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In long run, Grand Canyon’s watershed must be saved from uranium mining contamination

the task of elected officials is not to just manage our county’s and city’s assets, but to thoroughly understand the complexities of our evolving human development. This involves managing our environmental resources to the best long-range benefit, and not for short-sighted, misperceived monetary gain.

Consequences outweigh benefits  Kingman Daily Miner, Jack Ehrhardt,  14 Oct 11 Over the past months, stories have reported on how our local elected officials support the lifting of the moratorium on uranium mining in the Northern Arizona area, on the other side of the Grand Canyon. This area that is a watershed to the Grand Canyon is a sensitive area of environmental protection for its capacity to bring vast amounts of water to the storage downstream in Lake Mead and provide clean water to communities in the west. 

The 20-year moratorium simply stops an avalanche of virtually impossible to regulate uranium mining and not any regular agricultural use like recreation or grazing. Our local elected officials who support this deadly mineral extraction, explain it as a needed economic activity to increase Mohave County’s economic profile and create jobs. While it is easy to see some benefit from any economic activity, the truth is, when it comes to uranium mining, the disastrous environmental consequences far outweigh the economic benefit.

A simple life cycle analysis reveals potential hazards that range from contamination of the site groundwater-watershed with migration to the Colorado River, pollution along the transportation routes, as well as the Holocaust nature of the storage of radioactive spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Many of us in Mohave County support the moratorium. We see the activity of uranium mining near one of the seven wonders of our earth and conclude clearly that protecting the region from contamination and protecting the Grand Canyon is paramount to handing our future generations a healthy and safe region to live within. Twenty years from now we will be judged for how much conscience and vision we used to manage our natural resources today.
Our Native American community here in Mohave County also agrees with banning uranium mining. The Hualapai tribe that has 100 miles bordering the Grand Canyon and has 1 million acres of land, has passed an explicit resolution banning uranium mining on its land. Economic development is as equally important to their community as any other, and they have chosen to weigh the intrinsic value of this type of mining activity versus the diminished value of any economic gain and have rejected the activity. Their resolution 67-2009 states that the federal law known as the 1872 Mining Law is an anachronism, and that uranium exploration and mining cause many adverse humanitarian and environmental impacts that are inconsistent with the management of public lands. Other Native American tribes have outlawed this mining, including the Navajo tribe on its 17.2 million acres.

It seems to me that the task of elected officials is not to just manage our county’s and city’s assets, but to thoroughly understand the complexities of our evolving human development. This involves managing our environmental resources to the best long-range benefit, and not for short-sighted, misperceived monetary gain. Despite what some think and expound, the world is changing as the end of this period of exorbitant economic growth has come and is now gone. It is morphing to something leaders do not want to face as the transformation is taking place.

Agrarian Sustainable Economic Growth and its own set of complexities will require an exercise in new thinking for us. Our leadership had better be aware of it, and prepare for it, or their ignorance will lead us all to a suffering that will be unimaginable.

October 16, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uranium, USA, water