President Donald Trump sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, undoing protections established by his Democratic predecessors on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans.

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development.

Trump, a Republican, issued proclamations Monday under the Antiquities Act to reduce their size by about 90% each. He took similar actions during his first term, but those were reversed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans have drastically reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in Western states. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.

“They took the land from the people quite honestly,” Trump said at a signing event at the White House Monday. “We’re giving it back.”

President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, established Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, and President Barack Obama, also a Democrat, created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 under the Antiquities Act. The 1906 law gives presidents the powers to protect sites considered historic, archaeologically significant or culturally important.

Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said tribal leaders had braced for a reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. She said it was “heartbreaking” and accused federal officials of sidestepping their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be impacted.

“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” Smith-Idjesa said. “This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”

‘Big day for Utah’

Utah officials had long fought against the monument designations and argued that the state should be in charge of controlling its own lands. Trump in his first term reduced their size, calling their creation a “massive land grab.” Combined they spanned more than 3.2 million acres (13 million hectares), an area nearly the size of Connecticut.

Trump reduced them Monday to less than 303,000 acres (123,000 hectares) combined.

That’s a greater reduction than his first term, when he left Grand Staircase Escalante at 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) and Bears Ears at 213,000 acres (86,000 hectares).

“This is a big day for Utah,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox as he stood next to Trump at the White House. “These monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area as possible to protect the antiquities.”

Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of tribal nations that consider the land sacred. The landscape contains ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites and features in some tribes’ creation and migration stories. Its designation honored five tribes in the region — Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute.

Home to hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance, Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.

Grand Staircase-Escalante consists of cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites, including rock paintings. It holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium.

The national monument designation provides sweeping protections not just for significant geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump’s move to downsize say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for critical minerals.

Trump asserted Monday that people can not hunt, fish or “virtually not even walk” on the monuments. That’s false: Hunting, fishing, camping and other recreation are permitted under state and federal regulations, said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation group.

Biden designated or expanded more than a dozen monuments and had a goal to conserve at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

Trump’s policies are largely the opposite: He wants to tap into the natural resource wealth of federal lands that total more than 100,000 square miles (260,000 square kilometers) and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.

That’s drawn backlash from Democrats who warn of the wholesale disposal of treasured landscapes for commercial gain.

“Today’s executive action is another chapter in this administration’s war on the West,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said Monday. He added that Trump was “turning the Antiquities Act on its head.”

Land sale proposals fell flat

Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last year that federal officials would review and consider redrawing monument boundaries as part of a push to expand U.S. energy production.

Trump in his current term has used proclamations to lift commercial fishing prohibitions within expansive marine monuments in areas of the Pacific Ocean and in the Atlantic Ocean off the New England coast. Those monuments were created by Democratic and Republican administrations. The effort to boost the fishing industry, which has been challenged in court, marks a dramatic shift in federal policy by prioritizing commercial interests over efforts to allow the fish supply to increase.

Some Republicans have tried to sell or transfer federal lands to states or other entities. Those efforts have largely fallen flat: A push by some GOP lawmakers in the House to sell public lands ran into bipartisan opposition, while another proposal by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to sell more than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square kilometers) of federal lands was removed from Republicans’ big tax and spending bill.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year turned back a lawsuit from Utah officials who sought to wrest control of vast areas of public land within the state from the federal government.

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Hannah Schoenbaum reported from Salt Lake City.

This story was adapted from a radio broadcast script using artificial intelligence. Every story, including those adapted with AI, is reviewed by a human editor before publication to ensure that KSL’s editorial standards are upheld.

SALT LAKE CITY — As Utah looks for ways to meet growing electricity demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, manufacturing and population growth, nuclear energy has become part of the state’s energy conversation.

Gov. Spencer Cox has said Utah must embrace nuclear energy if it wants to meet surging electricity demand and remain competitive in the global economy.

“And as I’ve said many times, if you are serious about energy abundance, you have to be serious about nuclear energy,” Cox said.

Much of that demand is being driven by artificial intelligence data centers, which require enormous and reliable power supplies. Proponents say small modular reactors are the answer — offering stable, carbon-free electricity that traditional renewables struggle to match.

Critics, including downwinders and environmental advocates, said Utah’s history with radiation exposure should make state leaders more cautious.

Listen to parts one and two of the nuclear energy reporting on KSL News Daily below. 

Advocates tout nuclear reliability and clean air benefits

John Kotek, senior vice president of policy and public affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said nuclear power’s fuel cycle gives it an edge over fossil fuels.

“Once you fuel a nuclear reactor, it’ll run between 18 and 24 months before you have to shut it down and put new fuel in it,” Kotek said. “So you’re not dependent on shipments of coal or gas in a pipeline or what have you.”

Kotek added that nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions or air pollutants, saying it has “a real role to play in cleaning up air quality in the West.”

