Trump mining grants 'massive benefit' to Nevada, UNR's Sandoval says 15%
By Mark Robison27%
8/7/2026, 3:41:41 PM
Keywords: Mining Grants, Nevada, Unr, Brian Sandoval, Donald Trump, Critical Minerals, Mining Education
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, False Dilemma, and Indoctrination, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 23% saturation with 121 hits. Analysis detected 736 faulty-reasoning hits from 525 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 23.9% and a BS Rank of 15% (26,072 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 85.20% of the article peer group.
University of Nevada, Reno stands to benefit in the wake of President Donald Trump hosting a U.S.
State Department meeting on the importance of critical minerals for national security.
On Friday, Aug.
7, Trump announced $180 million in grants for mining schools, including UNR’s Mackay School of Mines.
UNR President Brian Sandoval, College of Science Associate Dean Scott Bassett and Brayden Goodrich, a mining engineering student who graduated in May, attended.
Also at the event were Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Security official David Copley.
“One of the things the president said is that they believe it's the first time in 100 years that there's been a dialogue and investment by the White House in mining education,” Sandoval told the Reno Gazette Journal after the meeting.
“Nationwide, there are less than 200 graduates from the mining schools — that's folks that go into the mining industry," he said.
"So I think it's a strategic and important investment, and we're hopeful that the university will be a beneficiary of that.”
A 2025 Nevada Mining Association report says that the U.S. confers 160 mining undergraduate degrees per year compared with 2,500 to 3,000 in China.
“Nevada is one of the top mining states in the country,” Sandoval said.
“One of the things our mining industry needs most is engineers and graduates who work in the mining industry.
This (federal money) is potentially a massive benefit to the university and to the mining industry and thus the economy in the state.”
UNR is one of 14 accredited institutions in the U.S. with educational programs in mining, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration.
All 14 are expected to be recipients of $100 million total in grant funding from the Department of Education with three — not UNR's Mackay — getting a portion of $80 million in grants from the Department of War, the White House announced.
Sandoval said it wasn’t known yet how much UNR might receive in funding for its mining school or what it’ll be used for.
“We expect the specifics to come out in the very near future,” he said.
The announcement didn’t come out of the blue, though.
“We've been having conversations with the (Trump) administration for 18 months to two years about critical minerals and the fact that we have a specialty in those things,” Sandoval said.
UNR will host a lithium and critical minerals summit later this month, he said.
“We want to develop a critical mineral center within the Mackay School of Earth Sciences because what the president talked about today is we want to mine it, we want to be able to process it and be able to onshore everything that's associated with critical minerals and mining it so that there's no reliance on foreign countries to do that," Sandoval said.
“This is not just a state imperative, but it's a national imperative.”
Mark Robison is the politics & government reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal.
Email comments to mrobison@rgj.com or comment on Mark’s Greater Reno Facebook page.
Speakers
2speakers61%attributed speech206writer words
Selected voice
87%flagged-word coverageBrian Sandoval
295 attributed words92% of attributed speech43% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.