Gravel Roads & Yellowcake
Nuclear’s back — will this one mine become the blueprint, or the cautionary tale, for how the U.S. expands uranium mining in the name of energy security?
At dawn on the Kaibab Plateau, pinyon juniper smells like pencil shavings dunked in gin. A water truck climbs a two-track. Crows heckle from the treeline.
Seven miles south of Grand Canyon National Park, the Pinyon Plain uranium mine spins up for the day. After decades of legal fights and “maybe someday,” it finally started pulling ore to the surface in early 2024, one of the first new U.S. uranium mines to actually run in years.
On paper, it’s tiny: roughly 14 acres of disturbance, grandfathered in under old approvals. In reality, it sits on Havasupai ancestral land, inside the new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, near sacred Red Butte and above a maze of fractures and aquifers that eventually feed Grand Canyon springs and the Colorado River.
It’s a small mine carrying a big question: if the U.S. is going to expand uranium production, how do we do it right?
Let’s zoom out.
In 2024, uranium loaded into U.S. reactors used a little over 50 million pounds of U₃O₈ equivalent. Domestic mines only produced about 677,000 pounds that year. Our best in six years, but still basically a rounding error.
Roughly 95% of the uranium used by U.S. utilities in 2023 came from abroad. Canada, Kazakhstan, and Australia were the big three, with Russia, Uzbekistan, Namibia and others filling in the rest.
We are, in plain English, import-dependent. At the same time, both parties are suddenly in love with nuclear again: new builds, lifetime extensions, even talk of small modular reactors to help steady a renewables-heavy grid and power data centers.
So yes, there’s a solid argument for growing a domestic uranium story. The mistake would be assuming “more Pinyon Plains” is the blueprint.
Here’s how the current chain actually works.
Ore from Pinyon Plain is trucked hundreds of miles to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah. The last conventional uranium mill in the country. There it’s crushed, soaked in chemical solutions, and processed into yellowcake, a concentrated uranium powder.
The yellowcake doesn’t stay in Utah. It goes on to conversion facilities (turned into a gas), enrichment plants (where centrifuges boost the fissile isotope up to reactor grade), and finally fuel-fabrication plants, where it becomes pellets and fuel rods.
At every step, there’s risk: tailings ponds that can leak into shallow aquifers at White Mesa, where Ute Mountain tribal members, local communities, and conservation groups worry about contamination and have protested expanding operations; long truck hauls carrying hazardous material through communities that still live with the ghosts of the last uranium boom; waste streams that stay hot long after corporate interest cools.
So expanding uranium “correctly” has to mean more than just opening more holes in the ground.
Start with where we mine.
Putting a uranium shaft within sight of the Grand Canyon’s watershed, on contested sacred ground, over complex hydrogeology, is the opposite of cautious. Even state regulators who renewed Pinyon Plain’s aquifer permit admit the geology is complicated; federal scientists have outlined multiple plausible pathways from mine workings to canyon springs. The Havasupai do not have the luxury of trusting “it’ll probably be fine” when they live downstream.
If we want a credible domestic uranium strategy, we have to flip the map. Brownfields before backcountry. Existing mining districts, industrial corridors, and already-chewed-up landscapes rise to the top of the list. Cultural keystones and national-park shoulders drop off it. Mining law reform, finally updating the 1872 rules that still give hardrock mining an almost automatic priority on public land, would lock that in.
Then there’s who gets a say.
Tribal nations have seen this movie before: promises of jobs, then decades of abandoned mines, cancers, and dry stock ponds. Navajo Nation and others pushed back hard when the first ore trucks rolled from Pinyon Plain in July 2024; haul routes were paused and re-negotiated. That only happened because tribes and local communities forced the issue.
A grown-up uranium policy would make that kind of leverage the norm, not an emergency brake. Tribal consent and real bargaining power, over siting, haul routes, monitoring, and cleanup, has to be baked into the process, not bolted on after the fact.
And we have to look beyond mines.
If we’re serious about energy security, we should be just as focused on rebuilding conversion and enrichment inside the U.S., with modern safety standards and strong worker protections, as we are on new shafts. Recent laws banning Russian enriched uranium and funding domestic facilities are a step in that direction, but we’re not there yet.
Finally, there’s the question nobody wants to talk about at ribbon cuttings: how does this end?
If we allow new or revived uranium projects, full-cost cleanup and long-term water monitoring need to be part of the entry ticket. That means serious bonds posted up front. It means tailings built and monitored to standards that match how long they’re dangerous, not how long a company plans to stick around. It means commitments that don’t evaporate when the spot price dips.
Nuclear can absolutely help us cut carbon, keep the lights on through heat waves, and tame some of the demand spike from data centers. Expanding uranium production on U.S. soil can be part of that.
But if “energy security” just means more gravel roads and yellowcake shipments through communities, with the same old tradeoffs, we haven’t secured much. We’ve just moved the risk from map pins across our boarder into ours.
The Kaibab Plateau will keep smelling like pencil shavings and gin at dawn. The question is whether the springs below it, and the people who rely on them, get to stay clear while we chase a steadier grid.
Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.