A pair of bills introduced in the Colorado legislature that would impose new restrictions on mining in Colorado — especially uranium mining — has aroused concern among hard-rock miners that they may be forced to curtail existing operations.
One bill would essentially require mining companies, before they started their operations, to prove they could leave the groundwater they would use in the process as clean as they found it. Another would affirm local governments’ power to regulate water quality and health standards — even to the point of banning certain types of mining entirely, as Summit County did by forbidding cyanide heap-leach mining.
The water quality bill seems reasonable, as long as the standards aren’t raised so high that they effectively forbid mining entirely. The county powers bill is more complex because it would supplant a case now pending in the Colorado Supreme Court to determine whether state regulations on such issues preempt local regulatory powers.
One of the quartet of northern Colorado Democrats sponsoring the bills, Rep. Randy Fischer of Fort Collins, said at a news conference Wednesday, “This is not an effort to stop uranium mining in Colorado. It’s an effort to put protections in place before it gets started.”
We’d like to believe Fischer. The problem is that when he and Rep. John Kefalas announced this very proposal on the west steps of the Capitol last October, they were surrounded by hard-line anti-nuclear activists waving angry signs demanding: “Ban uranium mining in Colorado.”
Psychologists call such mixed messages “cognitive dissonance.”
True, Fischer and Kefalas may not echo the passions of some of their supporters. But if they didn’t want to give the impression that their true goal is to ban uranium mining, they should have worked with responsible voices from the hard-rock mining industry before drafting their legislation. Instead, they worked mostly with anti-mining forces.
That closed-door process was different from the collaborative effort that rewrote the Mined Land Reclamation Act in 1993 after the Summitville disaster, said Stuart Sanderson, president of the Colorado Mining Association.
“Then, everyone got a seat at the table. Together we produced a bill that environmentalists, industry and the state could agree was worthwhile,” Sanderson said.
The Post favors reasonable regulations on mining but not a total ban. Uranium mining is particularly important today because nuclear power is the only reliable source of base-load electrical energy that doesn’t release the greenhouse gases now blamed for global warming.
Before the legislators act on the new mining regulation bills, the lawmakers must ensure they receive the full range of public input necessary to balance local concerns with America’s need for clean domestic energy.
