The Uranium Blindspot.Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate

 THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Independent Accountability Journalism♦Governance, Politics & Extractive Industry
 July 2026

The Uranium Blindspot: Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate
As U92 Energy Corp. advances drill programmes at the Kurupung uranium project, the government has yet to answer a foundational question: who, in Guyana, can actually tell if something is going wrong?

I. THE WARNING CANNOT BE DISMISSED
Dr. Vincent Adams is not a critic of mining. He is a former head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a professional who has overseen uranium remediation programmes in the United States — a country that spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars confronting contamination legacies it did not anticipate when licences were first issued. He has chaired international conferences on uranium mining’s environmental footprint, drawing participants from more than sixty countries, including Kazakhstan, one of the world’s largest uranium producers. When Dr. Adams says Guyana does not have what it takes to regulate uranium mining — that the country’s institutions have no clue what they are getting into — he is not raising a theoretical concern.
He is delivering a professional judgment grounded in direct comparative experience. And this government has not answered it.

“Guyana just based on their track record do not have it, they do not understand what it takes to have it, and they have no interest in providing that capacity to take on such an operation. They have no clue what they are getting into. Have no clue whatsoever.” — Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Head

That silence is the story. Not because uranium mining is inherently incompatible with Guyana’s development — Dr. Adams himself does not argue that — but because the government has issued licences, approved exploration, and allowed a foreign junior mining company to consolidate a decadeof technical data on Guyanese soil without publicly demonstrating that any regulatory body in this country can independently verify what that company is doing, or will be doing, in the interior of Region Seven.

II. WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN LICENSED
The facts on the ground are specific and deserve to be stated precisely. On 19 April 2024, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission granted Exclusive Prospecting Licences to LIA (Guyana) Inc. — a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore-registered LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Guyana in March 2023, just one month before the licences were issued. Those licences cover not only uranium but other radioactive minerals and rare earth elements across 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven.
The licences run for three years to 18 April 2027 with the possibility of two additional one-year extensions — meaning this project could remain active and expanding through April 2029 without any new licensing decision by the government.

Adam Clode CEO – U 92 Corp.

Canada-based U92 Energy Corp. has since acquired the complete historical technical and exploration dataset for the Kurupung project, which it describes as carrying a historical resource estimate of 20.6 million pounds of uranium. This is U 92’s only listed project. The company has finalised a commercial agreement for a Phase One 5,000-metre diamond drilling programme and submitted the required environmental application for drill pad preparation. The company’s entire commercial existence rests on this single Guyanese concession.
The GGMC issued licences to an entity incorporated one month before the grant date. It has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record.
The GGMC has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record prior to that April 2024 grant. The Environmental Protection Agency has not published any environmental impact assessment, baseline study, or radiation monitoring protocol for the Kurupung project. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority — the body nominally responsible for radiological matters — has not issued a public statement on the project’s regulatory framework. Parliament has not been briefed. The public has not been consulted.

III. THE REGULATORY INDEPENDENCE PROBLEM
Dr. Adams identified the core structural failure with precision. It is not simply that Guyana lacks technical personnel with uranium expertise — though that is true. The deeper problem is the absence of what he calls regulatory independence: the institutional capacity for the government to independently verify what an operator is doing, rather than relying on operator-reported data.
In every sophisticated resource jurisdiction, regulatory independence is the foundational safeguard. It requires trained government scientists and engineers who can read drill logs critically, interpret radiological readings independently, identify anomalies in waste management, and assess water contamination risks without being dependent on the company’s own consultants for their understanding of what is happening. It requires laboratory infrastructure, monitoring networks, and institutional knowledge built over time.
Guyana has none of this for uranium. It does not exist. It is not being built. No minister has announced a timeline for its construction. The 2024 licences were issued into a regulatory vacuum.

The government has adopted a model in oil and gas where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That same model, applied to radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut — it is a liability being transferred permanently onto the Guyanese people.
Dr. Adams drew explicit parallels to the oil and gas sector, where Guyana’s environmental governance record is already a subject of documented concern. The Environmental Protection Agency has been criticised by civil society and international observers for its limited capacity to independently audit Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC compliance data. The GGMC’s own audit trail is in a state of chronic disrepair — a matter this outlet documented in its investigation into the Commission’s nine-year audit backlog.

