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**Pharm Girl** · 06-20-2008, 08:05 PM

Here's the reality of the new West - like the old West: The boom will suffer no limits because speculators and mining companies enjoy so few restrictions.

In the American West, we take global warming personally. Like those polar bears desperately hunting for dwindling ice flows, we feel we're on the frontlines of the new weather regime.
The West is drying up. For example, canyon-hugging conservationists and jet-boating gear-heads have argued for several years about whether to "drain" Lake Powell, the 200 mile-long reservoir that once drowned the redrock Eden which was Glen Canyon. But a funny thing happened on the way to debate -- Mother Nature drained it herself. Almost. The Utah reservoir is now reduced by half and the prospects of it ever reaching "full pool" again are less than dim. A recent Natural Resources Defense Council report suggests that Lake Mead, an even bigger reservoir downstream that feeds Las Vegas and Southern California, may be emptied by 2050.
Ghost towns are nothing new in our boom-n'-bust history, of course, but imagine some future tour guide ushering visitors through the awesome ruins of Las Vegas's Circus-Circus, the Bellagio, or the Luxor Hotel. "They didn't understand the limits of the landscape that enfolded them," she might say, while holding up a golf-ball excavated from the ruins for the crowd to see. "When drought pushed them across the threshold, they didn't see it coming, they couldn't cope, and it all fell apart."

Here we go again… Unfortunately, it's not only the heat that's hitting us hard out here. One of the "solutions" to the crisis of climate chaos is about to kick the citizens of the West right in our collective gut before we even have a chance to go down for the count from heat exhaustion. Nuclear power -- once touted as a "solution" to other problems and recently resurrected -- is now being pushed hard as an alternative to carbon-dioxide emitting coal for keeping the lights on. And, unfortunately for us, its raw material, uranium, is right in our backyard.
So we in states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana are poised for a mining boom reminiscent of the one in the 1950s when the nuclear age began. Then, the West's uranium mines provided the raw material for our metastasizing Cold War nuclear arsenal and the nation's first generation of nuclear reactors. (You remember Three Mile Island, don't you?) Back then, radioactive ore was often dug out by impoverished Navajo miners desperate for jobs. Many of them later sickened and died from exposure to radioactivity.
After uranium has been turned into "yellowcake," fit for further processing into reactor fuel, and then used to power a nuclear reactor, it is supposed to return to our Western landscapes in the form of "spent" nuclear fuel -- something that is lethally dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Our arid landscapes, we are told, are ideal for waste that must be kept isolated and dry for at least a thousand years.
In other words, we get it at both ends of the nuclear energy cycle -- and the drier we get, the more appealing we look. First, they dig a hole and take it out; then, they dig another and return it to the ground in far more dangerous shape. Lurking between the mines and the waste dumps are processing mills -- and, of course, we have them, too. Even as debris from toxic slag piles in the old mines and mills of the West is still blowing in the wind or leaching into our watersheds, new slag heaps are taking shape in the fevered dreams of the next generation of speculators.
By now you may have heard about Yucca Mountain, the multi-billion dollar facility under construction in Nevada. Yucca was supposed to be the designated repository for the nuclear energy industry's waste. It has been plagued, however, by faulty science, enormous cost overruns, fierce opposition from local "downwinders," and the problem of transporting all that dangerous nuclear waste across the nation. After years of local resistance and a torrent of bad press, the Yucca project has finally been stalled and, now a distant threat to public health and environmental integrity, is about to be overtaken by a far more clear and present danger -- a new uranium boom in the arid lands of the West.
A temporary town for a thousand uranium miners is already under construction at Ticaboo in southern Utah. It will remind old-timers here of the now popular tourist destination of Moab, which was essentially a trailer-park city for miners in the 1950s and Ground Zero for the first episode of what local historians label "uranium frenzy."
The newest uranium frenzy has opened with a PR campaign to convince a wary public that nuclear power should be an acceptable, if desperate, last-ditch option to stem the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It has convinced some former skeptics to take a second look at the potential value of non-carbon-dioxide emitting nuclear reactors. But, as Christian Parenti reports in The Nation, the debate about reviving and expanding nuclear power is quickly becoming moot in the United States, if not globally.
Bottom line: Wall Street won't invest because nuclear power is too expensive, too risky, too complex, takes too long to bring on line, and can't compete with other energy sources once massive tax-payer subsidies are removed from the equation. (Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner have, however, proposed more than $500 billion in subsidies to double nuclear capacity in the decades ahead.) But those limitations will not dampen the radioactive rush in the West, especially since the planet's limited supply of uranium is ever more valuable on international markets -- which means mining and processing uranium ore will continue to defile some of our wildest landscapes.

