BREAKING: USDA Pushes Forward on a Radioactive Open Pit Mine Miles From Devils Tower
The Forest Service won’t publish a draft study and won’t let anybody object. Michael Boren signs the decision himself. You have until August 28.
A company wants to dig a hole four hundred feet deep into the Bear Lodge Mountains of northeastern Wyoming, on national forest ground that belongs to you, and haul rock out of it for seventeen years. The Forest Service published notice of that in the Federal Register on July 29 and gave the public thirty days to respond.
The pit runs about 132 acres. Surface disturbance on public land comes to roughly 260 acres. The mine area, national forest and the company’s adjacent private ground together, runs about 1,700 acres, and by Rare Element Resources’ own account it won’t be open to recreation while the mine operates. Blasting, haul roads, benches cut in expanding steps, a dewatering pond, safety fencing, a guardhouse. Seventeen years of mining, twenty-two years start to finish once you count closure and reclamation. When the pumps shut off at the end, groundwater comes back, and the Forest Service says a lake may form in the hole and stay there.
The rock they’re after carries thorium and u…
