A billion-dollar uranium mining project proposed for Weld County has aroused fierce opposition from some residents concerned about its possible impact on local water supplies.
Other Coloradans hail the project for the well-paying jobs and the millions in state and local taxes it would produce. The Centennial/Indian Springs mine is estimated to be able to produce an average of 800,000 pounds of uranium a year for 15 years after it opens in 2011. At the current price of $129 per pound, that’s $1.5 billion worth of ore.
Coloradans have debated mining’s economic benefits versus its environmental impacts since the state was formed in the wake of successive gold and silver rushes. But the tradeoffs are different in the 21st century, since generating electricity from uranium doesn’t generate the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. That casts nuclear power and its close cousin, uranium mining, in new roles in a 60-year Colorado political melodrama during which they have gone from hero to villain and back again.
Historian Carl Ubbelohde noted that the advent of the Cold War sparked a “uranium rush into the Colorado plateau and offshoots into other areas in 1948.”
The uranium boom was welcomed by economic boosters. Far from decrying Colorado’s role in the arms race with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, The Denver Post greeted the 1951 news that the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant would be built with a front-page headline: “There’s Good News Today: U.S. to Build $45 Million A-Plant Near Denver.”
The subsequent push for peaceful uses for atomic energy solidified the nuclear industry’s hero role, even to the political left. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, written by Tom Hayden for the Students for a Democratic Society, rhapsodized about nuclear power creating electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.”
By 1979, leftists had soured on technology in general and nuclear power in particular. Hayden’s then-wife, actress Jane Fonda, made the movie “The China Syndrome” polemicizing the perils of power plants. Later that year, life imitated art when a unit at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. No one was killed, but the incident crippled plans to expand nuclear power in the U.S., with the last domestic reactor coming on-line in 1997. Meanwhile, utility companies found it was cheaper to generate electricity from coal.
But as our melodrama unfolds in 2007, Al Gore is accepting a Nobel Peace Prize for warning about global warming. That means King Coal — whose throne floats on a vast cloud of carbon dioxide — has been recast from economic hero to environmental villain. It also means nuclear power, the only large-scale source of around-the-clock “baseload electricity” that does not emit CO, can claim to be part of the solution to our most pressing environmental problem.
Nuclear power already produces 20 percent of the electricity in the U.S. and several new plants are on the drawing board. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized subsidies for up to six new reactors. China, India and Japan are trying to reduce their dependence on coal by developing advanced reactor technology.
This worldwide upsurge in interest in nuclear power and a new process known as “in situ” extraction promises to give Colorado’s uranium industry a new lease on life. In the process, it’s generating new political conflicts: pitting business interests and advocates of a broad-based effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions against “soft-energy” purists who advocate only conservation coupled with wind or solar energy.
A hint of the upcoming political brawl came Oct. 14 when anti-nuclear activists gathered at the state Capitol to hear two Larimer County legislators, Democrats Randy Fischer and John Kefalas, announce a three-part legislative agenda to:
Lane Douglas, project manager for Powertech Uranium of Centennial, chief developer of the Larimer County project, vigorously disputed the two lawmakers’ contentions in an interview with The Denver Post.
The current law’s secrecy provisions cover prospecting only and are aimed at keeping competitors, not the public, in the dark, Douglas said. Once plans jell into an actual development proposal, they go before federal and state regulators for an exhausting series of public hearings.
That brings us to water — always a hot issue in Colorado.
As outlined by Douglas, Powertech’s plan would inject water enriched with oxygen and common baking soda to dissolve uranium deposits. The water would be pumped back up, cleaned and recycled back into the deposits to bring up more uranium.
Two percent less water would be injected than was initially withdrawn, so neighboring groundwater would migrate to the mine site, reducing the risk that the water/ore mix would seep to surrounding areas. Test wells would monitor operations.
If the in-situ process really can be used without harming potable groundwater sources, it has several advantages over traditional underground or strip-mining operations — including the fact that it uses far less energy to extract the uranium. That helps defuse a final argument of anti-nuclear diehards: That while nuclear power plants emit no CO themselves, fossil fuels are consumed in mining the uranium ore.
So uranium mining, having worn both white hat and black hat in our long Colorado melodrama, now returns to center stage — this time bedecked in a bright green bonnet.
