with the lives and the health of the American workers who were exposed unjustly to radiation because the federal government kept it from them and they lied about the dangers,” he said.

Navajo uranium miners at the Rico Mine in 1953. (Source: The Navajo Uranium Miner Oral History and Photography Project at the Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico)

From 1945 to 1992, the U.S. conducted a total of 1,030 nuclear tests, according to the Arms Control Association.

Many were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, with 928 nuclear tests conducted at the site between 1951 and 1992, according to the Nevada National Security Site. About 100 of those were atmospheric tests, and the rest were underground detonations.

According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, atmospheric tests involved unrestrained releases of radioactive materials directly into the environment, causing the largest collective dose of radiation thus far from man-made radiation sources.

Between the 1940s and 1990s, thousands of uranium mines operated in the United States, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Most operated in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona, typically on federal and tribal lands.

The number of mining locations associated with uranium is around 15,000, according to the EPA, and of those, more than 4,000 have documented uranium production.

Navajo Nation leaders advocated and worked with officials in Washington, D.C., for decades to get the amendments added to the RECA that would benefit more Navajo people who have been impacted by uranium mining, as well as radiation exposure.

Their efforts continue with the current expansion bill: Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley and the Navajo Nation Washington Office team have been working on an advocacy push this week with congressional leaders.

“Our people have borne the cost of America’s nuclear program in their health and well-being,” Nygren said in a written statement. “The amendments we advocate for today are not merely legislative changes; they are affirmations of justice and a commitment to heal the wounds of the past.”

On May 14, Nygren and Curley met with former Navajo uranium miners and members of Congress to urge passage of the amendments before RECA expires in a few weeks.

“As the Navajo Nation, we feel that that’s the best fit for us, especially for our miners,” Curley told the Mirror about her support of the expansion bill.

Curley said she’s spent her time in Washington educating congressional leaders about the Navajo Nation and the impact uranium mining has had on their people.

“A lot of our Navajo fathers, grandparents, and uncles went into these mines without any protection,” she said. “And now, many decades later, we’re dealing with the health effects.”

The legacy of uranium mining has impacted the Navajo Nation for decades, from abandoned mines to contaminated waste disposal.

From 1944 to 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands, according to the EPA, and hundreds of Navajo people worked in the mines, often living and raising families in close proximity to the mines and mills.

Ahasteen said those numbers show exactly how large the uranium operations were on the Navajo Nation and the impact it would have on the Navajo people.

“There are photos on record to show Navajo people being exploited, not given any proper protective equipment, but (the federal government) knew about the dangers of radiation since the ’40s,” Ahasteen said. “They were given a shovel and a hard hat, and they were told: Go to work. You’ll earn lots of money. You’ll have a nice life, and we did that, but it didn’t work so well for us.”

Although the mines are no longer operational across the Navajo Nation, contamination continues, including 523 abandoned uranium mines in addition to homes and water sources with heightened levels of radiation.

The health risks associated with this contamination include the possibility of lung cancer from inhaling radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function resulting from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.

“We want to remind all of the members of Congress that it was because of the Navajo Nation that we are where we are today,” Ahasteen said. “It is because of the uranium workers (that) the United States is the nuclear power that it is today.”

Ahasteen said the Navajo people have demonstrated their patriotism for the U.S. time and time again, but the country continues not to recognize that.

“That’s really what’s appalling,” he added.

As of December 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that 7,704 claims from tribal citizens representing 24 tribal nations had been filed with the RECA program, 5,310 had been granted and more than $362.5 million had been awarded.

Navajo people make up 86% of the claimants, according to the DOJ, and they have received awards totaling more than $297 million.

RECA’s downwind affected area covers land within multiple federally recognized tribal nations, including the Navajo, Hopi and White Mountain Apache.

Ahasteen provided RECA claim numbers for Arizona as of April 2023. A total of 15,603 RECA claims had been submitted in Arizona, 3,052 of which came from the Navajo Nation.

“That accounts for about 20% of all claims in Arizona,” he said.

In New Mexico, he said that there were a total of 7,300 claims, and 2,900 were Navajo.

“That means 40% of all of New Mexico claims are Navajo,” Ahasteen said. “Combined between Arizona and New Mexico, Navajo makes up about a fourth of all RECA claims.”

Ahasteen said it is disappointing that the program is approaching expiration and that the expansion bill still hasn’t moved in the House.

