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Sleepy Nunn, Colorado, with its watertower slogan “Watch Nunn Grow.” Opponents of uranium mining planned for the area suggest a new slogan, “Watch Nunn Glow.” -
Robin Davis on the northern Colorado property she and her husband bought with a plan to board horses and open a riding school. Now the couple worries that uranium mining will cover their land with wells and pipelines and contaminate their water -
Exploratory drilling near Nunn, Colorado, where Powertech wants to mine for uranium
Updated Sept. 28, 2007
NUNN, COLORADO – Early last year, Robin and Jay Davis bought 80 acres of rolling prairie in north-central Colorado. As is often the case in Western states, the “split estate” property included only the surface rights, not the rights to any minerals that might lie beneath the land. So before they signed the deal, the couple carefully researched potential mineral development. “We looked into oil, gas and coal,” Robin Davis says. “Even diamonds.” Deciding that the risk was negligible, they bought the land, planning to board horses and open a riding school.
Then, last fall, a Canadian-owned energy company informed the Davises and their neighbors that it wanted to extract not coal or natural gas, but uranium from beneath their property. “When we got a letter about it, we thought it was a joke,” Robin Davis says. “Uranium mining? Here? Yeah, right.”
But Powertech (USA) Inc. is serious. The company recently bought 5,760 acres of mineral rights near the high-tech mecca of Fort Collins. Powertech hopes to extract about 8 million pounds of uranium, worth nearly $700 million at current market prices, mostly through in-situ recovery, which involves injecting a solution underground to dissolve uranium.
In-situ uranium projects are on tap for other places in the West as well, including New Mexico, and Powertech is exploring for uranium in South Dakota and Wyoming. But in many ways, Powertech’s Colorado proposal is different. The West’s uranium mining has historically taken place in sparsely settled deserts, not near booming urban centers. Affected residents have been mostly poor and rural, and opposition has often been slow to develop. About 300,000 people live within 30 miles of Powertech’s proposed operations; Weld County, in which the project is located, is one of the 50 fastest-growing counties in the nation. Universities and computer companies in Fort Collins and nearby Greeley have attracted well-educated academics and scientists, some of whom own homes and land near the project site, and they’ve organized a robust grassroots resistance.
Their biggest fear? Contamination of the area’s groundwater. Powertech plans to drill deep into an aquifer that supplies local homes and farms. In-situ processing, say critics, could do more than just ravage the surface of the land: It could permanently taint groundwater with heavy metals and radioactivity. “We can live without a lot of things,” says Robin Davis, “but water is not one of them.”
The countryside around Powertech’s planned operation is mostly shortgrass prairie, dotted with sagebrush and golden blooms of rabbitbrush. Swainson’s hawks soar overhead; meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds perch on fenceposts. A few old farmhouses stand amid corn and wheat fields, but most of the homes are new, tidy and moderately sized, on 40- to 80-acre plots. The occasional fencerow, house or pickup sports a bright yellow sign with a black radiation symbol and the words “No Uranium Mining in Colorado. www.nunnglow.com.” (The closest town is the farming hamlet of Nunn, whose water tower displays the slogan “Watch Nunn Grow.” Opponents have suggested changing the last word to “Glow.”)
Powertech’s project would be the first use of in-situ extraction techniques in Colorado, beyond a few tests in the 1970s, and the state is scrambling to get up to speed before Powertech submits permit applications in late 2008.
The company is also considering some open-pit mining, but the geology of the Nunn area is mostly suited to in-situ recovery. Many of the uranium ore deposits lie beneath the water table in sandstone and are confined above and below by impermeable mudstone. Workers would drill a grid of wells 50 to 150 feet apart and pipe a sodium bicarbonate solution into the underground ore. The alkaline solution dissolves the uranium, and is then pumped to the surface and piped to a mobile processing facility. The pure uranium adheres to resin beads, which are trucked to a mill. Then the uranium is stripped off and processed into “yellowcake,” the raw material for the fuel rods used in nuclear power plants.
In groundwater, the sodium bicarbonate solution dissolves not only uranium, but also heavy metals such as molybdenum and selenium. Uranium can cause kidney problems and increase cancer risk. In minute doses, molybdenum and selenium are essential nutrients. In higher amounts, molybdenum can cause joint pain and liver dysfunction in humans and birth defects in animals. Selenium can damage the nervous system, and in livestock it can cause reproductive failure and “blind staggers,” marked by impaired vision, aimless wandering and even paralysis.
