The Keys to an Open Gate

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Keys to an Open Gate

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The EPA exempted Kurupung’s uranium drilling from an Environmental Impact Assessment on the grounds that radioactive waste would be “securely contained.” Its own applicant had already put in writing, two months earlier, that it wasn’t.

“…needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” — the applicant’s own consultant, March 2026. “…securely contained, monitored and managed.” — the EPA’s exemption notice, August 2026.

On September 11, Kaieteur News reported that the Environmental Protection Agency had cleared U92 Energy Corp.’s uranium exploration programme at Kurupung of the need for a full Environmental Impact Assessment. The notice, the agency said, followed a screening under Section 11(2) of the Environmental Protection Act. Among the reasons the EPA gave for its exemption: that fuel, waste, drill fluids, and uranium-bearing core and samples “will be securely contained, monitored and managed.”

That sentence is not a prediction anymore. It is a claim the agency’s own applicant had already contradicted in a document the agency itself appears to have relied on to make its decision.

THE DOCUMENT THE EPA HAD IN HAND

This publication has obtained the “Project Summary for Environmental Authorization” prepared for LIA (Guyana) Inc. — U92’s local subsidiary and the license holder of record — by Richard Spencer, PhD, P.Geo, C.Geol., the same qualified person credited in U92’s investor disclosures. It is dated March 2026. The EPA’s own September notice directs the public to a “Project Summary Tab” for further detail on the project it had just screened. This is, in all likelihood, that document.

In it, under a section titled “Drill Core Storage & Sampling Facility,” the company’s own geologist states that 88,000 metres of historic drill core — material from more than five decades of uranium exploration by four separate operators — sits on-site near the Aricheng airstrip. The core, the document says, “has been moved several times from the original, covered storage areas.” It “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility.” A drone photograph in the same document labels one section of the site “Unsorted historic drill core.”

Convert 88,000 metres to miles and the figure comes out to just under 55 — matching, almost exactly, what the Amerindian Peoples Association told the EPA in its own letter weeks earlier: that 55 miles of radioactive core had been sitting, uncommunicated, near the community’s land and water.

The EPA’s Section 11(2) notice, published roughly six months after that document was written, does not mention this finding. It does not explain how a site the applicant’s own consultant describes as needing to be moved to “a safer, adequate facility” satisfies a determination that uranium-bearing material is being “securely contained.” It offers no indication that the agency ordered, or even requested, radiological testing of the existing storage site before reaching that conclusion.

AN EXEMPTION BUILT ON A CONTRADICTION

The EPA’s stated reasoning for exempting Kurupung from a full EIA rests on five points:

◊ That the project is exploration only.

◊ That land disturbance is small and localized.

◊ That impacts are temporary, reversible and manageable.

◊ That disturbed areas will be progressively rehabilitated.

◊ And that hazardous material will be securely contained under an approved Environmental Management Plan with radiation-safety conditions.

The fifth point is not a description of the current state of the site. It is a description of a future one — the same future one LIA Guyana’s own document sketches out in a section written entirely in the conditional and future tense: a new storage facility, east of the camp, not yet built; topsoil not yet cleared; gravel not yet compacted; a roof not yet erected. The EPA’s exemption notice treats “will be securely contained” as an adequate basis for clearing the project now. The applicant’s own paperwork treats it as a plan for later.

This is not a technicality. It is the difference between a regulator satisfying itself that a hazard is being managed, and a regulator accepting a company’s promise that it eventually will be — while approximately 88,000 metres of radioactive material sits, by the company’s own account, in a temporary and inadequate condition in the meantime, within a landscape the Amerindian Peoples Association says its people still walk, farm, hunt and draw water from.

Dr. Vincent Adams, the former EPA Executive Director whose credentials include chairing the International Atomic Energy Agency’s own 2009 conference on remediating radioactive land contamination, has already told this publication that Guyana has “no capacity whatsoever” to oversee uranium mining and its long-term monitoring — a judgment made before this document became public. Asked what such a country’s regulator should do when it does not have that capacity in-house, his answer was not equivocal: the possession of instruments, he said, means nothing without understanding what they show and how to respond to it.

An agency that cannot independently verify a radiological hazard has one honest option before granting any exemption: order the testing. Nothing in the EPA’s September notice indicates that happened.

WHAT “COMPETENT AUTHORITY” SHOULD HAVE MEANT HERE

EPA Executive Director Dr. Kemraj Parsram has told this publication’s colleagues at Kaieteur News that the agency is “the competent authority” that decides ‘if and when” an authorization is granted. That is the correct legal position. It is also the standard by which this decision now has to be judged.

A competent authority, confronted with its own applicant’s written admission that historic radioactive material has been repeatedly relocated, is not currently contained to modern standard, and remains in part unsorted, does not have the option of exempting the project and letting the containment plan catch up later.

It has the obligation to test the material, verify the risk, and make that verification — not the developer’s assurance — the basis of its decision. Anything less is not screening. It is trusting the fox’s floor plan for the henhouse.

The EPA’s own notice preserves an appeal window: any person who may be affected by the decision may lodge an appeal with the Environmental Assessment Board, addressed to its Chairman, within thirty days of publication. The Amerindian Peoples Association has already told the agency, in writing, that it was never consulted. Dr. Adams has already told the agency, in writing, that the state cannot safely oversee this material. Neither letter, on the public record, produced radiological testing of a hazard the applicant itself flagged as inadequately contained.

The appeal window is not a formality. It may be the only mechanism left standing between a written admission of risk and a drill program now cleared to proceed around it.

THIS PUBLICATION ASKS, DIRECTLY

Did the EPA review the March 2026 Project Summary — including its account of core that has been “moved several times” and “needs to be moved to a safer, adequate facility” — before issuing its Section 11(2) exemption in August?

If it did, on what basis did the agency conclude that uranium-bearing material is being “securely contained” when its own applicant’s document says otherwise?

Did the EPA order, or request, independent radiological testing of the existing core storage site — including the area its own applicant’s drone imagery labels “unsorted historic drill core” — at any point before granting the exemption?

If no such testing occurred, will the EPA commit to ordering it now, before Phase One drilling proceeds and before the thirty-day appeal window closes?

This is not a question of whether Guyana should host a uranium industry. It is a question of whether the agency charged with protecting Guyanese land, water and people from one has read its own applicant’s paperwork.