Colorado residents fight uranium mine

Jean Hediger can stand at the edge of her organic wheat farm and look west to the Rockies, east toward this speck-in-the-road town and straight ahead into what she sees as her worst nightmare.

A Canadian company’s plans to establish a uranium mine just across the two-lane county road from Hediger’s farm has triggered a bitter tug-of-war with residents of this fast-growing region about 70 miles north of Denver who fear the risk of contaminated water and other health problems.
“How do you farm organically next to a uranium mine?” Hediger asks. “It’s pretty darned scary, isn’t it?”

Powertech Uranium Corp. Chief Executive Officer Richard Clement insists the firm’s closed-system mining process, in which a solution of oxygen and sodium bicarbonate is injected to recover the uranium, is safe.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there about nuclear, about uranium, about radiation, about the effects of mining,” he said. “This is probably one of the most benign methods of mining that you’re ever going to encounter.”

Similar confrontations are occurring in the West, Nebraska and even Virginia as uranium companies try to meet a voracious global demand for new nuclear power plants and capitalize on rising prices _ hovering around $90 per pound to $100 per pound, from a low of about $7 just five years ago.

Newsweek