Flimflam capitalism: Speculation makes the hearts of wannabe tycoons pound harder. Back in the 1950s, prospectors would begin a mine, bulldoze an airstrip, fly in potential investors, swing a Geiger-counter over ore that supposedly came out of that bit of ground and… well, you know how it ends, but, strangely enough, investors often don't. Scam or legit, there is money to be made simply in building up the infrastructure of speculative exploration.
Even dry holes can be lucrative for a short while. Economically impoverished and vulnerable locals welcome the temporary jobs and merchants want to sell to all those move-in drillers, heavy equipment operators, and miners. Local politicians, eager for access to the pie, will cut deals to open doors. In Utah, for example, two top legislators signed lucrative "consulting" contracts to pave the way for a developer to get the necessary water for a nuclear power plant and formal permission to build it somewhere in the state. Critics charge that the legislators also tried to get generous taxpayer subsidies to sweeten the pot.

The first phase of a mining boom is the rush to stake claims. In Colorado last year, 10,730 uranium mining claims were filed, up from 120 five years ago. More than 6,000 new claims have been staked in southeast Utah. Throughout the West, claims are up tenfold. Next comes exploratory drilling. That means carving roads across the wildlands to bring in equipment. Drilling teams will have no trouble financing their road-building adventures, since profits for the metals mining industry are up 1,400% in the past six years.

Such speculation is as basic to industrial capitalism as the raw materials that power its machinery. Witness the inflated fantasies of the recently punctured housing bubble. Even if the mines never materialize, the run-up will leave lasting scars, especially as the new uranium boom follows on the heels of an oil and gas boom, a desperate effort to wring every last drop of fossil fuel from the depleted reserves of the West.

Bulldozers first, four-wheeled locusts next, then dust in the wind: Like some devastating one-two punch, mineral development and motorized recreation are essentially guaranteed to create the next Great American Dustbowl. First, uranium prospectors bulldoze more roads to add to the thousands of miles of roads already carved across open Western lands in previous booms. Next, a horde of Off-Road Vehicle (ORV) riders take to them, causing more erosion and bio-degradation.

ORV ownership has expanded exponentially throughout the West and most of our deserts have already become weekend ORV theme parks. Those tens of thousands of untrained riders are barely regulated. Enforcement is a joke. They go where they wish and do what they please. Ecological devastation from the exploration and extraction cycle, already substantial, is aided and abetted by the inevitable crush of ORVs. As these riders braid new tracks through lands that otherwise qualify for wilderness protection, they may lose their standing forever, while already compromised wildlife habitats are further fragmented.

The thin and fragile soils of our deserts, barely held in place by a delicate microbiotic crust, have already been overgrazed and overrun. It can take twenty years to grow that protective microbial mat, but one spinning tire can destroy it in one second. If you live to the east of us, expect to see the dust under that "crypto" crust released into your air, as high desert winds churn it up and carry it away. Recent research concludes that snowpack in the Colorado mountains is melting earlier and faster due, in part, to dust blowing in from Utah and Nevada that covers the snow fields and absorbs heat. The Dustbowl, of course, is another old story. Unlike the dust storms of the 1930s, however, our Western dust may have the added charm of being radioactive.

