In the Grand Canyon, uranium mining threatens a tribe’s survival.
The mining company plans to drill down 1,475ft to extract high-grade uranium ore, then truck it 250 miles by road to their processing mill in Utah.
That kind of commercialization will never happen here, we are the guardians of the Grand Canyon,” said Tilousi.
In 2012 the Obama administration banned new uranium claims around the Grand Canyon watershed for 20 years.
She is appalled that the Forest Service also gave Canyon Mine a permit and fears contamination not just in the water but via dust and the ore being trucked overland.
If the pond level gets too close to the brim to satisfy environmental regulations, as it has a number of times since the shaft filled with water at the end of the winter, the company evaporates some off and trucks the rest to its uranium processing mill.
Recent testing has shown that the contaminated pond water measures at 130 parts per billion, or a little over four times the environmental protection agency’s limits for safe drinking water of 30 parts per billion of dissolved uranium.
It had expected to be extracting ore by now, but operational delays mean that’s unlikely to happen before late 2017, the company has said.
“All it would take to harm the Havasupai’s sole source of drinking water is contamination from the mine leaking into the aquifer,” he said.
It may not show up for years, but the risk remains, even decades after the mine closes.” The Havasupai, the Grand Canyon Trust and other environmental groups sued the Forest Service in 2013 for relying on old environmental studies when issuing Energy Fuels with its current permit, and for threatening a cultural site.