Power to the Patients: the Navajo Nation vs. the Uranium Industry
The Canyon Mine has been renamed Pinyon Plain Mine.
In a move triggering a new phase in the conflict between the Navajo Nation, a uranium mining company, and state and the federal government, on July 30 a mining corporation began trucking radioactive ore 350 miles through the Navajo Nation. This violated an agreement the Navajos thought they had with Energy Fuels, Inc. (EFI), federal and state agencies that required a two-week advance notice before hauling uranium ore through the Nation. It also violated a Navajo law that denied any hauling of radioactive material through the Nation, but Arizona and the feds declared their control over the route. On August 3, Navajo President Buu Nygren ordered tribal police to stop the trucks which had transported “dozens of tons” of radioactive ore according to reports from the Pinyon Plain Mine on the Kaibab National Forest immediately southwest of the Navajo Nation, to EFI’s White Mesa Mill, in Blanding, Utah, just beyond the northern, San Juan River border of the Nation. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs said she’d try to start “good faith negotiations” between the tribe and miners. Nygren produced an executive order stating that the Navajos and the mining company must reach an agreement on transporting radioactive material through the reservation, which may stop transportation for the next six months.
Former Navajo President, Jonathan Nez put the case simply: “Prior to the arrival of uranium mining, Navajos had the lowest rate of cancer of all the tribes.”
To take a statistical slice: in 2020 there were more than 40,000 cancer cases in Arizona and New Mexico, with a combined population of 9.5 million, while more than 20,000 occurred among 400,000 Navajos, less than half living on the Navajo Nation. That is why Navajos call cancer Yeetso, the Big Monster. Twenty thousand cases have a much greater effect on 400,000 people than 40,000 cases have on 9.5 million people.
Protests broke out along the route: on Friday about 50 people in Cameron including President Nygren and his wife Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren; on Saturday, protesters gathered at the Flagstaff City Hall, including members of the Haul No! group; and on Sunday, more than 100 people, including Havasupai tribal members who live in Grand Canyon directly beneath the Pinyon Plain Mine, demonstrated at Grand Canyon Junction near the mine. Organizers are planning another demonstration on August 24 at Grand Canyon Junction.
The tribes, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Grand Canyon Trust and hundreds of other residents of the region fought the opening of this mine for years but were defeated by federal and state governments to which they had appealed.
Recently, Congress has made three decisions that bear directly on uranium mining on the Navajo Nation: it banned the purchase of Russian uranium processed for nuclear power-plant use, except when no other suitable uranium is available; it discontinued the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which had provided funds to about 4,600 Navajos, nearly 90-percent of the “downwind” victims who produced 30 million tons of uranium from 1944-1986; and it approved $2.7 billion for development of the domestic uranium industry, most of which may well go into the pockets of EFI, a Canadian company that owns Pinyon Plain Mine and the White Mesa Mill, the only uranium mill operating at the moment in the US. In Wyoming, EFI has two other mines and one Republican senator, John Barrasso, who authored the bill to ban the purchase of Russian uranium.
There is no mention in the bill that companies mining in the US, like the only uranium producer in the country, Canadian-owned EFI, will be required to sell only to US buyers. An oversight?
The discontinuation of RECA is not so much a matter of saving public funds as it is a way to forget about miners, their families, and other residents mainly on the Navajo Nation who have suffered and continue to suffer from the health effects, mainly cancer, from prolonged exposure to uranium in mines and in mine tailings, and through lack of education about the danger of radiation. The Diné College began its Uranium Education Program by producing a glossary of explanations in Navajo for uranium-radiation terms in English. Neither the federal government nor mine owners had explained the dangers of working in their unventilated mines to Navajo workers; or the dangers of Navajos using material from mine tailings to build structures; or for their children to play in the tailings.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reported on June 7: “’Speaker (Mike) Johnson not only has betrayed the veterans and the blue-collar uranium miners and their families but has really also profoundly impacted and wronged the Navajo people,’ said Navajo Nation spokesperson Justin Ahasteen, from his Washington, D.C. office.
