Mining reform advocates say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is the biggest roadblock.(WDCpix)

“Literally, the law says that the minerals of the United States are free and open to location and purchase,” said Jeff Parsons, senior attorney for the nonprofit environmental law firm the Western Mining Action Project.

“What’s happened now is that these foreign companies, like Russian companies mining uranium, are taking advantage of that loophole and literally taking the United States citizens’ minerals for free,” Parsons said. “At a time when the deficit is at an all-time high we’re still giving away our mineral resources with no return.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who told the Colorado Independent he is carefully watching the proposed sale of the Canadian company Uranium One to the Russian government-owned Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ), has repeatedly sponsored bills both in the House and Senate to broadly overhaul the 1872 Mining Law. He’s also proposed legislation (Senate Bill 796) that would treat uranium differently than other hard-rock minerals.

“It’s time to seriously consider whether uranium should still be classified as a ‘locatable mineral’ governed by the hard-rock mining laws,” said Udall, a Democrat who has risked considerable environmentalist wrath by maintaining that a revived nuclear power industry in the United States needs to be part of an overall alternative energy mix that weans the nation off fossil fuels.

“I’m a co-sponsor of a mining law reform bill in the Senate — SB 796 — which would study whether uranium should fall under the Mineral Leasing Act system and be subject to a federal royalty that is shared with the state, and it could also provide additional requirements concerning how those leases are issued and operated.”

Norman Schwab, vice president of the Denver-based conventional mining division of Uranium One, says anyone proposing a royalty structure for uranium mining doesn’t understand the business or appreciate the jobs and tax revenues mining generates.

“I think it’s a silly comment because there’s a vast amount of tax money that gets plowed back in many different ways, and obviously the spending power of the people that work on your mines actually gets spent at the site, in the town, or in the county or state,” Schwab said. He added that labor costs are much higher in the United States than in his native South Africa or other countries like Kazakhstan, where Uranium One pays significant leasing fees.

Furthermore, Schwab said the margins for mining uranium and other hard-rock minerals are so much lower than extracting minerals such as coal, oil and natural gas, which are taken out under lease agreements that are much more stringent than rules for removing so-called “locatable” minerals under the antiquated 1872 Mining Law.

“That’s why the oil and gas can pay all sorts of royalties, because they’re in the money,” Schwab said. “When you’re making big money, fine, then you can tax it to death, but don’t tax the thing until it’s operational.”

Parsons argues royalties, particularly for uranium mining, could help cover the massive costs of cleaning up toxic messes dating back to the state’s uranium-mining heyday in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

“On the front end [mining] we give this stuff away, and on the back end we end up with contamination problems that companies refuse to clean up,” Parsons said. “The industry as a whole has left a toxic legacy that they’re not cleaning up.”

Uranium One simply gave up on its share of the Taylor Ranch/Hansen project outside of Cañon City in Fremont County, which the Australian mining company Black Range Minerals is still developing. Schwab said his company pulled out because of Colorado’s regulatory climate that is unfriendly to mining interests and because the lingering legacy of past bad acts still stigmatizes the modern mining industry.

“The fact that there are legacy issues in the area … is really counterproductive,” Schwab said. “People haven’t cleaned up the mess and yet now want to make another mess, so to speak, and you’ve got to overcome that sentiment and that perception.

“The Cotter Mill [in Cañon City] is clearly a mess that hasn’t been tidied up yet, so why would you want more mess in your state?”

Parsons says that although 1872 Mining Law reform has passed in the U.S. House it remains stuck in the Senate.

“It is literally one person on the U.S. Senate who stops it at every turn, and that’s Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and he does so because he’s beholden to the mining interests because he’s dependent on them for his reelection in Nevada,” Parsons said.

As Lillis discovered, the Big Branch tragedy is not really about the explosion. It’s about the monopoly culture Massey established in the region that defies safety rules and that is sustained by intimidating the men who mine the coal that feeds Massey’s profits, men who fall in line and say nothing about blatant safety violations for fear of losing their jobs and any chance at working at any mine anywhere within hundreds of miles– for all the mines are owned by Massey.

Read Lillis’s latest dispatches here and here.

Gary Quarles, 33, killed at the Massey mine. (Herald Dispatch)

It’s now business as usual for Massey… The company has denied time off for miners to attend their friends’ funerals; has rejected makeshift memorials outside the mine site; and, in at least one case, required a worker to go on shift even though the fate of a relative — one of the victims of the April 5 disaster — remained unknown at the time, according to some family members and other sources familiar with those episodes. In short, the company might be taking heat for putting profits and efficiency above its workers, but it doesn’t appear to have changed its tune in the wake of the worst mining tragedy in 40 years.

