Pipeline Infrastructure Daily · The Big Drop
The same emergency-powers playbook fast-tracking the largest gas-pipeline buildout since 2008 is now reopening the country's polluted and radioactive mine sites—because the machines of the AI age need both at once: the power the pipelines carry, and the minerals the mines hold.
On March 20, 2025, the administration issued an executive order, Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production, invoking emergency powers—including the Defense Production Act—to accelerate domestic mining and processing. The Department of the Interior then launched a specific effort to recover critical minerals from mine waste: coal refuse, tailings, and abandoned uranium mines. The order's "critical" list was stretched to include uranium, copper, potash, gold, even coal.
The named pilots are legacy pollution sites. At Tar Creek, Oklahoma—a lead-and-zinc Superfund site near Picher, among the most contaminated places in the country—the plan is to pull zinc and germanium from the waste. At Bingham Canyon, Utah, the target is tellurium recovered from copper-mine tailings.
This is the same machine the map already watches, pointed at a second resource. The pipeline buildout and the mineral push run on one playbook: emergency or national-priority powers, compressed permitting, the opening of federal and public land, and the reframing of private industrial projects as strategic national assets. Pipelines move the power; mines move the materials. Both are being cleared at speed, and both point at the same endpoint—the data centers and the energy systems that feed artificial intelligence.
The pipelines carry the watts. The mines supply the metal. The AI buildout needs both, and the same orders are clearing the way for each.
The radioactivity is real, but it depends on the source. Conventional rare-earth ore, phosphate byproducts, and uranium-mine tailings carry uranium and thorium—the naturally radioactive material that makes ordinary rare-earth mining a waste problem, and that makes the abandoned uranium mines on Interior's list radioactive by definition.
The coal route runs the other way. Recovering rare earths from coal ash and acid-mine drainage is promoted precisely because it largely avoids that radioactive byproduct—one drainage sample yielded material that was 62% rare-earth oxide and only about 0.01% uranium and thorium. So "polluted ponds hold radioactive minerals" is true for some streams and inverted for others: the coal-waste route is the low-radioactivity option, while the uranium tailings are the hot one.
One common shorthand needs splitting. Rare earths do not go into battery cells. They make the magnets—neodymium and dysprosium in the motors, generators, turbines, drives, and cooling fans. Batteries need a different set: lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese. Both sit under the "critical minerals" umbrella, but they are two supply chains, not one.
The link to compute is the whole chain, not just batteries. AI's physical buildout pulls on copper (wiring, transformers, the grid), rare-earth magnets (generation, motors, cooling), batteries (grid and backup storage), and gallium, germanium, and rare earths (the semiconductors themselves). That is why the same fast-track logic driving the pipelines is now driving the mines.
For this beat the measurable risk is what gets disturbed. The program's first targets are Superfund sites, tailings impoundments, abandoned uranium mines, and acid-mine-drainage ponds—ground that was capped or contained precisely because it is dangerous. Re-mining it for the AI supply chain is the current-state exposure: not a past incident, but a present decision to reopen poisoned ground at speed.
| Site / stream | Targeted minerals | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Tar Creek, OK (Picher) | zinc, germanium | lead-zinc Superfund site, among the most contaminated in the U.S. |
| Bingham Canyon, UT | tellurium | recovered from copper-mine tailings |
| Abandoned uranium mines | uranium | legacy radioactive sites, named on Interior's recovery list |
| Coal refuse, ash & acid-mine drainage | rare earths (for magnets) | the low-radioactivity route—the reason it's favored |
Live from the Federal Register—the most recent rules, notices, and presidential documents mentioning critical minerals. Refreshes on every visit.
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