06-20-2008, 08:05 PM	#1 (permalink)
Pharm Girl ... Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Sin city Posts: 2,951 Blog Entries: 13 Thanks: 569 Thanked 286 Times in 230 Posts	Uranium Frenzy in the West. Here's the reality of the new West - like the old West: The boom will suffer no limits because speculators and mining companies enjoy so few restrictions. In the American West, we take global warming personally. Like those polar bears desperately hunting for dwindling ice flows, we feel we're on the frontlines of the new weather regime. The West is drying up. For example, canyon-hugging conservationists and jet-boating gear-heads have argued for several years about whether to "drain" Lake Powell, the 200 mile-long reservoir that once drowned the redrock Eden which was Glen Canyon. But a funny thing happened on the way to debate -- Mother Nature drained it herself. Almost. The Utah reservoir is now reduced by half and the prospects of it ever reaching "full pool" again are less than dim. A recent Natural Resources Defense Council report suggests that Lake Mead, an even bigger reservoir downstream that feeds Las Vegas and Southern California, may be emptied by 2050. Ghost towns are nothing new in our boom-n'-bust history, of course, but imagine some future tour guide ushering visitors through the awesome ruins of Las Vegas's Circus-Circus, the Bellagio, or the Luxor Hotel. "They didn't understand the limits of the landscape that enfolded them," she might say, while holding up a golf-ball excavated from the ruins for the crowd to see. "When drought pushed them across the threshold, they didn't see it coming, they couldn't cope, and it all fell apart." Here we go again… Unfortunately, it's not only the heat that's hitting us hard out here. One of the "solutions" to the crisis of climate chaos is about to kick the citizens of the West right in our collective gut before we even have a chance to go down for the count from heat exhaustion. Nuclear power -- once touted as a "solution" to other problems and recently resurrected -- is now being pushed hard as an alternative to carbon-dioxide emitting coal for keeping the lights on. And, unfortunately for us, its raw material, uranium, is right in our backyard. So we in states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana are poised for a mining boom reminiscent of the one in the 1950s when the nuclear age began. Then, the West's uranium mines provided the raw material for our metastasizing Cold War nuclear arsenal and the nation's first generation of nuclear reactors. (You remember Three Mile Island, don't you?) Back then, radioactive ore was often dug out by impoverished Navajo miners desperate for jobs. Many of them later sickened and died from exposure to radioactivity. After uranium has been turned into "yellowcake," fit for further processing into reactor fuel, and then used to power a nuclear reactor, it is supposed to return to our Western landscapes in the form of "spent" nuclear fuel -- something that is lethally dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Our arid landscapes, we are told, are ideal for waste that must be kept isolated and dry for at least a thousand years. In other words, we get it at both ends of the nuclear energy cycle -- and the drier we get, the more appealing we look. First, they dig a hole and take it out; then, they dig another and return it to the ground in far more dangerous shape. Lurking between the mines and the waste dumps are processing mills -- and, of course, we have them, too. Even as debris from toxic slag piles in the old mines and mills of the West is still blowing in the wind or leaching into our watersheds, new slag heaps are taking shape in the fevered dreams of the next generation of speculators. By now you may have heard about Yucca Mountain, the multi-billion dollar facility under construction in Nevada. Yucca was supposed to be the designated repository for the nuclear energy industry's waste. It has been plagued, however, by faulty science, enormous cost overruns, fierce opposition from local "downwinders," and the problem of transporting all that dangerous nuclear waste across the nation. After years of local resistance and a torrent of bad press, the Yucca project has finally been stalled and, now a distant threat to public health and environmental integrity, is about to be overtaken by a far more clear and present danger -- a new uranium boom in the arid lands of the West. A temporary town for a thousand uranium miners is already under construction at Ticaboo in southern Utah. It will remind old-timers here of the now popular tourist destination of Moab, which was essentially a trailer-park city for miners in the 1950s and Ground Zero for the first episode of what local historians label "uranium frenzy." The newest uranium frenzy has opened with a PR campaign to convince a wary public that nuclear power should be an acceptable, if