Mining

Thanks to renewed interest in nuclear power, the United States is on the verge of a uranium mining boom, and nowhere is the hurry to stake claims more pronounced than in the districts flanking the Grand Canyon's storied sandstone cliffs. On public lands within five miles of Grand Canyon National Park, there are now more than 1,100 uranium claims, compared with just 10 in January 2003, according to data from the Department of the Interior.

Waiting in their cars or on broken sidewalks, the blue-jeaned crowd has turned out for a parade. But they could pass for mourners at a funeral. They line up along the main drag in front of empty cafes and shops and rusted mining equipment fenced off with barbed wire. Passing time, some press hands and foreheads against windows of stores that went out of business so many years ago that it's hard to remember what they sold. Two graybeards stand near a telephone pole, watching for any sign of action in front of Susie's Thrift and Gift.

President Bush on Monday signaled his intention to protect some of the Pacific Ocean's most remote and unspoiled islands, atolls and coral reefs from fishing and deep-sea mining. In a memo to three Cabinet secretaries, the president asked for a plan that would protect parts of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on the planet, as well as waters around Rose Atoll in American Samoa and various islands and reefs in the central Pacific that are under U.S. jurisdiction.

High up a steep Sierra hillside that rises behind this Mother Lode town, past where the paved road runs out, tucked into a shadowy gulch covered with pines and cedars -- and far, far away from the financial calamities rocking Wall Street -- this was where Perry Cottingham could be found last week, engaged in that most seminal of California enterprises, mining for gold. Here was a man happy in his work.

This tiny community nestled on the backside of Pike's Peak revels in its mining heritage. Tourists are invited to tour underground tunnels, gamble in the Gold Rush and Gold Diggers casinos or view a video at a museum entitled, "The Timeless Art of Gold Extraction." They can shop for trinkets in the stores set up in Victorian houses built during Cripple Creek's mining heyday.

Mining: An article in Wednesday's Section A, about the conflicts that a mining boom has created in some historic mining towns of the West, called molybdenum an alloy. It is an element.

Re "Mining towns not all happy with this boom," Oct. 1 Your story from Cripple Creek, Colo., made important points about the changing economies in the Rockies. The income derived from tourism and from retirees settling in the region now exceeds income from mining and other extractive industries. There is another, less-known trend at work. Business owners have discovered that the region's scenery and quality of life help them attract a first-rate workforce and are setting up companies there.

Re "Mining for votes," editorial, Oct. 7 Your editorial was dead-on. "Clean coal" has been feeding at the federal R&D trough for decades, and coal is still dirty. So is coal mining and coal transit. Neither presidential candidate has felt it necessary to define what they mean by the term, and neither has mentioned carbon sequestration, coal's only hope. The public's only hope is to urge that the next president's transition team contains no coal industry representatives, e.g., lobbyists and campaign donors, and that it takes no high-level personnel recommendations from the coal industry.

The Interior Department is poised to issue a final rule that would make it easier for mountaintop mining companies to dump waste near rivers and streams, the agency announced. The environmental impact statement overhauls a 1983 regulation protecting water quality that has been regularly flouted by mining companies. It marks the next-to-last step in a 4 1/2 -year battle over how companies should dispose of the rubble and slurry created when they blow the tops off mountains to get to the coal.

Ronald seems a sober, respectable, church-on-Sunday type. Not the kind you'd find prospecting for diamonds here in Zimbabwe's wild east, a world of swaggering foreigners, dirty money and shoot-to-kill police. Not the sort who'd utter movie-script lines like this one: "You can make $15,000 or $20,000 in 30 minutes. But you can die within seconds." Ronald, like the rest of Zimbabwe, has caught Africa's nastiest ailment -- diamond fever.