President Joe Biden’s designation of a new national monument near the Grand Canyon prohibits mining of most uranium deposits within the monument, a decision made amid renewed interest in accelerating the building of carbon-free nuclear powerplants in the U.S., which need uranium to fuel reactors.  

Indeed, domestic uranium processing is once more burgeoning, said industry experts, who noted that U.S. production rose by more than 800% in 2022 compared to 2021. In raw numbers, though, the increase in domestic production can only sufficiently power a single reactor for a few months. The U.S. imports uranium from other countries to fill its needs.          

A Denver-based company could benefit from the boom in domestic uranium production. 

“With Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, there’s a lot more interest in trying to restore some of these capabilities here in the United States,”  Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing for Energy Fuels, said in an interview with The Denver Gazette. “That’s why this facility is just so important right now.”

The facility Moore referred to is the White Mesa Mill, near Blanding, Utah, which is the only licensed, conventional uranium mill left in the U.S. and is also owned by Energy Fuels, which processes ore for uranium, vanadium and rare earth metals. The company is in the midst of expanding its rare earth materials refining to include separation of mixed rare earth oxides into high-purity individual metals suitable for manufacturing.

“We really think that San Juan County (Utah) is on the cusp of becoming this clean energy hub for the United States, where we’re producing the raw materials that we need for many of the clean energy technologies that we’re developing today from renewable energy to electric vehicles to nuclear power,” Moore said.

The mill, built in 1980, has been processing uranium since — but has changed hands several times. Energy Fuels took ownership of the mill in 2012.

The mill employs about 60 people and half of them are Native Americans from the surrounding Ute Mountain Ute and Navajo nations, he said.

In January, Energy Fuels sold about $18.1 million, or some 300,000 pounds of natural, unenriched yellowcake, also called U308, to the new federal uranium reserve created by the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration formed and funded by Congress to stockpile U.S. origin uranium. 

Energy Fuels also owns the only remaining active, permitted uranium mine out of more than 50 ore bodies previously discovered inside the new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona. 

New mines in what is now a national monument were halted by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2014. Salazar, who is from Colorado, implemented a 20-year mining moratorium that was set to expire next year.

While designation as a national monument by law precludes all future mining claims, it doesn’t affect existing mineral rights, including mines established prior to the 2014 withdrawal of the area for mining by Salazar, according to a fact sheet from the White House on the designation.

The U.S. Department of Energy said there are 3,446 abandoned, defense-related uranium mines in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico — remnants of the uranium mining boom of the 1950s.

The Biden administration said the designation is part of Biden’s “goal to conserve and restore 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030,” and maintains the nearly 1 million acres are “sacred to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples.”

This is Biden’s fifth National Monument designation. By comparison, President Bill Clinton designated 19, Theodore Roosevelt 17, and Jimmy Carter 15. Carter designated more than 55,800,000 acres, mostly in Alaska, according to the National Park Service.

A 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service showed the federal government already owns and controls roughly 640 million acres or about 28% of the 2.27 billion acres of land in the United States.

While environmentalists voice concerns about the environmental impacts of mining, experts point out that minerals must be mined where they are found. Some of the richest areas in the U.S. for uranium lie in western states, according to the Uranium Producers of America.

In the area of the new monument, uranium is found in “breccia pipes”— vertical geologic features that do not require open pit mining like some other metals such as copper do. A typical pipe is about 300 feet in diameter and may extend downward as many as 3,000 feet, Energy Fuels’ Moore said. 

Using classic shaft mining, Moore said that the entire mine site is only about 17 acres in size. Once the uranium ore has been removed, the shaft will be capped, and the entire site reclaimed.

The Grand Canyon Trust, long-time opponents of uranium mining, said in a 2021 blog post by Amber Reimondo, the organization’s energy director, the mine’s shaft penetrated a “shallow aquifer,” resulting in “over 40 million gallons and counting” of water being pumped out of the shaft since 2013. The blog post said, “Recent scientific research has concluded that water from shallow aquifers percolated into the deeper Redwall-Muav aquifer at unknown locations south of the Grand Canyon. The Redwall-Muav aquifer is the source of the largest spring in the Grand Canyon.” The blog post provided no links to the research.

The blog post added, “In reality, no one has investigated to determine whether fractures in the area could allow contaminated water to seep through the walls of the mine shaft and reach the Redwall-Muav Aquifer.”

The blog post called for deep monitoring wells to be drilled around the mine to determine the direction of the groundwater flow and to “immediately detect contamination.”

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is quoted in the blog post as saying there is “over 1,000 feet of impermeable rock layers between the bottom of the mine shaft and the Redwall-Muav Aquifer,” while also claiming that the U.S. Geological Survey “suggests that shallow groundwater could be mixing with deeper groundwater near the mine.”

A 2023 “multi-modal online poll” of 600 “likely 2024 General Election voters in Arizona” by Impact Research, which describes itself as “a proud ally and asset to progressive causes and campaigns around the globe,” reported that 81% of those polled agreed that “protecting Arizona’s clean water supply” was “very important.” The report, apparently commissioned by the Grand Canyon Trust, went on to say that 49% of those polled thought it is very important for Congress to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining than to create more drilling and mining jobs.

There are currently an estimated 13 million pounds of uranium in breccia pipes in Northern Arizona, according to the Uranium Producers of America.

The U.S. today, with 94 commercial power reactors, has an annual requirement of about 50 million pounds and continues to be the world’s largest consumer of uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Moore said in 2022 about 47% of all the uranium used in U.S. nuclear reactors was imported from four countries. More than 11 million pounds came from Canada, about 10 million pounds was from Kazakhstan, about 4.8 million pounds was from Russia, and 4.4 million pounds was from Uzbekistan. Moore said uranium from the latter three of those countries is controlled by Russia.

“In 2021, U.S. uranium production was about 21,000 pounds of U308,” said Moore. “Truly, that’s pretty much zero in the grand scheme of things. The U.S. consumes about 45 million pounds of yellowcake every year.”

U.S. uranium production went from 21,000 pounds to 194,000 pounds in 2022, said Moore.

“But even 194,000 pounds isn’t that much,” Moore said. “That’s only enough to fuel maybe a single reactor for six months. And I’ll say that our company produced the lion’s share of that 2022 production. We produced 162,000 pounds of yellowcake last year at the White Mesa Mill. So, that’s probably 80% of the 194,000 pounds that happened last year throughout the U.S.”

Historically, uranium production in the U.S. peaked in 1980 at about 44 million pounds. In 2013, U.S. uranium mines produced about 4.6 million pounds, less than 10% of the annual uranium required to fuel the current commercial reactors.