desperate, last-ditch option to stem the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It has convinced some former skeptics to take a second look at the potential value of non-carbon-dioxide emitting nuclear reactors. But, as Christian Parenti reports in The Nation, the debate about reviving and expanding nuclear power is quickly becoming moot in the United States, if not globally. Bottom line: Wall Street won't invest because nuclear power is too expensive, too risky, too complex, takes too long to bring on line, and can't compete with other energy sources once massive tax-payer subsidies are removed from the equation. (Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner have, however, proposed more than $500 billion in subsidies to double nuclear capacity in the decades ahead.) But those limitations will not dampen the radioactive rush in the West, especially since the planet's limited supply of uranium is ever more valuable on international markets -- which means mining and processing uranium ore will continue to defile some of our wildest landscapes. Flimflam capitalism: Speculation makes the hearts of wannabe tycoons pound harder. Back in the 1950s, prospectors would begin a mine, bulldoze an airstrip, fly in potential investors, swing a Geiger-counter over ore that supposedly came out of that bit of ground and… well, you know how it ends, but, strangely enough, investors often don't. Scam or legit, there is money to be made simply in building up the infrastructure of speculative exploration. Even dry holes can be lucrative for a short while. Economically impoverished and vulnerable locals welcome the temporary jobs and merchants want to sell to all those move-in drillers, heavy equipment operators, and miners. Local politicians, eager for access to the pie, will cut deals to open doors. In Utah, for example, two top legislators signed lucrative "consulting" contracts to pave the way for a developer to get the necessary water for a nuclear power plant and formal permission to build it somewhere in the state. Critics charge that the legislators also tried to get generous taxpayer subsidies to sweeten the pot. The first phase of a mining boom is the rush to stake claims. In Colorado last year, 10,730 uranium mining claims were filed, up from 120 five years ago. More than 6,000 new claims have been staked in southeast Utah. Throughout the West, claims are up tenfold. Next comes exploratory drilling. That means carving roads across the wildlands to bring in equipment. Drilling teams will have no trouble financing their road-building adventures, since profits for the metals mining industry are up 1,400% in the past six years. Such speculation is as basic to industrial capitalism as the raw materials that power its machinery. Witness the inflated fantasies of the recently punctured housing bubble. Even if the mines never materialize, the run-up will leave lasting scars, especially as the new uranium boom follows on the heels of an oil and gas boom, a desperate effort to wring every last drop of fossil fuel from the depleted reserves of the West. Bulldozers first, four-wheeled locusts next, then dust in the wind: Like some devastating one-two punch, mineral development and motorized recreation are essentially guaranteed to create the next Great American Dustbowl. First, uranium prospectors bulldoze more roads to add to the thousands of miles of roads already carved across open Western lands in previous booms. Next, a horde of Off-Road Vehicle (ORV) riders take to them, causing more erosion and bio-degradation. ORV ownership has expanded exponentially throughout the West and most of our deserts have already become weekend ORV theme parks. Those tens of thousands of untrained riders are barely regulated. Enforcement is a joke. They go where they wish and do what they please. Ecological devastation from the exploration and extraction cycle, already substantial, is aided and abetted by the inevitable crush of ORVs. As these riders braid new tracks through lands that otherwise qualify for wilderness protection, they may lose their standing forever, while already compromised wildlife habitats are further fragmented. The thin and fragile soils of our deserts, barely held in place by a delicate microbiotic crust, have already been overgrazed and overrun. It can take twenty years to grow that protective microbial mat, but one spinning tire can destroy it in one second. If you live to the east of us, expect to see the dust under that "crypto" crust released into your air, as high desert winds churn it up and carry it away. Recent research concludes that snowpack in the Colorado mountains is melting earlier and faster due, in part, to dust blowing in from Utah and Nevada that covers the snow fields and absorbs heat. The Dustbowl, of course, is another old story. Unlike the dust storms of the 1930s, however, our Western dust may have the added charm of being radioactive.