Dr. Tatjana Jevremovic, director of the nuclear lab at the University of Utah, said the math also favors uranium.

“The amount of energy you get out of a kilogram of uranium is about 10,000 times the amount of energy you get out of a kilogram of coal or petroleum,” Goodell said. “And also it is an energy source that has basically zero carbon emissions along with it.”

Environmental, health groups raise alarms

Not everyone is convinced the benefits outweigh the risks. Carmen Valdez, a senior policy associate at Heal Utah, said co-locating reactors with data centers creates compounding dangers.

“If something were to catch on fire, if something were to fail, you are now accumulating a lot of issues as well as creating toxic spaces,” Valdez said. “If we’re concerned about the cancers coming from data centers, what is the concern about a data center with a nuclear reactor, with spent fuel, on site?”

Valdez urged state lawmakers to invest instead in resources Utah already has in abundance.

“We are extremely equipped for solar. Maybe we should start looking at rooftop solar for our large communities and consumers,” Valdez said. “We have battery storage. We have so many opportunities.”

Waste disposal remains unresolved

Even nuclear supporters acknowledge one lingering challenge: the United States has no permanent disposal facility for radioactive waste.

“The very good part about spent nuclear fuel is that it’s very easy to manage. You put it in pools for a few years, you put it in these concrete and steel containers, and you can leave it on site,” Kotek said. “The challenge is, of course, it is radioactive, so it needs a long-term place to be stored and ultimately disposed.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an independent federal agency that licenses and regulates the civilian use of nuclear energy.  Kotek said the commission has helped to significantly improve plant safety over decades of operation.

“We’ve been operating commercial nuclear power plants in the United States for more than 60 years,” Kotek said. “And when you do something that long, you learn a lot about it. You get good at it.”

Utah’s Downwinders say history demands caution

Between 1951 and 1962, the U.S. government conducted above-ground nuclear testing at what was then called the Nevada Test Site. As a result, the wind carried radioactive debris to thousands of people in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

The people subjected to that fallout are known as Downwinders. For Mary Dickson, a Downwinder and thyroid cancer survivor, the push for nuclear energy carries a deeply personal weight. Dickson advocates for Utahns harmed by radiation exposure from nuclear weapons testing, and she said the state’s history should give leaders pause.

“The idea that they would be so cavalier and just welcome nuclear energy and everything that goes with it, including nuclear waste, into our state makes us expendable,” Dickson said. “And you’d think with our legacy, we would be far, far more cautious and just say ‘no.’”

Dickson said the concern extends beyond reactors themselves.

“They’re pushing for the facilities for every step — to develop uranium for reactors, to mine it, mill it, fabricate it, enrich it, all of that,” Dickson said. “And they’re looking at these throughout the state.”

Modern reactors designed to contain worst-case scenarios

Goodell said residents worried about safety should consider the track record of communities that already live near nuclear plants. He said modern facilities are engineered with multiple layers of protection.

“We don’t just design them to prevent accidents. We design them to contain accidents, so that even in a worst-case scenario for a nuclear power plant, all of the nasty radioactive material will stay at the plant,” Goodell said.

Graphic accessed from the Downwinders.info website. It indicates which counties in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah experienced fallout from nuclear testing.

Dickson acknowledged that newer technology is safer than past designs but said no system is foolproof. She called on Utahns to demand answers from government leaders and push for regulations that protect public health and safety.

Contributing | Simone Seikaly

SALT LAKE CITY — On Sunday, it got all the way up to 109 degrees in Salt Lake City, and on a record-breaking heat day, it was not a surprise to find a packed splash pad.

Max Simakov and his family were visiting from Texas, and let’s just say a triple-digit day is nothing they couldn’t handle.

“Three of us live in Austin, Texas, and so this is actually normal except we have humidity. So this is nothing,” Simakov said.

While the kids were cooling off at the splash pad, things were heating up in the car. FOX 13 News placed a tray of unbaked cookies on the dashboard, seeing how long it would take to bake. In the first 30 minutes, the cookies had already reached 130 degrees, which shows how fast things can heat up.

Sunday night forecast:

Triple-digits sticking around – Sunday night forecast

West Jordan resident Kristina Morrill and her family were at the splash pad on Sunday, and she said she takes extra safety precautions for her family during the summer months.

“I’m vulnerable to the heat, so I can pass out, and so they kind of know hydration is the key,” she said. “Get yourself ready. Start drinking earlier, maybe a couple hours before that.”

“Sunscreen for sure — we are very diligent with that,” Simakov added. “Sometimes in the summertime, kids kind of roam from house to house, from friend to friend, and so I just want to make sure the kids are hydrated.”

In a matter of just two hours, the cookies inside FOX 13’s car had crisp edges, which demonstrated how dangerously hot the inside of cars can get. It’s encouraged not to leave dogs or kids inside the car for long periods of time, especially on triple-digit days.

Salt Lake County has a list of cooling centers across the state, along with their hours, on their website.