A few miles south of the Grand Canyon, thousands of tons of uranium ore, reddish-gray, blue and radioactive, are piled up high in a clearing in the forest. They’ve been there for months, stranded by a standoff between the mining company that dug them deep out of the ground, Energy Fuels Inc., and the leader of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren.
Back in the summer, Energy Fuels had triggered an uproar when it loaded some of the ore onto a truck, slapped a “radioactive” sign over the taillights and drove it through the heart of Navajo territory. Radioactive is an alarming word anywhere, but here in Navajo country, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that powered America’s nuclear arms race with the USSR and spewed toxic waste into the land, it causes terror. Those fears have only grown the past couple years as nuclear power came back in vogue and sparked a uranium rush in mining camps all across the Southwest. So when the news made it to Nygren that morning, he was furious. No one had sought his consent for the shipment. He quickly ordered dozens of police officers to throw on their sirens, fan out and intercept the truck. The dragnet turned up nothing in the end — the truck snuck through — but the hard-line response delivered a warning, amplified over social media and ratified days later by the governor of Arizona, to the miners: Stay out of Navajo country. Cut off from the lone processing mill in the US — all the main routes cut through Navajo territory — executives at Energy Fuels stockpiled it by the entrance of the mine. When the heaps of crushed rock grew too sprawling, they pulled the miners out of the tunnels and turned the drilling machines off. The standoff represents the ugly side of the world’s sudden re-embrace of nuclear power. Yes, there’s the promise of a steady stream of clean energy to fuel the AI boom, fight climate change and, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, replace Russian oil and gas. But there’s also the fear — both around the nuclear reactor sites popping up across the world and in the communities surrounding mining operations in Australia, Kyrgyzstan and Navajo Nation, where the locals are still documenting cancer cases decades after the last of the Cold War-era outfits shut down. It’s like the backlash erupting over all sorts of other mining projects crucial to the transition away from fossil fuels — lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, zinc — just with the added threat of radioactivity. “Generations and generations of my people have been hurt,” Nygren, 38, said in an interview. “Go find uranium somewhere else.” Truth is there isn’t all that much uranium at the Energy Fuels mine, known as Pinyon Plain, or any of the other half-dozen mines that opened in the Southwest the past couple years. In most cases, crews are simply combing through the untouched veins of mines that were closed when the 2011 Fukushima disaster scared global leaders away from nuclear power and crashed the uranium market. Pooled all together, they only hold a fraction of the hundreds of millions of pounds of ore buried in any of the top mines in Canada, Kazakhstan and Namibia. So the rush of mining activity here serves as a testament to the magnitude of the uranium fever sweeping the globe right now. At just over $70 per pound, the price is up some 200% over the past five years — even after it gave back a chunk of its gains in 2024. The mining outfits that held claims to those old sites went from nearly worthless — mere penny stocks in most cases — to high-flyers on New York and Toronto exchanges.Mark Chalmers, the CEO at Energy Fuels, had watched the rally in uranium somewhat skeptically at first. But when the price suddenly pierced the $50 mark in 2022, after hovering right around $20 for years, it got his attention. “That’s when we seriously started looking to open” the mine, he says. It was a chilly late fall morning and Chalmers, 67, was huddling with his lieutenants in the breakroom at the mine, a postage stamp of a spot carved out of a thick stand of pine trees. Deep down below, a small team was drilling holes into the sedimentary walls that snake through the mine. Chalmers had them searching for the very best ore. This way, they’d know where to begin when they finally got the green light to ship through Navajo territory. At Pinyon Plain, they’re used to setbacks. Prospectors discovered the deposit in the 1970s but by the time all the mining permits were secured a decade later, the global uranium market had collapsed. Just like in 2011, the initial trigger was a nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl meltdown. And then, a few years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the nuclear arms race was over. Plans were hatched over the years to open the mine as uranium prices bumped higher, but the enthusiasm would die as soon as the rally fade