“We are hopeful that when it is brought to the House floor for a vote, Congress will speak, and they will move forward with the amendments because it’s the right thing to do,” he added.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Lincoln Park/Cotter Community Advisory Group encourages well owners to participate in monitoring program — The #CañonCity Daily Record #ArkansasRiver

Lincoln Park/Cotter Mill superfund site via the Environmental Protection Agency

Click the link to read the article on the Cañon City Daily Record website. Here’s an excerpt:

May 10, 2024

In February 2023, the current Radiation Materials License holder, Colorado Legacy Land (CLL), declared insolvency and stated they could no longer maintain staff to ensure site security or continue regular operations. The Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) took emergency action and contracted with the existing company, Ensero Solutions LLC, to continue with the necessary on-site activities. CDPHE assumed the monitoring program including wells and air monitoring stations because CLL had abandoned these responsibilities.

At the end of February, the CDPHE sent a letter to residents of Lincoln Park who have been part of the well-monitoring program established decades ago to keep track of groundwater contamination associated with the former Cotter Uranium Mill. The agency was asked for permission to access properties and test wells as had been done routinely in the past by either Cotter or CLL.

At the Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting on April 16, Shiya Wang, CDPHE Radiation Project Manager, announced that of the 38 letters sent to well owners, only 16 responses were received to allow CDPHE representatives to continue the monitoring program. If you, the well-owner, receive a follow-up letter, please take the time to complete your information and get it back to the CDPHE. Any questions can be directed to the agency or the CAG at its Facebook page, “Lincoln Park/Cotter Community Advisory Group”

The reason for monitoring, as stated in the letter, is: “Continuous sampling of environmental media provides valuable data to both the State and to the Lincoln Park Community regarding the migration of hazardous constituents in the environment that have been associated with historical operations at the Site. Residents are encouraged to continue providing access to the sampling location so that this information can continue to assist the State’s, as well as the community’s, understanding of the current conditions in the area.

Navajo government asks Biden admin to stop uranium transport across Navajo Nation — KNAU

Click the link to read the article on the KNAU website. Here’s an excerpt:

May 1, 2024

Navajo leaders signed onto legislation Tuesday asking President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to halt uranium transportation on the Navajo Nation ahead of some of the first scheduled trips. The Pinyon Plain Mine near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon began production in December. Mine owner Energy Fuels is expected to transport uranium ore on highways through northern Arizona and the Navajo Nation to a southern Utah mill. The legislation emphasizes the historic impact uranium mining has had on the Navajo people.

“During the Cold War, the demand for uranium surged, prompting extensive mining operations on Navajo lands without adequate environmental safeguards, resulting in lasting devastation to land, water, and public health, including high rates of cancer and other illnesses among Navajo uranium miners and their families.”

Good News from the Clean Energy Beat: #Solar for All! Clean Energy Powers California! — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 26, 2024

😀 Good News Corner 😎

Now this is what I’m talking about: Last week, the Biden administration forked out $7 billion to states, tribal nations, and non-profits to carry out its Solar for All program aimed at expanding rooftop and residential solar and energy storage access to low-income folks and other underserved communities. About $1.7 billion of that cash will go to the West (see breakdown below). This is what I call a win-win-win-win situation:

Win 1 = It will add more solar power to the nation’s energy mix, hopefully displacing some fossil fuel generation, which will result in cleaner air and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Win 2 = This added solar will be on rooftops or vacant lots in or near towns or cities, reducing the need to blanket the desert with photovoltaics, which can be hugely destructive to ecosystems and wildlife habitat.

Win 3 = Rooftop and community-level solar installations will increase residents’ self-sufficiency and reduce dependency on the grid, which is becoming less and less reliable as more frequent and severe extreme weather events damage infrastructure and utilities are forced to shut off power to reduce wildfire hazard. Plus, many homes that lack access to electricity, especially on tribal lands, will now have power.

Win 4 = This program has the potential to radically transform the residential solar landscape, redistributing this exclusive amenity now reserved to homeowners who can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars upfront on a solar system, to, well, all of us, including renters.

Recipients include:

Colorado Energy Office: $156 million for single-family and multifamily rooftop solar statewide.

New Mexico Energy, Minerals, & Natural Resources Department: $156 million to “help overcome existing barriers to widespread adoption of distributed solar generation” by expanding access to shared solar beyond the new community solar program.

