THE NEWS: The White Mesa Concerned Community and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe will hold a spiritual walk on Oct. 22 to advocate for protection from the impacts of the White Mesa Uranium Mill. The walk begins at 11 a.m. at the White Mesa Community Center and all supporters are welcome.
THE CONTEXT: The White Mesa Mill, located between the Ute Mountain Ute community of White Mesa and Blanding, was constructed in the 1970s, when uranium mining still was going gangbusters in southeastern Utah. Then the Cold War ended, meaning less uranium was needed for bombs, the nation stopped building nuclear power plants, and globalization opened channels to cheaper uranium from overseas. Slowly, the domestic uranium mining industry withered, virtually going dormant in the last few years. The White Mesa Mill, however, has hung on—barely, and is now the nation’s only remaining active uranium mill.
Thing is, they aren’t processing uranium, at least in the conventional sense. They are processing “alternate feed materials,” which is to say, they are taking uranium-bearing waste from other facilities, running it through the mill, and then dumping the stuff in their on-site disposal piles and ponds. While the process can recover minute quantities of uranium, the real money comes from the “recycling fees” the companies pay Energy Fuels for letting them dump their waste there. The company made zilch selling uranium during the first half of this year, compared to the $1.2 million it brought in from alternate feed materials processing—a.k.a. waste disposal.
Evidence indicates it’s not the safest dump, either. The disposal ponds have leaked and contaminants detected in shallow groundwater beneath the mill. More recently, aerial photos have shown that some of the waste remains uncovered by water, allowing it to emit carcinogens. This same negligence led the EPA to prohibit the mill from processing material originating from Superfund sites. The agency has eased up on that prohibition, but still bans the facility from dumping that material into the problematic disposal cell.
All of this understandably concerns folks who live in nearby White Mesa, which is on Ute Mountain Ute Tribe land. For nearly a decade the tribe and its allies have been pushing regulators to hold Energy Fuels accountable and to ensure that their drinking water and lands aren’t further desecrated by the facility. This month’s walk commemorates and continues those efforts.
The U.S. uranium industry has had it rough for most of the last decade. Nuclear power’s prospects dimmed considerably after Fukushima, older reactors have been shutting down and the ones that continued to operate were fueled mostly by uranium from overseas. All of that caused the price to fall and stay in a slump for years and sent the mines into zombie-land. That explains why Energy Fuels has turned to other revenue sources—being a waste dump, or processing rare earth elements—for its mill.
But over the last year or so, things have been looking up for the industry. Nuclear energy is getting a new sheen as a low-carbon source of power along with subsidies from the Biden administration. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed American utilities to look for domestic fuel sources.
For the last five years or so, the price of a pound of uranium hovered in the $20 to $25 range. Then, about a year ago, it shot up to about $50, a level it has sustained ever since. This hasn’t spurred a lot of uranium mining, yet. But new mining claims are being staked in uranium country and a lot of claims are changing hands.
Last month, for example, Canada-based Atomic Minerals announced it had acquired by staking 50 claims on 1,000 acres in the Uravan Mineral Belt in San Miguel County, Colorado. And Uravan Minerals acquired Prime Fuels Corp. and its 107 claims in the Lisbon Valley in San Juan County, Utah. A quick search of Bureau of Land Management data revealed that six mining claims have been filed in San Miguel and Montrose Counties in Colorado (uranium country) since April. And in San Juan County, Utah, a whopping 256 claims have been filed in just six months. Woah. I’ll be looking into those claims and where they are and give y’all the details in an upcoming dispatch.
Whether this is a sign that mining will be revived or just a bunch of fly-by-night companies playing mining claim Monopoly in order to build up their portfolio to lure more investment remains to be seen. Staking a mining claim is easy and cheap, thanks to the 150-year-old General Mining Law that still governs this kind of thing, and entails little commitment to actually mine the land. Still, the uptick in activity is a sign that the uranium industry may not be entirely done for after all.
I wrote Tuesday about how last Water Year had been superlatively average, with super-dry spells somewhat offset by massive monsoon moisture to end up right at about normal precipitation levels for the year. The Lower Dolores River’s streamflow gages illustrate the phenomenon nicely—and provide a potentially good omen for the new water year.
The Dolores below McPhee Reservoir has been nearly dry for the last two summers as dam managers hold back all but a trickle of the meager water for irrigators. But the monsoon managed to fill it up again on several occasions, as can be seen here:
The river at Bedrock, which is above the confluence with the San Miguel, was running at less than 20 cubic feet per second—far below the median—in between storms. But the rains shot it up above 1,000 cfs on a couple of occasions this summer, and it exceeded 2,000 cfs on July 6. That’s big. But it’s not pre-dam big, I’m afraid:
Still, it was pretty darned nice to get those October rains and to see the arroyos and rivers (which, by the way, are on trial at the Supreme Court right now. Here’s the deets) swell up. Rig to Flip caught some of it on video:
And, to finish off the week, let’s take a look back at the raging flood of October 1911. It affected a big swath of the Southwest, but hit the San Juan Mountains and the many rivers they drain especially hard.
