What Was Bears Ears NM "Open For Business" - But Zero Applications For Mining So Far

Early on Friday morning, vast swathes of the red-rock high plateau that surrounds federally protected buttes in southern Utah were officially thrown open to miners.

A controversial decision weeks earlier by President Donald Trump had shrunk the size of two national monuments -- known as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante -- by hundreds of thousands of acres, enraging environmentalists and American Indian groups who feared a stampede of mine and oil wildcatters would rush in and destroy the area’s sandstone vistas, historic rock carvings and artifacts. And yet, five days in, not only has there been no stampede, but no one has shown up at all.

The Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining says it hasn’t received a single permit application for plots in the areas. That may not ease the angst in the activist community any but it does highlight a couple of key elements to the dispute: While the remote region contains several minerals as well as oil and gas, the logistics of moving material in and out are tricky, and the only resource that has the real potential of luring explorers is uranium. But uranium prices are depressed, having plunged more than 80 percent since 2007 and squelched interest in opening new mines.

All of which means that, for now at least, the Trump administration’s scaling back of the monuments feels more like a symbolic political statement than anything else.

EDIT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-07/bears-ears-mining-rush-falls-flat-as-no-one-bothers-to-show-up