Utah Office of Energy Development: $62 million to launch a new program to “strengthen the market for deploying residential-serving solar … for disadvantaged and low-income homes”

Montana and Wyoming and Idaho, Bonneville Environmental Foundation: $131 million to “expand economic and environmental benefits of solar to low-income, tribal, and disadvantaged communities.”

Colorado-based Oweesta Corporation: $156 million to “address adoption barriers to Native residential and community solar deployment” in tribal lands across the nation.

Executive Office of the State of Arizona: $156 million to “bring the benefits of the state’s abundant solar resources to the state’s low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

California Infrastructure Economic Development Bank: $250 million to reach “the homes and businesses statewide that are most in need of affordable, reliable clean energy.”

Nevada Clean Energy Fund: $156 million

Hopi Utilities Corporation: $25 million to deploy residential solar and storage systems on the Hopi Reservation, where 35% of households do not have electricity and those that do experience frequent and extended outages.

GRID Alternatives (Western Indigenous Network Solar for All) $62 million. Provides grants and incentives and technical assistance to deploy tribal residential solar, prioritizing communities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Alaska Energy Authority, $62 million, to partner with Alaska Housing Finance Corporation to deploy solar photovoltaic infrastructure statewide.

Oregon Department of Energy, $87 million

Washington State Department of Commerce, $156 million

Alaska, Tanana Chiefs Conference $62 million to provide tribal residents with residential and community solar.

***

And the good news keeps a coming: Wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal generation supplied more than 100% of California’s energy demand on 39 of 47 days this spring. It wasn’t all day, by any means, but anywhere from about 15 minutes on some days to just over nine hours on April 20.

That is to say that a state of 39 million people, with one of the world’s largest economies, ran on non-fossil-fuel energy sources for more than nine hours. That’s a big deal.

Sure, it was on a Saturday in spring, when power demand tends to be lower, and on 4/20, when I guess a lot of people might have been outside smoking dope, which may or may not have affected electricity use. And a small percentage of that power came from large hydropower dams, which have their own problems and which California does not apply toward its renewable portfolio standards. Still, it’s a milestone that wasn’t imaginable a couple of decades ago, when coal generation dominated the power grid and utility-scale solar and wind power barely registered.

Most of the power came from utility-scale solar installations (California grid operators don’t track rooftop solar output, but it contributed by reducing overall demand). In fact, the state’s collective solar systems not only met demand, but exceeded it enough to charge grid-scale batteries and still have enough left over to export to other states. On some days there was so much solar they had to curtail generation — or basically throw it away.

Here’s what it looked like:

Graphic credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

The green line represents electricity demand for the day. Part of the reason it dips during the middle of the afternoon is because that’s when rooftop solar output is at its peak, and rooftop solar reduces grid demand since folks are using power from their own panels rather than taking it from the grid. Source: CAISO.

And then there’s the dreaded solar duck curve to deal with. This refers to the shape of the electricity net-demand graph on sunny days (net-demand is determined by subtracting solar and wind supply from demand since they aren’t “dispatchable” power sources). On a number of days this spring, solar output was so high that it pushed the net-demand curve down into negative territory in the middle of the day. The real problem’s start when the sun sets and solar output suddenly diminishes. The net-demand curve shoots back up, forcing grid operators to fire up natural gas generation to “follow the load,” or meet demand.

But even that dynamic is changing as an ever-increasing amount of that late afternoon load spike is being met with power from grid-scale batteries that had been charging all day. On the evening of April 16, for example, another milestone was reached when battery storage discharge became the largest energy source on California’s grid, contributing nearly as much power as natural gas and nuclear generation combined for about an hour. Just this week, California announced it had surpassed 10,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity — a 1,250% increase from just five years ago.

Batteries alone, however, won’t get California or the West to 100% clean energy. The region will also need more of what’s known as “geographic smoothing,” or moving power around the region to fill gaps left when wind and solar generation drop off. This might include sending Wyoming wind power to California when the sun stops shining, or shipping California solar to Colorado during the middle of the day. Achieving this will require better regional integration of the grid and power markets. Just yesterday the Biden administration announced a plan to spend $331 million to help build out transmission lines, an important step in realizing this goal.

Read more about the Duck Curve:

The Energy Transition and Public Lands, Part III — December 15, 2021.