At around four a.m. on October 6, 1911, Navajo Methodist Mission Superintendent J.N. Simmons woke up to find himself and the mission near Farmington, New Mexico, surrounded by water. It wasn’t a total surprise. He and two other staffers—Frank B. Tice and Walter Weston—had received the flood alarm the previous day, but had chosen to stay, certain that the San Juan River’s waters would never reach them, and if they did, the brand new, three-story cement-block mission building, watched over by God, would provide an unsinkable refuge. They were wrong.
The rain began in the San Juan Mountains late on the morning of October 4, 1911. It came down gently at first, slowly gaining intensity over the course of the day. By evening the tropical storm was a torrent, dropping two inches of precipitation on Durango in just 12 hours, nearly twice what the town normally gets during all of October. Weather watchers in Gladstone, above Silverton, recorded eight inches of rain on October 5—a virtual high country hurricane.
Once-gurgling streams jumped from their banks and pummeled everything in their path: railroad tracks and roads and bridges and barns. Junction Creek tore out the Main Avenue and railroad bridges before adding its load to the Animas, which carried an estimated 25,000 cubic feet per second of water as it ran through town. It’s an almost incomprehensible volume. A good spring runoff might lift the waters to 6,000 cfs, high enough for the river to leave its banks and spread across the floor of the Animas Valley, and to turn Smelter Rapid into a churning hellhole for rafters.
The water unmoored the railroad bridge near Durango’s fish hatchery and carried it downstream, despite the fact that two full coal cars had been parked on the bridge to provide ballast; further downstream the waters washed away 100 tons of toxic slag from the Durango smelter, and carried away several homes from Santa Rita, on the opposite shore.
Over in Dolores the river peaked out at 10,000 cfs, more than 20% greater than the second highest peak hit in 1949. The closest the river’s come to that in relatively recent times was 6,450 during the huge 1984 runoff that threatened to topple Glen Canyon Dam far downstream. The raging river of sorrow ripped out railroad tracks, washed out roads, and inundated the town, itself, where sections of boardwalk floated down the streets.
In Farmington the raging monsters of the upper San Juan and the Animas joined forces, spilling over the banks and onto the flats south of the river, where the Navajo mission sat. Simmons and his fellow staffers sent the children to higher ground at about midnight as a precaution, then went to bed, not realizing their own mistake until they awoke four hours later.
Somehow, Weston was able to quickly escape on horseback (he may have snuck out earlier). Tice chose to stick around, heading for the top floor of the structure. Simmons ran out and climbed atop an outhouse, apparently in order to launch himself onto a horse. Tragically, Simmons missed the horse and ended up in the water, instead, carried rapidly downstream alongside dead animals, haystacks, and pieces of people’s homes.
Tice, it seemed, was the only survivor, and as the sun came up, onlookers gathered on the opposite shore. They watched Tice climb from the second story to the third, finally climbing onto the roof with his dog. It seemed safe enough; the water stopped rising after it inundated the third story. Little did he know, the waters were slowly dissolving the building underneath him, and it, the roof, the dog, and finally Tice were all swallowed up by the current. They found his body 20 miles downstream.
The Shiprock Indian School campus was covered with water five feet deep. Every bridge in San Juan County, Utah, where a miniature oil boom was on, was lost; 150,000 cubic feet of water shot past the little town of Mexican Hat every second, according to a 2001 USGS paleo-flood hydrology investigation. That’s about one hundred times the volume of water in the river during a typical March or April, a popular time to raft that section. It tore through the Goosenecks, backed up in Grand Gulch, deposited trees on sandstone benches high above where the river normally flows, and finally combined with the raging Colorado River, creating a 300,000 cfs liquid leviathan, to wreak more havoc through the Grand Canyon and beyond.
The storm dissipated, leaving a bright sun to illuminate the river valleys, newly scoured of the roads, houses, bridges, railroad tracks and other detritus that humans had littered the valleys with over the previous decades. And there was something else, too. On an island in the San Juan River, somewhere between Farmington and Shiprock, a man huddled next to a small fire, cooking apples that he had snagged as they bobbed past. After falling in the water he had grabbed ahold of some debris, and it had carried him for miles until he finally reached the island, cold, wet and hungry but, maybe miraculously, alive. It was J.N. Simmons, of the Navajo mission.
Wow, the important stuff you never hear about. How could I have lived in this area for close to 30 years and never heard of this amazing and tragic event?
Gee, climate change is not really new!