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The Obama administration decided Tuesday to use a big chunk of the economic stimulus package to accelerate removal of the Atlas uranium mill tailings near Moab, which have threatened to leach radioactive waste into the Colorado River. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that of the $6 billion that the stimulus package gave the Energy Department to accelerate environmental cleanup work, he is allocating $108 million to the Moab project. That had Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, almost shouting for joy. He has fought the Energy Department under previous leadership for years to accelerate the project and was told as late as a month ago that it might not be completed for another 20 years because of lack of funds. Such lack of funds is apparently no longer a problem for now.

"The first million tons of uranium tailings have been taken away from a huge pile near Moab. The U.S. Department of Energy says the milestone was reached this week as part of an ongoing project to remove 16 million tons of radioactive waste from the shores of the Colorado River. The waste is being loaded on trains and shipped to a disposal site 30 miles to the north. The Energy Department is overseeing the work. Crews began loading railroad cars in April and hauling the waste to a series of cells at Crescent Junction designed for long-term storage for hazardous waste. The project is expected to cost around $1 billion."

"On July 21, 2009, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar proposed a two-year withdrawal of about 1 million acres of Federal land near the Grand Canyon from future mineral entry. These lands are contained in three parcels: two parcels on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land to the north of the Grand Canyon (North and East Segregation Areas) and one on the Kaibab National Forest south of the Grand Canyon (South Segregation Area). The purpose of the two-year withdrawal is to examine the potential effects of restricting these areas from new mine development for the next 20 years. This proposed withdrawal initiated a period of study during which the effects of the withdrawal must be evaluated. At the direction of the Secretary, the U.S. Geological Survey began a series of short-term studies designed to develop additional information about the possible effects of uranium mining on the natural resources of the region. Dissolved uranium and other major, minor, and trace elements occur naturally in groundwater as the result of precipitation infiltrating from the surface to water-bearing zones and, presumably, to underlying regional aquifers. Discharges from these aquifers occur as seeps and springs throughout the region and provide valuable habitat and water sources for plants and animals. Uranium mining within the watershed may increase the amount of radioactive materials and heavy metals in the surface water and groundwater flowing into Grand Canyon National Park and the Colorado River, and deep mining activities may increase mobilization of uranium through the rock strata into the aquifers. In addition, waste rock and ore from mined areas may be transported away from the mines by wind and runoff."

"With Shell Oil's recent withdrawal of a water right permit application to divert 375 cubic feet per second of water from the Yampa River in northwest Colorado, one would get the impression that the bubble has finally burst on mass scale, traditional energy development in the West and that the oil industry has finally come to terms with the impact of traditional energy development on rapidly diminishing water resources. Not so in Utah. While recently briefing the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and Mining, Dr. Laura Nelson, vice president of the Salt Lake City-based Ecoshale, for example, proclaimed that the company just completed a pilot project that produced a high-quality oil-shale product and, "we did so working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to make an environmentally sensitive product." Similarly, the National Commission on Energy Policy - a bipartisan group of energy experts - recently stated that climate change legislation currently being considered by Congress must also spur more domestic energy production by extending the production tax credit for new reactors through 2025 and expanding the renewable energy standard to include nuclear."

Landowners near the site of a 1969 underground nuclear blast are suing to force a hearing on plans to drill natural gas in the area. Two environmental groups and two couples have filed a lawsuit seeking a hearing on the state's approval of drilling permits within three miles of the blast site near Rulison in western Colorado.

When Paul Zimmerman writes in his new book about the Rio Puerco and the Four Corners, he calls out the names of the cancers and gives voice to the poisoned places and streams. Zimmerman is not just writing empty words. Zimmerman writes of the national sacrifice area that the mainstream media and the spin doctors would have everyone forget, where the corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet, in his new book, A Primer in the Art of Deception: The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science. "A report in 1972 by the National Academy of Science suggested that the Four Corners area be designated a 'national sacrifice area," he writes.