“Ahasteen said the tribe played a crucial role in World War II, from the Code Talkers to supplying the uranium used for the country’s nuclear arsenal.”
Energy Fuels, Inc. CEO Mark Chalmers holds the opposite view. There is no history, no cancer epidemic, and the health damage from 1,500 uranium mines – 500 still not reclaimed – cannot be obliterated by his spell-binding narrative of wealth, health, and triumph of the American Way. Just buy EFI “clean energy” and you’ll be all right.
“The U,S. should not rely on bad international actors to supply the fuel that powers our homes and workplaces with carbon-free nuclear energy,” Chalmers said in a company press release. “We applaud senators Barrasso and Manchin, Representatives McMorris Rodgers, Latta, and congressional leaders and the president for coming together in a bipartisan effort to resist foreign interests that are funding the war in Ukraine.”
Chalmers began his career in Australia and is a dual citizen of Australia and the US. Just a few years ago, Energy Fuels, Inc. described itself as “a Toronto-based uranium and vanadium mineral exploration and development company with more than 30,000 acres of highly prospective uranium and vanadium property located in the States of Colorado, Utah and Arizona.” These days, the EFI pitch is that it is All American All the Time, with an American office in Lakewood CO, where Lockheed Martin dwells.
The Guardian reported last week that, “At Cop28, the US endorsed an agreement to triple nuclear energy production to combat climate change, boosting the demand for uranium.”
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is not going to bar any doors to mining interests that might do harm to Native Americans’ environments or health. Her Department of Environmental Quality has consistently approved the water pumped out of the Pinyon Plain Mine, despite its high content of uranium and other heavy metals, due to how it flows into its ponds.
Amber Reimondo, Grand Canyon Trust energy director, reported in July:
“All told, more than 66 million gallons of precious Grand Canyon region groundwater have been pumped out of the mine shaft as of December 31, 2023. And water loss isn’t the only concern.
“Water pumped out of the mine shaft has shown high levels of heavy metals that could spell disaster if they ever leached into surrounding groundwater aquifers, including uranium, lead, and arsenic. In the last quarter of 2023 (remember, the mine began extracting ore in December 2023), levels increased dramatically. Uranium levels reached six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant level for safe drinking water, lead reached 243 times the maximum contaminant level, and arsenic reached a whopping 812 times the maximum contaminant level.
“At times, the mine’s owner has struggled to get rid of all this water. It pumps the floodwater into a large open-air pond inside the mine fence, where birds often alight to drink and bathe. Visitors to the mine site have spotted burrows and tufts of fur caught in the chain-link where thirsty animals appear to have tunneled under the fence to reach the pond. On windy days, the misted water blows through the chain-link into the surrounding national monument lands.”
The White Mesa Mill recently received a large quantity of nuclear waste. Grand Canyon Trust staff described the event:
“Bills of lading recently uncovered in a shipping database reveal that Energy Fuels Resources imported more than 275,000 pounds of radioactive materials from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The materials appear to have been trucked to the company’s controversial White Mesa uranium mill, a mile from Bears Ears National Monument and just up the road from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa community.
“The materials arrived in the port of Everett, Washington on January 16, 2024. Aerial photos taken of the mill on May 16, 2024 reveal numerous shipping containers believed to hold materials from Japan’s nuclear energy program, including uranium ores used in testing, uranium-loaded resins, filter-bed sands, and uranium-loaded carbon, which Japanese regulators view as waste.
“’While the mill may extract a small amount of uranium from these materials, more than 99% of them will likely end up buried in the waste pits at the White Mesa Mill along with the more than 700 million pounds of radioactive waste already there,’ said Tim Peterson, cultural landscapes director for the Grand Canyon Trust. ‘This latest shipment from Japan shifts the burden of Japan’s radioactive legacy from Japanese citizens to the people of White Mesa.’
“Information about how much the Utah mill might have been paid to process and dispose of the materials has not been made public. Normally, a uranium mill would pay for uranium ore, but for decades the White Mesa Mill has instead earned millions in fees to process and discard radioactive materials from across North America and the world.
