Topping the list of things I never thought I’d do was “Visit a uranium mine.” This week, I did.
I am not what you’d call outdoorsy. My sister is the family hiker, and she told me the night before the visit not to wear a dress to the mine (I wasn’t sure if mine vibes were casual or professional, but we eventually settled on blue jeans). Directions said the next day to turn right on a Forest Service road, and then, “follow the power lines.” Pinyon Plain ended up being easy to reach; I had phone service, there were campers a couple of miles from the mine, and no “radioactive” signs lined the site.
No, the site was just a rig, and a few buildings, enclosed in a fence. It was impressive beyond belief, that what comes out of that mine can power the entire state of Arizona for one to two years. The 17-acre site packs a serious punch. I even got to go down into the mine — it took a few minutes to pull on fun mining overalls, called “diggers” (good thing we nixed the dress), and a hard hat, then there I was, in a yellow elevator, traveling into the “orezone layer.”
Uranium mining has a terrible reputation. Most mining operations do. Bad mining accidents, though, are increasingly rare, and little is done to show just how low-impact uranium mining is. Send any group of miners 1,500 feet underground with thousands of pounds of equipment, and, to be sure, there are safety concerns. But mining practices have dramatically improved in the last few decades, which is why I, a non-outdoorsy, dress-loving, 22-year-old, who had no business being a thousand feet underground, could safely visit the site. The mine’s assistant superintendent, Matt Germansen, said something that’s stuck with me: “America should be proud of our mining.”
We should be. I thought I’d see mining as some perversion of nature, a practice that allows man to conquer and demolish creation. Far from it. Quite the opposite, actually, when you consider that uranium is indispensable to clean energy and America’s defense industry. The mine’s techniques are remarkable; the land is reclaimed, and much of the unused ore goes right back into the hole when the mine is finished being mined. It seems that Pinyon Plain has set gold standards for domestic mining, concerning both safety and environmental factors.
Alas, Joe Biden created a national monument this month, cutting off almost 1 million acres of uranium-rich Arizona land to new mining claims. The land has some of the best-known uranium deposits in the country, and, right now, the U.S. is wholly reliant on foreign countries for most of our uranium supply (Russia being one of them).
If you want know more about domestic mining, and Biden’s effort to thwart it, check out my coverage of the visit in the latest issue of National Review:
The U.S. spends $1 billion annually on Russian uranium. This in effect helps fund Russia’s war on Ukraine, a fact that should prompt Biden to ramp up domestic uranium operations. There’s already bipartisan support in the Senate for uranium production (mining and extracting naturally occurring uranium from ore) and enrichment (the process by which nuclear engineers separate uranium isotopes and make them into reactor fuel). And in 2022 the Department of Energy awarded Energy Fuels a contract to sell $18.5 million of uranium concentrates (the precursor of enrichment) to the U.S. government to establish a uranium reserve, which, according to Energy Fuels, is “intended to be a backup source of supply for domestic nuclear power plants in the event of a significant market disruption.” For example, war.