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On a blustery day in mid-May, a herd of cattle grazed against the snow-dusted slopes of the La Sal Mountains — a classic Western landscape, except for the splintered remains of all the juniper and piñon trees that had been attacked and viciously shredded by a hydromower. Nearby, scars slashed through the trees in oddly straight lines on a forested red-sandstone ridge, and rusty pipes jutted out of the earth. Next to a pumpjack, a tattered windsock fluttered from atop a sign reading WARNING POISON GAS KEEP OUT, reminding passersby that if the wind was right, deadly hydrogen sulfide gas might be headed their way.
I was in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah, long a sacrifice zone for extractive industries like mining, including copper, oil and gas, uranium, and, most recently, lithium. It was here that Charlie Steen struck the Mi Vida uranium deposit in the early 1950s, which made him rich and sparked a region-wide prospecting boom that put Moab on the map. Seventy years later, abandoned mine mine openings, or adits, still peer darkly out from red-rock cliffs, silent about the radioactive dangers they hold. A reclaimed uranium mill continues to contaminate groundwater, and a massive open-pit copper mine is hoping to expand. Meanwhile, Utah regulators just sued a natural gas plant for violating the air quality.
And now the Lisbon Valley is on the sacrificial altar again, this time in the name of the Trump administration’s purported “energy emergency.” In April, the Interior Department implemented “emergency permitting procedures” for oil and gas, uranium, coal, biofuels and critical mineral projects on federal lands, squeezing the projects’ entire environmental review, a process that can often take years, down to 28 days or less. And on May 23, the Bureau of Land Management’s Monticello Field Office approved the operating plan for the proposed Velvet-Wood uranium mine after spending just 11 days on its environmental assessment, working at a speed that effectively precluded public input, tribal consultation and any meaningful analysis of the project’s potential impacts or dangers.
BLM approved the operating plan for the uranium mine after spending just 11 days on its environmental assessment.
The Velvet Mine was conceived in the early 1970s, when Gulf Minerals Corporation first drilled into the sandstone formation, which back then was dotted only by juniper, piñon, cactus and sagebrush. The mine then passed through several owners, who sporadically worked on developing it until the late 1980s, when it went belly-up due to low uranium prices.
In 2015, the Canada-based Anfield Energy Corporation acquired the long-defunct mine along with the neighboring undeveloped Wood mining claims. When uranium prices began rising in the early 2020s, Anfield proposed combining those two assets into a larger operation called the Velvet-Wood Mine, which would take up over 2,000 acres.
Anfield first submitted its proposed operating plan in April 2024. The BLM initially found that both the plan and a follow-up application were deficient, and the mine’s progress was halted. But under President Trump’s expedited permitting, Anfield saw an opportunity to slice through the bureaucratic undergrowth.
“The expedited mining project review represents exactly the kind of decisive action we need to secure our energy future,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a written statement. He further justified the accelerated review by noting that the proposed underground mine would “result in only three acres of new surface disturbance.”
Surface disturbance, however, is only a sliver of an underground mine’s entire impact. The shafts, drifts and tunnels in a mine hijack the local hydrology, pulling groundwater into the mine’s drifts and tunnels, where it can pick up naturally occurring heavy metals and radioactive elements before it flows out of the adit and into the environment. An estimated 50 million gallons of water has built up inside the mine workings over the last four decades. Anfield’s operating plan notes that the accumulated water is “of marginal quality with elevated concentrations of dissolved solids and sulfate and elevated radionuclide activity levels.”
Utah regulators last year tentatively permitted the Velvet-Wood Mine to discharge up to 500,000 gallons of radium, uranium and zinc-tainted water into an unnamed wash each day after running it through a treatment plant. That wash empties into Big Indian Wash, which leads to Hatch Wash and Kane Springs Creek, which then runs into the Colorado River downstream from Moab. As Sarah Fields of the Moab-based nonprofit Uranium Watch points out, state regulators have not greenlighted Anfield’s water treatment plant plans, even though the state’s water discharge permit is contingent on the facility’s approval. Fields — who has been watchdogging the uranium industry for years — noted several other deficiencies in Anfield’s operating plan. She also debunked the notion that there was any sort of uranium supply shortage or other emergency that would necessitate such expedited production.
So, why the rush? Even with BLM approval, Anfield can’t move forward until it completes state permitting, which could take months. Anfield is also waiting for the state to renew its license to restart its Shootaring mill, which has been idle since 1982. Anfield hopes to process the Velvet-Wood’s ore there, though that would require trucking it about 200 miles, either by going through Moab and Hanksville, or through Monticello, Blanding and Bears Ears National Monument — all of which are still dealing with the Cold War-era uranium industry’s toxic legacy.
The National Environmental Policy Act requires the BLM to scrutinize the project’s various impacts, economic and otherwise, and to consider input from tribal nations with ties to the land and from citizens concerned about their public lands and waters. The review is supposed to identify and analyze any cultural and ecological resources that could be damaged, as well as to examine the project’s economic feasibility and consider less harmful alternative paths to development. The agency did not do all this in 11 days, though because, as everyone involved must have known, that would have been impossible. The entire exercise violates one of the nation’s foundational environmental laws and will perpetuate the Lisbon Valley’s status as a sacrifice zone.
If you look closely at a map, you’ll see that the Lisbon Valley is located close to the Utah-Colorado border, not far from where the otherwise straight line makes an odd little dogleg. Back in 1878, a surveyor named Rollin Reeves was tasked with marking out that border. He managed to adhere to a straight line until he reached the lower end of the Lisbon Valley, at which point he encountered “one long range of cañon after cañon, and as general rough and wild a view as we have seen since we left the San Juan River.”
The landscape was so rugged that he compared it to Hades. In fact, it was so rugged it forced him to veer off course with his survey, creating that little dogleg in the boundary line. The Lisbon Valley isn’t nearly as remote and wild these days, but despite decades of abuse, it’s still a beautiful and fascinating place, moderately insulated from all the Moab hubbub just up the road. Some of the old mining scars are healing, and an intrepid wanderer can still find solitude in a relatively unspoiled canyon and lean up against an ancient, weathered juniper tree to soak up its wisdom. Probably not for long. If all goes as planned, the machinery will soon be revving up.
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