Back in 2017, Donald Trump did one of the more admirable, anti-federalist acts of any president in recent memory when he slashed the size of the Bears Ears and National Staircase Escalante national monuments, returning the land to the control of the states. It was one of the few of Trump’s sweeping policies that Joe Biden didn’t attempt to reverse via executive orders upon taking office. (He waited until later in the year to reverse and expand the monuments beyond their original size.) But now Biden is once again looking at going in the opposite direction as he considers a plan to create what would be the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona. The proposed Native American monument would cover more than one million acres of land. While the indigenous people of the region should certainly have a voice in this debate, the creation of this monument would be disastrous for the country’s energy grid in the future. Those lands contain the richest deposits of uranium in our country and ongoing mining operations that could power many new nuclear reactors for the coming century or more. But if the land is designated as a national monument, all mining operations aside from the single existing uranium mine in the region will be banned. (National Review)

At the behest of environmental groups, President Biden is considering cutting off America’s best uranium resources even as his administration pushes to do away with fossil fuels.

Government officials and stakeholders met last week to discuss the creation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument, which would prohibit resource development on 1.1 million acres of uranium-rich land nestled between the Pinyon Plain Mine and the Grand Canyon.

“This land contains some of the most valuable uranium deposits in the United States,” said Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development for uranium producer Energy Fuels Resources. “Over the last, probably, 45 years, the area has extracted uranium that would provide fuel for 50 reactor years. These are the highest grade uranium deposits in the United States. For every tonne of ore you pull out, this rock has more uranium than any other deposits in the United States.”

The tribes are warning of risks to local natural resources in and around the Grand Canyon, particularly to groundwater. But the process being used to mine the uranium is known as breccia-pipe mining. This is basically a method of locating underground voids that have been filled by falling rocks from the surrounding natural structures and extracting those rocks. Disruptions on the surface are minimal and previous geological surveys of breccia-pipe mining sites have found no evidence of groundwater contamination.

The environmental activists supporting the creation of this monument are doing so because they still oppose new nuclear power development. They’re still pushing fears of some sort of “China Syndrome” event when, in reality, nuclear power generation in the United States has been remarkably safe. It’s also one of the few types of power generation that produces absolutely no carbon emissions, so you would think that a group of climate alarmists and environmentalists would be in favor of it.

Of course, Joe Biden is doubtless being pushed by his handlers to take this action to support the supposed environmentalists because we’re talking about uranium. If that land contained loads of lithium, you can rest assured that the tribes would be told to go pack sand, just as they were in Nevada. (Although the Bureau of Land Management did later backtrack on a different lithium mine.)

There are foreign policy issues at play in this debate as well. We currently import a significant portion of the uranium we use from Russia and Kazakhstan. Is that really any smarter than being reliant on China for our technological needs? And if we’re supposedly doing this in the best interests of the environment, Russia imposes far fewer environmental restrictions than we do and their mining operations are far messier.

It just seems as if there should be some sort of compromise available. Perhaps some reasonable restrictions on the size and number of mines could be imposed. Or the size of the monument could be significantly pared down from the 1.1 million acres currently under discussion. Biden only has the authority to do this under the Antiquities Act of 1906 which states that monuments must be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” This proposal once again seems like a gross overreach of those restrictions.