There is a big risk in uranium mining in northern Colorado

Letters to Editor
March 26, 2008

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Only 3 percent of all the water on Earth is fresh water. Less than 1 percent is readily available to the world population. In Colorado, each person uses, on average, 200 gallons of water per day. On a hot summer day it's not uncommon for that usage to be 600 gallons per day. Visualize 12, 55-gallon drums of water per person per day. For a city of 100,000 residents, on a hot day, the water treatment facility is producing 60 million gallons per day. Visualize 60 EPIC swimming pools of water per day. If you have never had the opportunity to see the effluent stream of treated water leaving the treatment facility, at 60 million gallons per day, it would blow your mind. It's enough to raft or kayak in!

Cities like Thornton are buying up thousands of acres of farmland in Weld County to dry up and trade for water rights, to build a treatment facility north of Fort Collins, and pipe finished water to their thirsty citizens. That is only one of many projects under way to provide water for a Colorado population expected to double in the next two decades, with several million coming to northern Colorado alone! Does it make any sense at all to jeopardize a precious water source such as the Laramie Fox Hills Aquifer with in-situ leach uranium mining?

There is an astounding amount of technical things to know about water. Perhaps the most important thing is that water is a gift to us. It is absolutely paramount that we protect it from the likes of Powertech, and others that couldn't care less about anything but the dollar sign.

Randy King, Wellington