Thirty-Eight Years of Process, Zero Pounds of Uranium

Here is the fact that should end the debate about who is being careful and who is being obstructive.

A company first applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in April 1988 to build in-situ uranium recovery facilities at Church Rock.¹ Thirty-eight years later, the facility still does not exist. It has never been constructed.² Not one pound of uranium has come out of the ground.

Now Attorney General Raúl Torrez has petitioned to intervene in the license renewal for the same project, and New Mexico's environment department has asked the NRC for a formal hearing before any construction proceeds.³ ⁴

Maybe that is diligence. It is also year thirty-eight.

The AG Brought a Real Argument

Credit where it is due, because we expected worse. The Department of Justice did not just wave at Church Rock and legacy contamination. It filed a 39-page rebuttal arguing that in-situ recovery has never been demonstrated to restore groundwater to pre-mining condition — and it quoted NuFuels' own 2023 NRC filing conceding that "no ISR site has restored all groundwater constituents of concern to pre-operational concentrations."⁵

That is real lawyering. The environment department added its own specifics: the project footprint, its proximity to Gallup's drinking water supply, and a restoration schedule that would not begin until years into operations.⁴

Fine. Test it. That is what a hearing is for.

But there is a cost to process that nobody in Santa Fe ever puts on the ledger, and it is not paid by the attorney general's office. It is paid in Gallup and Crownpoint.

Capital Does Not Wait

Uranium is a global commodity. Companies have properties in Wyoming, Texas, Utah, Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan. When a jurisdiction signals that a permit takes decades and ends in litigation regardless of the engineering, capital does the rational thing: it goes somewhere else.

New Mexico ranks second in the nation in identified uranium reserves and has produced essentially nothing since 2002.⁶ That is not an accident of geology. National production is now down to roughly 677,000 pounds of concentrate a year — a small fraction of what American reactors consume — which is precisely why the federal government placed this project on its permitting dashboard as a priority.⁷ ⁸ Washington is trying to accelerate domestic supply. Santa Fe is trying to schedule hearings.

Meanwhile the region waits. About one in three McKinley County residents — roughly 23,200 people — live below the federal poverty line.⁹ Median household income is $47,668.¹⁰ More than four in ten children in the county live in poverty.⁹

Industry has projected the New Mexico projects now in the federal pipeline could support more than 500 jobs, at least $400 million in local economic impact and roughly a 30-year domestic supply.¹¹ Those are developer numbers, not gospel. But even a fraction — a few hundred direct and construction jobs, tied to local hiring, apprenticeships and a dedicated contribution to cleaning up the legacy sites — is more than McKinley County has been offered in a generation.

Thirty-eight years of process has delivered exactly zero of it.

What the Delay Is Actually Protecting

We are not arguing that groundwater should be gambled away. Modern in-situ recovery is not the mine-and-mill model that scarred the Grants district — no open pits, no waste rock, no conventional tailings. But its risk sits underground in the water, and that risk is legitimate and worth proving out.

So prove it out. On a clock.

If the record shows this aquifer cannot be protected and cannot be restored, say no and explain why in language the public can verify. That is governing, and we will back it.

What is not governing is a permitting posture where the answer is never yes, never no, just later. Thirty-eight years is not caution. At some point an indefinite maybe becomes a decision — one made without ever having to defend it, and paid for by a county with 33 percent poverty.

The Bigger Prize Is Already Here

The frustrating part is how close New Mexico is to something much larger than one mine.

Urenco USA at Eunice runs the only commercial-scale uranium enrichment plant in the United States and is investing billions to expand it by nearly half.¹² Los Alamos is preparing a facility for pilot-scale production of advanced reactor fuel.¹³ Kairos Power develops fuel in Albuquerque and has its Hermes 2 reactor contracted to deliver power to the Tennessee Valley Authority around 2030 under a broader agreement with Google.¹⁴

Uranium in the northwest. Enrichment in the southeast. Nuclear science at Los Alamos. Fuel work in Albuquerque. As AI data centers drive demand for firm, around-the-clock power, no state in the country is better positioned to build that chain end to end.

New Mexico could supply the front end of America's nuclear buildout. Or it could spend another decade holding hearings while Wyoming and Texas take the mines, the fuel facilities and the jobs.

Make the Call

Executives get paid to absorb uncertainty — regulatory risk, capital exposure, community trust, technical complexity — then decide and own the outcome. "Pause and study" requires no judgment at all.

We are pro-growth, pro-nuclear and pro-data-center where the technology has genuinely improved on the old model. That is not growth at any price. It means water protected, tribal governments holding enforceable agreements, cleanup funded before production starts, and the jobs staying here.

So hold the hearing. Set a deadline. Publish the data. Consult the people who bear the consequences. Then green light it with conditions strong enough to protect the aquifer and keep the value in New Mexico, or red light it and defend that in public.

A hearing is not a verdict. It is supposed to produce one — and after thirty-eight years, New Mexico is owed a decision.