“They told my husband, ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re gonna do it,’” said the wife of one Massey miner, referring to the funerals he’s missed this month for friends who died in the blast. “What else are we gonna do?”

Such anecdotes aren’t easy to come by. Massey — the top coal producer in Appalachia — has built a reputation of intimidating its workers into a type of lock-step compliance that most often takes the form of silence, particularly when the subject revolves around safety in the company’s mines. The reason is clear: Massey is the economic engine in parts of West Virginia, and there’s a lingering fear among many workers that any grumbling could leave them unemployed. Some former employees said this week that the reluctance of Upper Big Branch miners to discuss the conditions inside those tunnels prior to the blast is no accident.

“I guarantee it: Massey’s already told these guys, ‘Hey, don’t say nothin’. You’re not talking to no reporters. You’re not saying nothin’ about our safety record — or you won’t have a job,’” said Chuck Nelson, a former Massey miner who’s since become an environmental activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. “That’s the way they operate.”

…It wasn’t always this way. Before Massey rose over the last several decades to become the predominate coal operator in the region, most of the area’s miners belonged to the union, affording them certain protections not enjoyed by Massey’s workers, most of whom are non-union. UMWA members didn’t fear losing their jobs, for example, if they reported a safety hazard.

“When we were all union, if there was something that came up, it wasn’t no problem at all to shut that mine down until everything was fixed.” said Nelson, who worked for nearly 20 years in union mines before Massey took over. “Non-union [workers], they ain’t got that right.”

The debate surrounding Massey is a complicated one in a coal-rich region where the balance between work and workers’ rights is nothing if not delicate. Indeed, even as some Massey families grumble about the company’s dubious safety record and cut-throat business ethic, other employees fly company flags and do the mowing in their Massey uniforms. For many, Massey is mining — and there’s an intense pride in both.

Still, Massey’s history of safety violations — including hundreds racked up at its other Appalachian projects in the last two weeks alone — has raised plenty of eyebrows in Washington in the wake of this month’s disaster. The White House, which had responded to the blast by vowing to reinspect the country’s most problematic mines, released a list of those projects Wednesday. At least eight of the 57 mines are Massey-owned.

A commenter at one of Lillis’s stories asks if Massey took out life insurance policies on their miners. As Wall Street has made clear, shorting against your own bad business practices is the best way to do business in the deregulated era.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

(rmi, Flickr)

Unlike oil and gas extraction, pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact.

The Environmental Protection Agency in a filing on Monday noted that hard-rock mining has impacted 40 percent of all western watersheds and that nationwide 28 percent of the toxic pollution generated in the United States comes from the mining industry –- the most of any sector. The EPA also concluded mining represents a major taxpayer burden because of cleanup costs.

The EPA filing was presented during a hearing Tuesday of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired by Colorado Sen. Mark Udall. Former Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, now Secretary of the Interior, testified the Obama administration wants to see the 1872 Mining Law reformed in the current Congress.

Mining reform legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate, and both versions would set up some sort of royalty structure for hard-rock mining on federal lands. The 137-year-old system of filing for relatively inexpensive and easy-to-acquire “patents” would be scrapped, and a fund would be set up to pay for massive cleanup efforts that for decades have been passed off to taxpayers when mining companies go bankrupt.

The Summitville gold mining disaster in Colorado, for instance, has cost taxpayers more than $200 million in cleanup costs. Reform advocates say the law passed in 1872 by the Grant administration was designed to encourage settlement of the West but is now antiquated and dangerous for the descendants of those settlers.

“We’re going back to the future on 1872 mining reform. This legislation is long overdue,” said Denver-based Environment Colorado advocate Matt Garrington. “Colorado is beautiful country, and we need to protect treasures such as Dolores Canyon from the impacts of uranium mining.”

The Dolores River Canyon is a proposed wilderness area in southwest Colorado threatened by nearby uranium mining claims, which increased 239 percent on public lands in Colorado between 2003 and 2007. Some of those claims are encroaching on national treasures like the Grand Canyon, conservationists point out.

“A lot has changed since 1872. The West is settled, and agriculture, tourism, and outdoor recreation are primary economic drivers for mountain towns,” state Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, said in a release. “We need sensible mining policy. Colorado has taken steps toward reform. Now, Washington has an opportunity to make sensible decisions about public land management and to protect our water.”

Salazar likely will get a fight from Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who in the past has blocked reform measures because of gold mining interests in his home state.