The pattern is institutional, not incidental.
The government has adopted a model in extractive industry governance where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That model, applied to uranium and radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut. It is a liability being transferred — permanently and multi-generationally — onto the Guyanese people.
IV. URANIUM IS NOT OIL
There is a reason Dr. Adams specified that countries which engaged in uranium mining decades ago are still spending heavily on contamination and rehabilitation today. Uranium mining’s legacy contamination problem is structural. Tailings — the waste material left after uranium extraction — remain radioactive for thousands of years. Acid mine drainage from uranium operations can travel through groundwater systems in ways that are difficult to predict, harder to reverse, and catastrophic in communities dependent on river water. Radon gas exposure poses chronic health risks to workers and surrounding populations. The Kurupung basin sits in a region of significant biodiversity and within watersheds that feed communities across Cuyuni-Mazaruni.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintain distinct, technically staffed regulatory bodies for uranium mining. Australia’s regulatory framework for uranium is administered under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act with site-specific environmental management plans, independent auditing, and bonding requirements calibrated to decommissioning costs. Canada — the country of U92’s own domicile — requires that uranium mining operators demonstrate financial assurance for the full cost of remediation before a single shovel breaks ground.
Guyana has no equivalent framework. It has not announced one. It has not committed to a timeline for developing one. It has issued the licences and proceeded.
V. WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
This editorial makes five specific demands of the government of Guyana, each proportionate to the scale of what is being licensed:
1. The GGMC must publish the full due diligence record supporting the April 2024 licence grant to LIA (Guyana) Inc., including financial assurance documentation, technical capacity assessments, and any independent environmental baseline studies conducted prior to the licence decision.
2. The Environmental Protection Agency must publish its environmental compliance framework for radioactive mineral exploration and extraction — if one exists. If it does not exist, the EPA must state that publicly and provide a timeline for its development before drill pad preparation proceeds.
3. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority must issue a public statement on its regulatory mandate over the Kurupung project, the staffing and laboratory capacity it currently possesses for uranium oversight, and what additional capacity it requires. This statement must be made before Phase One drilling commences.
4. The Natural Resources Committee of the National Assembly must convene a hearing at which Dr. Adams, the GGMC, the EPA, and the GNEA are required to appear together and answer questions about the regulatory gap on the public record. The opposition has both the right and the obligation to demand this hearing.
5. U92 Energy Corp. must be required to post full remediation bonding — calibrated to worst-case decommissioning costs by an independent environmental engineering firm — before any exploratory drilling occurs. A junior mining company whose sole listed project is this concession cannot be permitted to internalise the upside of resource extraction while externalising the remediation liability onto Guyanese taxpayers and communities.
VI. THE PATTERN THIS GOVERNMENT MUST ACCOUNT FOR
This is not the first time The 592 Guardian has documented the government’s approach of licensing what it cannot regulate. The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was advanced through procurement structures involving Venezuelan-linked entities and an intermediary payroll vehicle before any credible independent environmental audit of the site was published. The GGMC’s own institutional audit trail has not been reconciled in nearly a decade. The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract was executed without the competitive tendering that Guyanese law requires. The Guyana EITI validation process — meant to provide at least a minimum standard of extractive industry transparency — was convened under circumstances that this outlet documented firsthand as procedurally compromised.

The uranium sector is being opened in exactly this context. Not as an isolated governance failure but as a continuation of a documented institutional posture: licence first, regulate never, audit retrospectively if at all, and frame any accountability demand as an obstacle to development.

Dr. Adams did not frame his warning as opposition to development. He framed it as a prerequisite for responsible development. That distinction matters. It forecloses the government’s default deflection — that criticism of the regulatory framework is criticism of resource extraction itself. It is not. It is a demand that the government of Guyana demonstrate that it can protect its own people from the consequences of what it is authorising on their behalf.

If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung, then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.
If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung — to detect contamination before it becomes irreversible, to hold an operator accountable for radiological breaches, to protect workers and downstream communities from exposures they will never consent to — then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.

The burden of proof is on the government. It has not discharged it. The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until it does.
— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian
The 592 Guardian | Accountability Journalism for Guyana | www.592guardian.com