Turkey top envoy goes to Niger in bid to secure uranium supplies
The trip comes after Niger’s military government withdrew mining rights from Canadian and French companies to develop uranium deposits.
AP reports that the Obama administration is ignoring intense lobbying from the mining industry and political opponents on the right and will formally ban new uranium mining claims on 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon on Monday.
An interim ban imposed in 2009 is set to expire, and Interior Department officials will institute a new 20-year ban on uranium mining due to risks to the environment, including the potential for water pollution and harm to wildlife, desert vegetation and air quality. Around 3,000 existing claims will not be affected.
AP and The Guardian reports interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to announce the ban at a film screening at the National Geographic Society in the US capital:
AP: Senator John McCain and other lawmakers from Arizona and Utah sent a letter last year to Salazar claiming any new ban would create a “de facto wilderness” zone in a region that “conservationists previously agreed would remain accessible to the mining industry.”
McCain’s group has introduced a bill to enshrine what he called a “historic agreement” in 1984 “that designated parts of the Arizona Strip as wilderness and restored other lands to reasonable and safe uranium mining uses.”
The Guardian: In the final years of the George Bush presidency, when uranium prices were rising worldwide, mining companies filed thousands of new claims in northern Arizona, on lands near the Grand Canyon. They also proposed reopening old mines adjacent to the canyon.
