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Speculators are staking hundreds of new mining claims for uranium and lithium in the Four Corners area, hoping to cash in on America's transition away from fossil fuels.
Journalist Jonathan Thompson dug into the new mining claims in his newsletter, The Land Desk, and found more than 1,200 new claims filed in the last 12 months on national public land in Utah's San Juan and Grand Counties alone. They include uranium claims on thousands of acres adjacent to Canyonlands National Park and Bears Ears National Monument, including some areas that were proposed for protection but were not included in the final monument maps. Several of the claimants are connected to Energy Fuels Inc, which runs the White Mesa uranium mill.
Companies also filed claims in the last year on thousands of acres of land for potential lithium mining in the Lisbon Valley of San Juan County and near the Green River in Grand County.
As Thompson points out, mining claims alone are "not a reason to panic"—staking a mining claim is cheap, while getting a permit to open a mine is an extensive process. But the ease and speed at which the new claims were filed are more evidence that the General Mining Act of 1872, which allows anyone to stake claims without notice and not pay a dime in royalties to taxpayers, needs to be replaced with a modern mining law.
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There was one night on the Caldor where we had done a [firing operation] and then the main fire kind of blew up, so we were woken up in the middle of the night and had to go into immediate structure protection. We were in the thick of the smoke until probably 9 a.m. or so. And all of us definitely felt it the next day. We were pretty sick, like wheezy, raspy throats. I always feel exhausted the next day after long smoke exposure, and who knows what that can lead to in the long term.”
