# Energy Fuels A Colorado-headquartered uranium producer that operates the **White Mesa Mill** in southeastern Utah — **the last conventional uranium mill still running in the United States** — and which sits at the intersection of three things this vault tracks: public-lands rollback, defense-funded industrial policy, and an insider-trading allegation involving advance knowledge of a presidential decision. ## The 2026 sequence - **18 June 2026** — the **Department of Defense** announces a **$725 million loan** to Energy Fuels through its Office of Strategic Capital, to expand White Mesa Mill. - **29 July 2026** — the company announces it has **begun construction** on the expansion. - **10 August 2026** — **House Natural Resources Democrats** (Jared Huffman and Maxine Dexter) send a letter to CEO **Ross Bhappu** opening an investigation into **potential insider trading** — specifically whether two of the company's top executives received nonpublic information about Trump's planned reduction of **[[Bears Ears National Monument]]** before it became public. - The company denies wrongdoing. Senior vice president **Curtis Moore**: *"For our investors, our management, our execs — everybody — Bears Ears is immaterial to us at this point."* White Mesa Mill sits roughly **one mile outside the Bears Ears boundary**. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It is the sharpest available test of whether monument reductions have identifiable beneficiaries.** The vault's [[Antiquities Act]] and public-lands material documents monument boundary reductions as a policy pattern. The recurring counter-argument is that no specific private party gains. Here a congressional investigation is asking whether a specific company's executives traded on advance knowledge of a specific reduction, a mile from their facility. **Whatever the investigation concludes, the question is now on the record with named parties**, which it usually is not. **2. The DoD loan is industrial policy under a security label.** $725 million from the Office of Strategic Capital to a single uranium producer is not a procurement contract — it is the federal government capitalizing a domestic supply chain because the alternative is imports. That is the same instrument the vault tracks in defense-tech and critical-minerals material, and its political economy is identical regardless of which administration deploys it: public capital, private ownership, a national-security justification that forecloses ordinary scrutiny. **3. The tribal-health dimension is the part the financial story omits.** White Mesa is adjacent to a Ute Mountain Ute community that has objected to the mill's operation for decades on contamination and health grounds. Expansion funded by the Pentagon intensifies an exposure that was already contested. Any account of this that runs only through the stock trades and the monument boundary is incomplete. > [!warning] Allegation, not a finding > The insider-trading matter is a **congressional inquiry opened by minority-party members**, not a charge, indictment, or regulatory action. The company denies wrongdoing. Nothing here asserts that any individual traded unlawfully. ## See Also - [[Bears Ears National Monument]] · [[Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument]] · [[Antiquities Act]] - [[Department of Defense]] — the lender - [[Critical Minerals]]