Additionally, according to Fred Tillman, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) lead hydrologist investigating uranium mining impacts on water resources near the Grand Canyon, no one knows how the region’s groundwater flows. “Basic hydrology questions” still need answers, he said.

“We first have to study the potential impacts between these systems. We don’t know what the direction of the flow is or if there is recharge of the water between the mine and the canyon from elsewhere, because then their pumping might have no impact at all, but it’s really an unknown science question due to depth of the system and the lack of wells and observational data up there.”

“Does the perched water eventually go down and reach the regional aquifer and become part of that? We absolutely do not know that,” he added.

This is precisely what the Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust and other conservation groups argue. “There is risk and you need to have a more stringent Aquifer Protection Permit, because we don’t know enough about this area,” Alicyn Gitlin, Program Manager of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, told IC.

The risk became all too clear when Energy Fuels drilled through the Coconino Perched Aquifer, which led to the mine shaft flooding, equipment breaking down, and millions of gallons of clean drinking water becoming contaminated.

Tillman, who took samples from the Canyon Mine shaft in June 2016 and sampled the new USGS Canyon Mine Observation Well in July 2017, told us that, “The water coming in at the Coconino level is or was fairly low in most trace elements including uranium… The Coconino water was originally in the single digits of parts per billion that they were reporting to ADEQ.”

After the water entered the shaft, the mixed solution was 18 times higher in uranium levels – 3 times the maximum safety standard for drinking water recommended by the EPA. The water also contained 30 times more arsenic and exceeded the standard for radium, according to Gitlin.

Millions of gallons of the contaminated water have now been hauled off site in trucks or evaporated in an already water-starved climate.

The flooded mine shaft and resulting offsite disposal of water initiated a robust debate among conservation groups, the company, and governmental organizations about whether or not this could have been anticipated and the legality of the company’s actions.

Energy Fuels and public affairs representatives of the Forest Service allege that the need to dispose contaminated water off site couldn’t be predicted due to climatic changes in the area. Jacqueline C. Banks, Public Affairs Officer for the Kaibab National Forest Service, told IC, “We had an extremely wet winter, with lots of precipitation and lower than normal evaporation, so to prevent overflow from the evaporation pond, Energy Fuels implemented that emergency plan,” said Banks.

However, even with the unpredictable nature of the wet winter, this would have been a breach of the 1986 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Canyon Mine, which requires that “Holding pond(s) in the mine yard must be adequate to receive local runoff from a 100-year thunderstorm event, plus normal annual runoff and water that may be pumped from the mine. The volume of water in the pond(s) must be maintained at a level that will allow a reserve pond capacity to accommodate unforeseen and normally expected runoff events.”

Mark Chalmers, the President and COO of Energy Fuels and other company officials point toward the weather to help explain the flooded shaft. “This year was a very very wet year in Northern Arizona and we had more water than expected, so we hauled water to our mill to prevent our pond from overflowing,” Chalmers said.

However, there is no substantiated evidence from the USGS to support or refute this rationale. In fact, the current data available points away from any claims of climate driven water.

“EFR has put forth that possibility that there’s been a wet winter and more recent recharge of the aquifer,” Tillman observed. “We are still evaluating our sample results, and waiting for some more to come in (i.e., tritium results), but our first take on the carbon-14 result of 17.52 percent modern carbon is that there is at least some portion of quite old water down there. We’ll want to look at the tritium results to see if there is some recent water mixing as well, and then verify everything with another round of sampling (or two or three).”

Gitlin believes that other issues contributed to the flooded shaft, including a lack of scrutiny from ADEQ as well as the contents of the company’s Environmental Impact Statement and Plan of Operations that have remain unchanged since they were approved by the the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in 1986.