In Caldas, in the hills of southern Minas Gerais, a yellow excavator still tears into a reddish slope where mining has coexisted for decades with the heavy silence that uranium imposes on a place. The scene, captured at an open pit mine run by INB (Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil, Brazil's state nuclear industries company), could belong to any construction site in the country, if not for what lies beneath the surface: a mineral that by law belongs solely to the federal government, and one that today holds up the fate of more than a thousand mining projects scattered across Brazil.
A survey by ANM (Agência Nacional de Mineração, Brazil's national mining regulator), obtained by newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, quantified the scale of the standoff for the first time: 1,168 mining applications for other substances, including critical minerals like rare earths and nickel, plus gold, iron, copper, manganese and bauxite, are stalled because their areas overlap with ten major uranium deposits. Since exploration of nuclear ore is a monopoly held by the state company INB, these regions are reserved for the federal government, and everything else found underground alongside the uranium sits frozen, waiting for a decision that has not come.
The ten uranium areas identified by the ANM survey are located in Caldas and Gandarela, in the state of Minas Gerais; Lagoa Real, in Bahia; Santa Quitéria, in Ceará; Rio Cristalino, in Pará; Amorinópolis and Rio Preto, in Goiás; Figueira, in Paraná; and Espinharas, in Paraíba. There is also a region known as Cajá, which stretches across parts of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and Paraíba. It is across this patchwork of states that projects for critical minerals, now coveted by the battery and technology industries, wait for a government response.
Pressure to unblock the sector
According to the Folha report, there is urgency inside the MME (Ministério de Minas e Energia, Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy) to break INB's monopoly and open the door for partnerships between the state company and private investors. The ministry has already sent the Presidency's Casa Civil, its chief of staff office, a draft decree that would regulate a 2022 law allowing that kind of joint operation. Asked about the matter, the MME said that "optimizing how these areas are handled is part of an ongoing agenda within the federal government" and confirmed it had submitted the proposal.
The Casa Civil, in turn, confirmed the draft is under review but gave no timeline for a decision. In a statement to Folha, the office said "the proposal is under discussion among the government's technical teams, in coordination with the Ministry of Mines and Energy." Until the decree moves forward, the standoff over the ten uranium areas will keep more than a thousand mining applications on hold, and the scene in Caldas, that yellow excavator carving through rock and red earth, remains the most visible portrait of a sector waiting, underground, for a decision from the federal government.