After six years, a small but meaningful legal victory halts a plan to massively expand Daneros uranium mine, near Bears Ears National Monument.
On my first day at the Grand Canyon Trust seven years ago, I was greeted with a warm welcome, hot coffee, and a stack of papers on my desk. Those papers concerned a massive expansion of the Daneros uranium mine, approved just days earlier.
The Daneros Mine is situated on national public lands in a side canyon perched upstream of the eastern reaches of Lake Powell, about three miles from Bears Ears National Monument. It’s about eight miles from Natural Bridges National Monument and a dozen or so miles from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which surrounds the Colorado River as it begins to form Lake Powell.
Millions of visitors each year enjoy these enormous expanses of wildlands of spectacular beauty and cultural significance.
100,000 tons of uranium ore trucked to the White Mesa Mill
The Daneros Mine was built in 2009 on public lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), mostly atop decades-old uranium-mine workings.
Over the next three years, about 100,000 tons of uranium ore were hauled out from the underground mine and trucked about 60 miles east to the only operating uranium mill in the country, the White Mesa Mill.
But in late 2012, after uranium prices plummeted, the mine, which by then had been purchased by Energy Fuels Resources, which also owns the White Mesa Mill, was idled.
A plan to massively expand the Daneros Mine
Later the next year, Energy Fuels sought to modify the plan of operations for Daneros to vastly expand the mine. The company aimed to extend the mine’s life nearly threefold, to increase how much uranium ore could be mined fivefold, and expand the mine’s footprint tenfold.
Half a million tons of uranium ore recovered at the mine would be trucked to the White Mesa Mill, following a winding dirt road for a dozen miles and wending another 50-some miles on a remote two-lane highway through Bears Ears National Monument, skirting the south side of Natural Bridges National Monument.
As many as 15 haul trucks would go back and forth each day.
Filing a legal appeal
When the BLM published a draft environmental assessment for the Daneros Mine expansion — an environmental review that is supposed to examine how expanding the mine would affect the environment — the Grand Canyon Trust and our partners submitted comments explaining the many ways the proposed project and the BLM’s analysis of its environmental impacts failed to follow the law.
Unfortunately, the BLM pushed forward anyway, approving the mine expansion in 2018. Several months later, the Trust, along with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, filed an administrative lawsuit before the Interior Board of Land Appeals.
We argued that the BLM’s approval of the mine expansion ran afoul of the law.
The risk of groundwater contamination at Daneros Mine
Six years passed. In that time, the mine was bought and sold a couple times, and is currently owned by IsoEnergy, a Canadian uranium company.
Then, late last year, the Interior Board of Land Appeals held that the BLM’s approval of the mine expansion violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The Trust had argued that the BLM failed to adequately analyze whether the mine’s environmental monitoring plan was sufficient to detect potential groundwater infiltration into the underground mine workings.
This is a concern because when groundwater seeps into a uranium mine shaft, it creates a risk of contamination.
The BLM and the Utah Department of Natural Resources had previously admitted that mining activity at Daneros, like explosive blasting, could create underground fissures that form pathways for groundwater to flow from an upper aquifer into the mine.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals agreed with us, and it ruled in our favor.
Mining expansion plan halted
But the board deferred ordering a remedy, instead asking the BLM, the mine’s owner, and the Trust to submit another round of legal briefs.
In May, the Board issued its final order, setting aside the BLM’s approval of the mine’s monitoring plan. The BLM must now go back and ensure that the monitoring plan will provide for early detection of groundwater that could infiltrate into the mine.
Nothing can happen under the mine expansion proposal until the BLM complies with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act’s requirement to prevent “unnecessary or undue degradation” of our public lands.
A temporary reprieve
While this is a win for national public lands and the rule of law, it does not permanently put a stop to IsoEnergy’s plans at Daneros. But the Trust will remain vigilant to ensure that any new decision from the BLM to approve the monitoring plan follows the law.