“’If the mill’s operators are getting paid to receive this shipment from Japan, it’s not for processing uranium, but for disposing of waste the Japanese people don’t want near their communities,’ said Peterson.
“This is the second time in 19 years that the Japan Atomic Energy Agency has shipped radioactive materials to White Mesa. In 2005, the agency paid the White Mesa Mill $5.8 million to unload 1 million pounds of radioactive soils.
‘There’s no easy way for the public to track how much radioactive waste is being sent to the mill, where it’s coming from, and when. This should be a concern for anybody who drives along Utah’s highways,’ said Chaitna Sinha, staff attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust. ‘If the mill is going to function like a radioactive waste disposal business, it should be regulated like one, including obtaining the licenses and permits a commercial waste-disposal facility would have to secure to operate.’
“The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and community members in White Mesa are concerned that the mill’s radioactive waste processing and disposal business has created a de facto radioactive waste dump in their backyard, threatening public health, water, and air quality in White Mesa. The tribe and the grassroots group, White Mesa Concerned Community, will host a spiritual walk to protest the mill on October 12, 2024.”
These are the kinds of prices Navajos, Havasupai, Utes, Hopis, Paiutes, and others who live on the Colorado Plateau are paying and will pay for the new campaign for domestic uranium mining to produce “clean energy.”
Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch’s response to EFI’s unnotified transportation of radioactive ore through the reservation (called “smuggling” by President Nygren) was to insist that Navajo law be obeyed in the Nation.
“’Particularly with something as sensitive as uranium, where there is a long legacy of contamination and disproportionate impact to the Navajo people,’ she said. “’Anyone bringing those substances onto the Nation should undertake that activity with respect and sensitivity to the psychological impact to our people, as well as the trauma of uranium development that our community continues to live with every day.”
EFI can get away with this lawless behavior and will get away with more of it because the federal and state governments are themselves out of control. Wild tales are spinning through the minds of leaders of the Indispensable Nation – the narratives of limitless Hegemony, National Security, Monopoly Capitalism, Clean Energy, Racism, Sunbelt Growth, and Christian Fundamentalism.
At the end of this survey, I turned to a quote of anthropologist Gladys Reichard, which appears at the conclusion of Navajo Symbols of Healing, by Donald Sandner, M.D.: “Navajo dogma connects all things, natural and experienced, from man’s skeleton to universal destiny, which encompasses even inconceivable space, in a closely interlocked unity which omits nothing, no matter how small or how stupendous, and in which each individual has a significant function until, at his final dissolution, he not only becomes one with the ultimate harmony, but he is that harmony.”
The Navajos’ struggle against Yeetso, the Big Monster, is also our struggle, because in defending themselves they are also defending all of us facing the growing risk of exposure to radioactivity as “perfectly safe” nuclear power plants proliferate throughout the nation.
In connection with EFI’s declaration that mines are safer these days due to new federal laws, residents near Gallup NM remember the Church Rock Spill, the worst radiation accident that ever occurred in the US, worse than Three Mile Island. It happened seven years after passage of the federal Clean Water Act but not many of us outside of the Southwest have ever heard about it. In 1979, the United Nuclear Corporation‘s tailings disposal pond at its uranium mill in Church Rock breached, releasing more than 1,100 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 84-million gallons of acidic, radioactive water into the Puerco River, the residues of which traveled 80 miles onto the Navajo Nation. The river was used widely for drinking water and for watering stock. People were not notified of the spill for several days and the New Mexico governor refused to request by the Navajo government to the declare a disaster. Five years later the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Department declared the river was still unsafe for human or stock consumption.
The people of the Colorado Plateau have suffered enough from government dominated by a narrow clique of billionaires invested in national security anxiety, salvation through technology, and real estate growth in the Southwest, land of senior residential facilities and air-conditioning, where each summer sets a new heat record. Air-conditioning already takes 19 percent of our electricity. This can only increase with the growth of the Sunbelt and global warming.
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