Mining ban: Can’t touch uranium near the Grand Canyon
The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to block the development of low-cost coal and oil reserves in this country -- and even in Canada.
Bad enough that the administration continues to block the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas, a job-intensive, private project that has passed environmental review and would reduce our dependence on Mideast oil.
Against this background, if we are to avoid crippling the U.S. economy entirely, it's more urgent than ever that known high-grade uranium deposits be developed to facilitate new nuclear power plants, responsibly but quickly.
So the Obama administration announced Monday it's going to ban new mining claims on a million acres "near" the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves -- for 20 years.
Spokesmen for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society were ecstatic. "America's treasured Grand Canyon and the watersheds that support it have won a major victory today," the groups announced in a joint news release.
No great loss, they assure us: Mining would have created only a few hundred jobs, and, "Worse, virtually all the uranium-mining corporations seeking to mine around Grand Canyon are foreign owned, including several based in Canada."
Wow. Blame Canada? How progressive. Let's hope the green extremists typed out their news release on an American-made computer and keyboard, not some dastardly device slapped together in Korea or Taiwan.
More to the point, have any of these folks looked at a map of the Grand Canyon National Park lately? This sprawling preserve already creates a buffer zone at least four to 15 miles in depth around the river and its canyon. Add the adjacent Hualapai, Havasupai and Navajo Indian reservations, and the belt of protected lands not generally open to new mining claims can be as much as 50 miles across, already.
It can't be an accident that the phrasings of the proponents of all this "protection" create the impression that polluters seek to dredge the walls and floor of the canyon itself.
Yes, mining operations in earlier days could be careless -- though naturally occurring, unrefined uranium ore is a very different thing from enriched fuel pellets. But what method of energy generation and transmission do these environmental obstructionists favor, other than hamsters on treadmills or elves in hollow trees?
No one is proposing mining inside the park. And if any mine anywhere would poison the canyon, why did Republican members of Arizona's congressional delegation lambast the temporary mining bans imposed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2009 and again last year, complaining that a permanent ban on the filing of new mining claims would eliminate hundreds of Arizona jobs and unravel decades of agreements on responsible resource development?
