A company wants to blast a four-hundred-foot radioactive open pit into national forest fourteen miles from Devils Tower, and the Forest Service says there won't be a draft study and there won't be an objection process.

The pit runs 132 acres, seventeen years of mining and twenty-two start to finish, with about 1,700 acres closed to recreation the whole time. When the pumps shut off at the end the groundwater comes back, and the Forest Service says a lake may form in the hole and stay there. The rock carries thorium and uranium along with the rare earths, and a USGS crew mapped the ore body in the 1950s by walking radiation detectors across the Bear Lodge dome and drawing contour lines wherever the needle jumped.

Roosevelt made Devils Tower the first national monument in the United States in 1906, half a million people a year go out there, and more than twenty Northern Plains nations hold it as sacred ground. Fourteen agencies, counties, and county districts get a formal role in this review. No tribal nation appears on the list. The company's website says the mine sits twenty-two miles from the monument, and the coordinates it filed with the federal Permitting Council put it a little over fourteen.

The plan was written down in March on a public permitting dashboard anybody could read. The rule giving the public a right to object stops applying when the Under Secretary of Agriculture is the one proposing the project, and that's Michael Boren, the Idaho software billionaire and Trump megadonor whose entire prior history with the Forest Service consisted of the agency trying to make him stop, over an unauthorized cabin on national forest land, an unpermitted airstrip inside the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, and a Justice Department request for a restraining order after he flew a helicopter near a trail crew. He signs this one himself, and there's no appeal from what he signs.

Comments close at 11:59 Mountain on August 28 and that window is the entire public process, so file yours through PLAN (link in the post). Then send this to somebody, because almost nobody knows the clock is running and that's exactly what it was set up for.