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Navajos spurn uranium mining

By James W. Brosnan
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

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WASHINGTON — Soaring uranium prices are bringing mining companies back to western New Mexico, but the response from the Navajo Nation is "keep away."

Two tribal leaders and four tribe members at a congressional hearing Tuesday recited a legacy of cancer and other diseases they believe were caused by uranium mining during the 1950s, '60s and '70s and by the slow response of federal agencies.

The Navajo Nation has since banned uranium mining on reservation land. Now it wants Congress to put a moratorium on uranium mining on American Indian trust land regulated for the benefit of individuals by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

One company that wants to mine on those allotments and to persuade the Navajo Nation to allow mining as well is Uranium Resources, which recently bought an old mill near Grants. The company says it can employ about 3,000 people at mine sites it owns or would lease in the region.

"These will not be your mother's uranium mines from 50 years ago," Richard Van Horn, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Uranium Resources, said in an interview. "It will be safe. It will be environmentally friendly."

And at $78 a pound on the uranium spot market - 10 times the price of four years ago - the Navajos could have billions of dollars worth of ore on their land, said Van Horn.

Told of Van Horn's comments, the director of the Navajo Nation's Environmental Protection Agency, Stephen Etsitty, said the tribe would reconsider the uranium mining ban "only if we were able to find a true and reliable cure for cancer."

"We understand this is a resource. We understand that it is valuable at this time. But we cannot rely on the market to rest our future on," Etsitty said. "We need more than monetary compensation. The thing that's been driving our position is that the legacy contains all these health issues that have not been addressed."

Etsitty testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday. He was joined by George Arthur, the chairman of the Navajo council's resources committee, and four Navajos who had personal or family experiences with uranium mining.

Phil Harrison, 50, said his father worked in a mine near Cove, Ariz., and would bring home water collected from a cistern at his workplace. The family used it to wash in, and for making coffee and infant formula.

One brother died at the age of 6 months from a stomach ailment, Harrison said. His father died from lung cancer at the age of 46 and his cousin's father died from the same illness at 42.

An Indian Health Service official testified later that more lung cancers on Navajo land are due to uranium exposure than to smoking.

Edith Hood, who lives 12 miles north of Church Rock Village, near Gallup, said there are piles of waste from a uranium mine 50 to 60 feet high less than a quarter-mile from her home. Children still play in the piles, she said, and sheep get through the fence that is supposed to barricade the tailings.

"Today, there is talk of opening new mines. How can they open new mines when we haven't even addressed the health impacts and environmental damage from the old ones? Mining has already contaminated the water, the plants and the air. People are sick and dying all around us," Hood said, her voice often breaking with emotion.

It was at Church Rock Village in 1979, three months after the explosion at Three Mile Island, that a dam gave way at a tailings lagoon, sending 94 million gallons of wastewater and 1,100 tons of mill waste into the Rio Puerco.

The Environmental Protection Agency last summer removed 6,500 cubic yards of the radium-contaminated soils around the Northeast Church Rock Mine at a cost of $990,000 to EPA and $1.3 million to the former operator, United Nuclear Corp. An estimated 1.4 million cubic yards remains to be cleaned up.

The Department of Energy has spent $137 million at four milling sites that supplied uranium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. The EPA also demolished two contaminated homes, although as many as 70 to 80 remain to be examined.

Both Democrats and Republicans on the oversight committee criticized the federal response to the cleanup effort as too limited and too slow.

"You have all suffered needlessly from corporate greed and our nation's weapons programs," said Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat. She wondered if the response would have been the same if the uranium had been in Minneapolis or New York City.

In one telling moment, officials from the EPA, Department of Energy, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs admitted that Tuesday's hearing was the first time the agencies had ever sat in the room to discuss uranium pollution on Navajo land.

"The old adage about too many chiefs comes to mind," observed Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican.

Said the EPA's administrator for the region, Wayne Nastri: "Perhaps we studied issues too long. Perhaps we needed to take action."

Rep. Tom Udall, a Santa Fe Democrat who was allowed to participate in the hearing although he is not a committee member, pounced on the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Jerry Gidner.

"Do you think you (the bureau) fulfilled the trust responsibility?" Udall asked.

"That's hard to say," Gidner responded.

Udall interrupted: "Hard to say! I would hope you would be outraged. I would hope you would stand up and say, `We're supposed to be protecting these people.' Have you asked any of these agencies to put money in their budgets to remedy these contamination and cleanup problems and radioactive homes?"

"No," Gidner responded.

Gidner went on to say he didn't think the BIA could have stopped the mining given the pressure during the Cold War for nuclear weapons.

The committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, told the agencies he wants a progress report on Dec. 12 and then he will decide whether another hearing is needed.