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| Economy |
| Interior to halt uranium mining at Grand Canyon |
| 2009-07-20 |
| Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will announce Monday that his department is temporarily barring the filing of new uranium mining claims on about 1 million acres near the Grand Canyon, an Obama administration official said. The land is being "segregated" for two years so that the department can study whether it should be permanently withdrawn from mining activity, said the official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter. It's not the US is short on energy production or anything. The announcement comes ahead of Tuesday's congressional hearing on a bill to set aside more than 1 million acres of federal lands north and south of the canyon. The bill's sponsor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, and environmental groups had been looking to Salazar for temporary protections at the Grand Canyon while the legislation is pending. Perhaps they will change their minds if a nuclear powered private jets were developed to ferry in luxury high government officials and their rich sponsors around. The Interior Department under President George W. Bush was unresponsive to efforts to ban new uranium mining claims. The House Natural Resources Committee invoked a little-used rule to stop any new claims for up to three years, but Interior officials refused to recognize the action and continued to authorize additional mining claims. A contract is a binding document, A coalition of environmental groups sued, but not to the left. and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management later rescinded Congress' right to withdraw lands from mining and other activities in emergencies. What's the emergency, other than you've bankrupted the world's richest nation by forcing the import of the energy it uses from those who want to kill or enslave us? Since then, environmentalists and Grijalva have been hanging their hopes on Salazar for temporary protections. Ken "The US can't tap its single largest source of energy, shale" Salazar. Any companion bill to Grijalva's in the Senate is unlikely to come from Arizona's two U.S. senators. Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl told Grijalva in a letter last month that adequate protections already exist. Let the Enviromental Luddites eat yellowcake. |
| Posted by:ed |
| #3 If we were really serious about stretching Uranium fuel supply beyond the near future we would be building breeder reactors. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-07-20 21:52 |
| #2 I'm pretty sure we're nowhere near Peak Uranium, so perhaps aside from the financial idiocy of withdrawing valuable resources from auction in the face of trillion-dollar-plus deficits, this isn't the most important of issues. |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2009-07-20 13:26 |
| #1 Well, we are not going to make any nuclear reactors, sell over seas, and we sure as heck are not going to renew our nuclear force so why not? |
| Posted by: Kelly 2009-07-20 13:06 |