In Their Own Words

 In Their Own Words

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar September 2026

For weeks, the Amerindian Peoples Association’s claim that 55 miles of radioactively contaminated core samples were sitting in storage at Kurupung, unreported and unexplained to the community that lives around it, stood as an allegation. A serious one, formally lodged with the Environmental Protection Agency — but an allegation nonetheless, made by a party the developer could, if it chose, dismiss as uninformed or exaggerating.

THE NUMBER, CONFIRMED

In a “Project Summary for Environmental Authorization” prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc. by Richard Spencer, PhD, P.Geo, C.Geol. — the same qualified person credited in U92 Energy Corp.’s investor disclosures — the section titled “Drill Core Storage & Sampling Facility” states plainly: 88,000 metres of drill core from prior drilling on the project area is located on-site, near the Aricheng airstrip.

Convert that figure and it comes out to almost exactly 55 miles. It is not an approximate echo of what Indigenous leaders told the EPA. It is, within the rounding of a metric-to-imperial conversion, the same number.

This publication is not aware of any prior reporting that connected these two figures. The APA reported 55 miles from what its letter describes as community knowledge and concern. The company’s own consultant reported 88,000 metres from a site survey. Two sources, with no apparent coordination between them, describing the same pile of radioactive material in different units — and arriving at the same answer.

WHAT THE DEVELOPER’S OWN DOCUMENT SAYS ABOUT IT

The core, the document states, “has been moved several times from the original, covered storage areas.” It “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” A drone photograph included in the document — labeled Figure 3-2 — shows what the caption calls a “Temporary drill core-sorting pad”: rows of stacked, tarp-covered material stretching across a cleared area near the airstrip. A separate section of the same image is labeled, in the company’s own annotation, “Unsorted historic drill core.”

Read that phrase again. This is not an activist’s characterization. It is the developer’s own retained professional geologist, in a document written for the developer’s own regulatory submission, stating that some portion of the radioactive material accumulated across five decades of exploration at Kurupung remains, as of March 2026, unsorted.

The same document goes on to describe a plan: a new storage site east of the exploration camp, cleared of topsoil, its gravel compacted, partially roofed in corrugated metal on steel pillars, with core boxes to be stacked on pallets and a dedicated, ventilated unit for a core saw. All of this is described in the future tense. It is a plan for what adequate storage should look like — written by the people who are, by their own account, not yet doing it.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE NUMBER

This publication’s prior reporting — “No Consent, No Rules” and “No Capacity, No Rules” — established two things: that Kurupung’s legal classification as “state land” allowed the government to bypass Free, Prior and Informed Consent obligations that would apply on titled Amerindian territory, and that Dr. Vincent Adams, the only Guyanese official ever to have chaired an international body on radioactive land remediation, considers the state to have no capacity whatsoever to oversee this project safely.

This document supplies what both of those arguments were missing: proof, not argument. It is one thing to say a country lacks the expertise to monitor uranium waste. It is another to have the developer’s own paperwork confirm that decades’ worth of it has, in fact, been mishandled — moved repeatedly, stored temporarily, left partly unsorted — in the immediate vicinity of a community that says it was never told.

The APA’s letter asked a direct question: who has been exposed, for how long, to material stored this way? That question does not go away because the company has now drafted a plan to fix it. A plan to build a safer facility is, definitionally, an admission that the current one is not safe. The company’s own document does not use the word “unsafe.” It does not need to. “Needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility” says the same thing in the language regulatory filings use when they are trying not to say it plainly.

THE QUESTIONS THIS DOCUMENT DEMANDS ANSWERS TO

This publication puts the following to LIA (Guyana) Inc., U92 Energy Corp., and the Environmental Protection Agency, on the record:

◊ When did the company first identify that historic core storage at Kurupung was inadequate, and when was the community notified of that finding — if it was notified at all, prior to the APA’s own letter surfacing the concern independently?

◊ What radiological monitoring, if any, has been conducted at the current temporary storage site and the “unsorted historic drill core” pile shown in Figure 3-2, and are those results available to the public or to the affected community?

◊ Given that the remedial storage facility described in the March 2026 document remains, by its own account, unbuilt, what interim safeguards — if any — are in place now, while thousands of tonnes of radioactive material sit in a “temporary” and admittedly inadequate condition?

◊ Does the EPA’s Environmental Management Plan, approved or under review for this project, include any binding requirement — with an enforceable timeline — to complete the remedial storage facility described in this document, or does it rely on the company’s own voluntary account of its intentions?

The APA has asked the EPA to rescind the environmental authorization already extended to this project. Dr. Adams has asked that his expertise be engaged before the state approves what it cannot yet monitor. This publication now asks a narrower, sharper question, one the developer’s own document makes unavoidable: if the company’s own geologist says the current arrangement is not adequate, on what basis has any part of this project been allowed to continue while it remains so?

— The Board