Tusayan, Ariz. — Before my visit to Energy Fuels’ Pinyon Plain uranium mine this summer, I looked it up on a map, where it appeared as a dot in Arizona’s vast Kaibab National Forest. In person, it wasn’t much more than that. Aside from the rig itself, the operation is just a rock mound, a plastic-lined dirt pit, an office, and an engineering building. It wasn’t long after I arrived that I donned diggers and a hard hat and traveled 1,200 feet down into the earth. I walked through the mine’s tunnels, watching miners section off and drill into rock for the element needed to power nuclear reactors.
President Biden also made a mine-related visit to Arizona in August, but he needed no diggers or hard hat. The purpose of his trip was to declare a national monument, a designation that will ban new mining projects on almost 1 million acres of uranium-rich land. Pinyon Plain will continue to operate under the company’s valid existing rights, but the many other known uranium deposits in the area are now off-limits.
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