Among the bills languishing on Gov. Bill Richardson's desk is one he should put out of its misery — before the suffering can be spread to other New Mexicans.

It's Senate Bill 487, purporting to clean up uranium mines in northwestern New Mexico.

We'll tax the mining companies, by darn, and clean up hundreds of boreholes and bigger mine shafts around Mt. Taylor and the boonies beyond; mines and drill holes dug before the market for uranium sagged in the 1980s. Only when things are clean will this tough-sounding measure allow in situ recovery — right there where the digging's been done — of that radioactive mineral, by running fizz-water through the openings ...

What? Hose down those holes, then separate out the uranium? Doing what to groundwater supplies?

What else but contaminating them?

Well, what's a little radioactivity alongside the riches to be made, the jobs to be offered, in a resurgent uranium market? State Sen. David Ulibarrí, who's also Cibola County manager, figures that, what with soaring uranium prices, a $50 billion industry is just waiting to open between Grants and the Navajo Reservation — whose leaders, we've noted, have the good sense to say not on our land.

What they also say is the drinking water in the eastern part of the reservation — what there is of it — might well be contaminated by this new boom.

Your worries are over, comes the pitch from Sen. Ulibarrí, Rep. Patricia Lundstrom of Gallup and other area politicians pressing for a reprise of past uranium booms: This bill would impose a surtax — 50 cents a pound — on all yellowcake uranium "severed or processed" in our state. And half of today's excise taxes also would go toward a fund to clean up all the messes made in the bad ol' days.

In fact, that's the name of the bill: "Abandoned Uranium Mine Reclamation Fees." Irresistible to a populist politician like our governor ...

Unless he thinks about it for a while: How far will four bits a pound go toward really remedying all the damage done — when, lying in mines on the sides of Mt. Taylor alone, there are thousands of gallons of water that would make Geiger counters sing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

Would even a tax 10 times as high allow adequate reclamation?

And the quid pro quo here is to let corporate contaminators flush more water into the holes? How clean will it really be once the uranium's removed?

Richardson served long enough in Congress to spot sheep-clothed wolves miles away. This one practically howls with faux sincerity.

As for a new and golden age of uranium, it's far too serious an issue to be skirted by this bill.

Can the stuff be mined, or otherwise recovered, with something like safety? With something like environmental protection? The governor would do well to put his Cabinet secretaries of health, labor, environment, natural resources and others to work on a comprehensive study of the positives — and negatives — of today's and tomorrow's nuclear industry, and New Mexico's role as supplier as well as researcher.

But signing this bill into law would be premature — and potentially dangerous.