A pronghorn hangs out among Wyoming wind turbines. Better integration of the Western grid would allow California and Arizona to draw on Wyoming wind to back up solar when the sun goes down. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

A recap of Part I and Part II: Climate change is wreaking havoc on the electricity grid as extreme heat spurs an increase in demand for p…

Read full story

***

NEWS: Another proposed pumped hydropower storage project on the Navajo Nation bites the dust.

CONTEXT: One way to store energy is in batteries. Another way is with pumped hydropower facilities, usually consisting of two reservoirs, one above the other. Surplus power from the grid, usually generated by solar or wind during the day, is used to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir. When the power is needed, such as when the sun sets and solar drops off, water is released from the upper reservoir and gravity propels it through a turbine that feeds electricity into the grid before emptying into the lower reservoir to begin the cycle anew.

It’s smart technology, capable of providing massive amounts of energy just when it’s needed. The problem is, these things require water, dams, reservoirs, pumping plants, and pipelines, all of which can have an impact. That means properly siting these facilities — and working with stakeholders before finalizing plans or applying for permits — is important. And, well, so far, a lot of developers haven’t done a great job with that, and now it’s biting them in the butt.

Confluence of the Little Colorado River and Colorado River; Credit: EcoFlight

A few months ago the Land Desk reported on federal regulators’ rejection of seven proposed pumped hydropower storage projects on the Navajo Nation, while also establishing a policy of denying any project on tribal land if the tribe opposes it. The regulators deferred a decision on one additional proposal — the massive, three-reservoir Big Canyon project that would be on Navajo Nation land along a tributary of the Little Colorado River. The Navajo Nation initially had expressed concerns about the proposal without explicitly opposing it. After the new policy was put in place, the tribe clarified its opposition. This week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission followed its new policy and rejected the permit.

It’s a bummer to see so many clean energy proposals go down in flames. Had they been built, the projects would have contributed mightily to the Western energy transition. Their failure, however, is not on the tribal nation or advocates who opposed the projects. The developers are to blame for faulty siting decisions and for failing to adequately consult with stakeholders at the very beginning of the process. That would save everyone a lot of headaches, and it might even result in some good projects getting built in the right places.

For more on the proposals and their problems, check out this excellent piece — complete with great maps — by the Grand Canyon Trust’s Daryn Akei Melvyn.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Ute Mountain in the spring. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

EPA officials pledge to clean up old uranium mines at the first Navajo Superfund site — AZCentral.com

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:

March 23, 2024

Representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency met with Cove community members last week to discuss the agency’s decision to place the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District on the National Priorities List. Although the meeting was intended to be informational, tribal, Navajo EPA and community leaders expressed their uncertainty about whether the federal government will actually start addressing the cleanup of the abandoned uranium mines that landed the site on the EPA list, also known as the Superfund program. The mining district encompasses Navajo Nation communities of Cove, Round Rock and Lukachukai in the far northeastern corner of Arizona.

“We are looking at what happened in the past and how the federal government could have prevented a lot of this contamination,” said Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty, “could’ve prevented our community from getting sick. What I don’t want them (children) to have to deal with is another three or four decades before actual action happens.”

[…]

Phil Harrison remembers when his childhood community of Cove was alive with family gatherings, ceremonies, rodeos, farming and ranching, but after decades of uranium contamination, those days are a thing of the past…Harrison’s father was a miner in the uranium mines of Cove, which was where uranium was first discovered on the Navajo Nation. Uranium production in the northern and western Carrizo Mountains of the Navajo Nation began in 1948, peaked in 1955 and 1956 and declined to zero again by 1967.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

How will the needed power be generated?

Can data centers be “sustainable”?

Is resistance futile?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Share this:

Like this:

How (Not) to Talk About Climate

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Share this:

Like this:

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

📈 Data Center Watch 📊

📈 Data Dump 📊

Share this:

Like this:

By the Numbers

News Briefs

Studies and Reports

On the Radar

Share this:

Like this:

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

Share this:

Like this:

Nuclear in Colorado

From Colorado Newsline

‘Renaissance of nuclear’

Federal workforce cuts

Federal support crucial, but politics tricky

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Parting Poem

Share this:

Like this:

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Share this:

Like this:

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

On the housing supply-side theory JONATHAN P. THOMPSON SEPTEMBER 19, 2023: https://www.landdesk.org/p/on-the-housing-supply-side-theory

Share this:

Laser research facility will aid work in fusion, medicine and fundamental science 