Open Pit Uranium Mine in New Mexico!
Comment: A great article! People of Virginia, read the article because the Boom to Burst is familiar with the people of New Mexico, they are still living with the cancers and deaths from the last uranium boom. Our government has not clean up the polluting mess of past mines and milling. NM is allowing foreign countries to take their uranium, ruin their people lives for the dollar. Demand VA to ban uranium mining and milling!
Monday, January 11, 2010
By Eric Jantz
New Mexico Environmental Law Center
For several years, the nuclear and uranium mining industry have been hyping a new uranium boom in New Mexico and a nuclear "renaissance" nationwide.
The promises have been impressive — limitless carbon-free electricity from nuclear power, tens of thousands of jobs in the uranium mines for New Mexicans, and billions, that's right, with a "b," in revenues for New Mexico government.
Unfortunately, some New Mexico legislators have embraced the industry's slick public relations campaign and propagated its misinformation.
The more realistic assessment of New Mexico's fiscal fortunes with uranium mining is significantly more modest.
A recent economic analysis by Dr. Thomas Power, former economics department chair at the University of Montana and highly regarded resource economist, forecasts roughly 3,000 jobs and several million in revenues to the state from renewed uranium mining over 20 to 30 years.
While this might appear to benefit the state, these modest economic benefits pale in comparison to the anticipated costs to the public in the form of groundwater contamination, radioactive air pollution and disease.
Despite the well worn assurances from the uranium mining industry that its polluting days are behind it, contemporary uranium mining's environmental and public health record are as shameful as its historic record.
Furthermore, most of the proposed uranium mining projects in New Mexico are purely speculative.
Only one company of the many who have either submitted mine permit applications or exploration applications is sufficiently capitalized to actually build a mine. And that company only has enough capital because it has partnered with a Japanese multinational corporation, presumably to ship its uranium to overseas markets.
Even in a best-case scenario for industry, uranium mining wouldn't begin for five to seven years. This optimistic timeline would do absolutely nothing for New Mexico's current fiscal woes, which need attention immediately.
In the unlikely event the predicted boom comes to pass, it will be short lived.
Uranium is a finite resource, and host communities will be thrust headlong into the cruel cycle of boom and bust economies.
While those communities may see some economic benefit in the short term, soon enough the uranium mining companies will pack up and leave, leaving communities with the environmental and public health bill — and broke to boot.
The people in these communities saw it the last time the uranium market went bust, and they'll see it again.
So what's a state legislator to do?
To start, maybe state legislators from uranium impacted communities should start listening to their constituents and stop shilling for out-of-state mining companies.
People in the northwestern part of the state are desperate for long-term, clean, and sustainable economic development. A good start would be to clean up the widespread contamination caused by the last uranium boom.
Thousands of jobs would be created by assessing the entire extent of contamination and remediating the billions of gallons of surface and groundwater and millions of acres of land contaminated by past uranium mining.
Elected officials could also work with communities to develop locally generated and distributed renewable electricity, which would bring green jobs and a clean, affordable energy source to run the local economy.
This would not only benefit communities now, it would be a long-term hedge against rising fossil fuel energy prices. Local energy could in turn run local sustainable agriculture, eco-tourism and other green businesses.
The last uranium "boom" sent shockwaves through the state that are still being felt years after the last pound of uranium was taken from the ground.
There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to condemn communities still struggling under the burden of the last boom and bust to another cycle of woe.
Eric Jantz is an attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/11223347977opinionguestcolumns01-11-10.htm