Although in-situ recovery is more economical and safer than traditional open-pit mining, it “tend(s) to contaminate the groundwater,” according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report. That’s why the government will not permit in-situ projects in drinking water aquifers. Powertech plans to drill into the Laramie-Fox Hills aquifer, which supplies local drinking and irrigation water. The company says that the portions of the Laramie-Fox Hills aquifer it wants to use are already unsafe for drinking due to high mineral levels. It plans to seek exemptions from the Environmental Protection Agency; the project can’t proceed unless the agency officially declares those parts of the aquifer undrinkable.
Even if Powertech gets exemptions, it still must prove that its operations won’t cause lasting harm to any groundwater, drinkable or not. But that may not be easy: No in-situ uranium project has ever succeeded in restoring the surrounding groundwater to its original baseline condition. Last fall, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times examined 32 permits for south Texas in-situ projects, most closed in the ’80s and ’90s, and reported that none were able to meet all of the groundwater restoration goals in their original permits. Some met the specification for one mineral but found ten- and twenty-fold increases in others.
In Wyoming and Nebraska, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission relaxed some restoration goals for in-situ well fields after the operations could not meet all of the water-quality standards specified in the original permits. “Those (lower) standards are still protective of human health and the environment,” says William von Till, chief of the Uranium Recovery Licensing Branch. And, he adds, the relaxed standards applied only to the exempted portions of the aquifers. The drinkable water outside those areas remained safe: “We are not aware of any instance where in-situ uranium milling has impacted a water well user.”
The history of in-situ recovery, though, provides many examples of accidents and unexpected results: pump failures, breaks in underground pipes, wastewater pond failures, water movement within aquifers. “There are lots of problems associated with any well operation that could breach the integrity of an aquifer and spread contamination,” says Eric Eidsness, a Reagan-era appointee to the EPA who was assistant administrator for water programs. “It just happens.”
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Lane Douglas, project manager for Powertech, is a tall blond man who tops his business attire with a white cowboy hat. As he wheels his new four-wheel-drive pickup down a dusty ranch road near Nunn, he says that the company is going out of its way to be a good neighbor. Although Powertech is required by law to compensate surface owners for using their land, it’s gone above and beyond the requirements – buying nearly 700 acres of land outright from owners who weren’t interested in negotiating surface agreements and offering a percentage of royalties to other landowners. In-situ operations will disturb the surface of a given area for only about three years, says Douglas; afterwards, the land will be recontoured and reseeded with native grasses. The project will create 100 well-paid jobs for 15 years, plus trickle-down benefits. The company estimates it will pay about $4.5 million per year in state and local taxes.
Those assurances don’t cut much ice with Robin Davis and other critics of the project. A former computer programmer with warm blue eyes and a brown ponytail, Davis stands in her grass-tufted pasture on a sunny August morning amid grazing pintos, bays and grays. She wasn’t concerned at first, she says; then she started researching the potential effects of in-situ recovery. Alarmed, she alerted her neighbors and helped launch Coloradoans Against Resource Destruction, one of three groups opposing the project.
CARD has set up a Web site, organized community meetings, and met with local legislators. At an Aug. 22 meeting in the town of Ault, south of Nunn, about 200 people packed the local VFW hall to learn how uranium recovery might affect their land and water. Families with squirming youngsters shared the long tables with senior citizens. A slim woman in yoga pants sat near a weather-beaten farmer wearing a “Crystal Beet Seed” cap. For nearly two hours, they listened to CARD members, many of them Ph.D.s or engineers, as they showed Powerpoint slides and described what they’d learned about uranium mining and the risks of radiation and selenium. After the meeting, small knots of people gathered in the hall and out on the sidewalk, commiserating about potential real estate buyers apparently scared off by the uranium plans, exchanging information, discussing possible next steps.
In the future, both citizens and grassroots groups may get less of a say about some uranium projects. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to develop a generic environmental impact statement for in-situ uranium processing. This blanket analysis would address common issues, such as public health, waste management, and air, water and soil quality. For individual projects, the NRC would determine if its analysis of, say, water quality, applied to that site; if so, it would use the analysis without further site-specific study. The agency is currently deciding if it will allow public comment on every in-situ project it oversees. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., has spoken out against the NRC’s plan, as has New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, D. No community considers its concerns about uranium proposals to be generic, says Richardson.
Indeed, Jean and Randy Hediger’s concerns are quite specific. They grow organic wheat and barley on 2,400 acres near Nunn and worry that heavy metals released into groundwater might leach into their soil and their crops. Uranium mining is just one more blow to the area’s agriculture, says Jean Hediger. As more and more farmers sell out, she says, “the farms are mostly gone. Now it’s people with their dreams, their ranchettes and 4-H.” And ironically, it’s those newcomers who have become the area’s defenders. “They’re the blessing of the ag community,” she says. “These smart, organized people are going to save us.”
The author is HCN‘s news editor.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Underground movement.
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