By Antonio Dey | HGPTV Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — As global extractive conglomerates aggressively advance exploration footprints across the Guiana Shield, petroleum engineer and premier environmental specialist Dr. Vincent Adams has issued a stern, unequivocal warning to the executive branch: Guyana is fundamentally unprepared, untrained, and structurally ill-equipped to safely manage a commercial uranium mining industry.
The high-stakes warning follows a surge of international market activity within the domestic mineral sector. According to technical investment filings dated May 27, 2026, the Canadian-registered extraction group U92 Energy Corporation successfully secured absolute operational control over Guyana’s singular advanced-stage uranium asset—the 92.2 km² Kurupung Uranium Project in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni region—via a reverse takeover and asset acquisition of a Singaporean parent firm.
While corporate boards celebrate the transaction as a definitive leap forward for Guyana’s green-energy transition, Dr. Adams, the former Executive Director of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cautions that moving into radioactive extraction with the country’s current lax regulatory infrastructure is an invite to generational environmental degradation.
Radioactive Realities: The Multi-Generational Danger of Uranium
Unlike conventional gold or bauxite mining, uranium extraction presents complex challenges due to toxic waste longevity and radioactive decay chains. Dr. Adams emphasized that the industry cannot be policed using casual, reactive environmental oversight.
If containment systems fail or environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are rubber-stamped, neighboring communities face severe public health risks, including spiked incidences of cancer, lung disease, and permanent groundwater contamination that can persist for centuries.
“Mining uranium is not some kind of a simple operation,” Dr. Adams stated during an unflinching policy discussion. “And we see right now what is happening in terms of environmental governance in Guyana. You can execute this industry safely—I want to make that completely clear—but you must possess the technical capacity to do it. The Government of Guyana, based strictly on their active track record, does not have it; they simply do not understand what it takes to build it.”
An Untrained EPA: The “Zero-Hour” Competency Deficit
Dr. Adams reserved his sharpest criticisms for the current institutional state of the EPA, pulling back the curtain on what he described as a total collapse of specialized human capital development inside the national regulator.
He alleged that robust capacity-building initiatives, including technical training frameworks funded by the World Bank during his tenure, were systematically dismantled or cancelled by the political directorate.
“They have no capacity whatsoever,” Dr. Adams asserted. “Look at the most critical, dominant industry in this country right now: deepwater oil and gas. There is not a single person remaining at the EPA who has even a single hour of formal training in petroleum engineering or offshore risk mitigation. They cancelled every single safeguard program we put in place.”
International Disasters: The Soviet Analogue
Drawing directly on his extensive 30-year career with the United States Department of Energy (USDOE)—where he managed multi-billion-dollar environmental cleanups across America’s nuclear weapons complex—Dr. Adams urged policymakers to study global precedents before signing off on foreign concession licenses.
He referenced extensive environmental impact studies conducted across former Soviet Union territories, specifically tracking the legacy of deep contamination in Kazakhstan and Germany. In those regions, under-regulated uranium mining left behind thousands of hectares of irradiated wasteland and poisoned water tables that required billions of Euros in international emergency remediation funds to stabilize.
Dr. Adams strongly condemned current offshore operational compromises, noting that if the state allows oil majors like ExxonMobil to routinely dump hot, toxic produced water into the Atlantic Ocean rather than mandating full subsea reinjection, it stands no chance of enforcing compliance on uranium operators. He warned that discharging unmonitored radioactive wastewater into the interior river networks would permanently damage Guyana’s eco-tourism corridors, destroy pristine interior wildlife, and poison indigenous fisheries.
He is urging the cabinet to pause all exploration advancement until independent baseline environmental studies are carried out and an autonomous, highly specialized nuclear regulatory council is established. “Without adequate, rigorous preparation,” Adams warned, “Guyana is exposing its future generations to a silent public health crisis.”
