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.
“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.
Bill Hatch lives in the Central Valley in California. He is a member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade of San Francisco. He can be reached at: billhatch@hotmail.com.
Source: CounterPunch
