Elsewhere in the region, a different kind of underground shaft mining technique was developed in the 1960s and 70s to take out vertical columns of uranium ore extending for hundreds of feet and found at depths of 1,000 to 1,500 feet. Miners working from a spiral-shaped tunnel would dig out the ore and send it by elevator to the surface, where it would be trucked to a processing mill in Utah. More than a dozen commercially viable ore columns, called breccia pipes, were set to be mined when global uranium prices collapsed in the early 1980s, and most were mothballed.
Three decades later uranium prices began to recover and mining companies geared up to resume operations and look for more ore to mine. But a new generation of scientists and conservationists, citing more recent studies of how mining can contaminate water and soils, said the risk to the Grand Canyon watershed was too great without further study. So in 2009 then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar imposed a 20-year moratorium on new mining on nearly 1 million acres that are outside the national park but still lie within the Colorado River watershed. The final legal challenge was turned away in 2013.
But the moratorium did not cover mines already approved by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Each had undergone an environmental impact analysis that the industry says should be honored today, especially in light of the refinement of mining techniques. Unlike fracking, no high-pressure water hoses are used to dislodge the uranium ore and there is very little disturbance at the mine surface entrance.
Adversaries and others disagree, citing new scientific tools to measure the migration of radioactive materials through water and soils. The industry points to studies that show high background levels of uranium in some springs even before mining began while adversaries cite data raising the possibility that deep geologic fractures near some mine sites could lead to contamination of groundwater.
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