Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today issued a notice of withdrawal of nearly 1 million acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service land around the Grand Canyon from new mining claims for the next two years to allow for more study and analysis.

Unlike oil and gas extraction, pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact.

The Environmental Protection Agency