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Lawmakers Hear Community Concerns & Industry Promises

In a series of separate public hearings this fall, members of Congress and New Mexico state legislators heard testimonies from the full range of people who have something to say about uranium mining — community members aggrieved by six decades of mining impacts, industry officials trumpeting new jobs from renewed uranium activity, and government regulators trying to figure out how to address both the past uranium legacy and future uranium developments.

But lawmakers’ reactions to essentially the same information were starkly different, telling a lot about the economic and political influence the uranium industry has on local and state elected officials.

On one hand, members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, after hearing testimony in Washington, DC on October 23 from Navajo citizens and Navajo Nation officials on the “devastating” affects of past uranium mining, expressed indignation that the impacts are still largely unaddressed. (See excerpts of the testimonies that follow.) The Committee ordered federal agencies to come up with a unified response to what chairman Henry Waxman of California, called “an American tragedy.”

Two weeks later, Representatives Tom Udall of New Mexico, Jim Matheson of Utah and Rick Renzi of Arizona joined Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr., for a roundtable discussion of uranium issues. Udall agreed with President Shirley and representatives of grass-roots groups that the federal government ought to consider imposing a moratorium on new uranium development until abandoned mines are cleaned up, community health studies conducted, and former uranium workers and their families fully compensated for their illnesses and premature deaths.

Mitchell Capitan, founder of Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), stated that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) “did not respect the right and sovereignty of the Navajo Nation to say ‘No’ to new uranium mining” when it granted Hydro Resources, Inc. (HRI), a license to mine uranium using the in situ leach (ISL) method in the Navajo communities of Churchrock and Crownpoint. “The NRC gives every indication it is tilted toward the uranium and nuclear industry,” Capitan said, handing Rep. Udall a picture from the NRC’s website of agency officials smiling and shaking hands with a uranium company that is proposing a new ISL mine in Wyoming.

Renzi said he, Udall and Matheson, plus other members of Congress, “are all signers to the Navajo Nation ban and we may need some technical corrections from BIA and NRC” to preserve the Navajo prohibition on uranium mining and processing in Navajo Country.

NRC’s Dr. Charles Miller acknowledged that NRC faces “an uphill battle” to “gain your trust.” But he was sharply rebuked by Navajo Nation Assistant Attorney General David Taylor for stating that the NRC had not issued a uranium milling license on Indian land. “I don’t know how you can say, Dr. Miller, that you’ve not approved licenses on Navajo land,” Taylor said. “Sections 8 and 17 [of the HRI project in Churchrock Chapter] are on Indian land.”

The tone among some New Mexico legislators and local government officials was decidedly different at a state legislative committee meeting in Grants, N.M., on October 29. “We need to mine uranium because if we don’t, someone else will,” said State Representative Jim Trujillo of Santa Fe at the hearing of the Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee (RHMC). “The problem of abandoned mines is a different matter. We need nuclear power to solve our energy problems.”

Grants Mayor Joe Murrietta said: “Cibola County is proud to be the uranium capital of the world. “We passed a resolution earlier this year supporting uranium mining to decrease our reliance on foreign oil. Mining and milling can be conducted safely under modern rules and regulations, and can provide jobs and economic stimulus to the region.”

The local and state leaders were buoyed by Uranium Resources, Inc.’s (URI) announcement on October 12 that it intends to purchase from Rio Algom Corporation what is now the site of the largest uranium mill tailings disposal facility in the U.S. in Ambrosia Lake, located about 15 miles northwest of Grants. URI President Rick Van Horn told RHMC members, “Our plan is to build a new, state-of-the-art uranium mill with zero discharge on the footprint of the old [Kerr-McGee Corporation] mill.” He said the mill would employ about 200 people and contribute to 4,000 new jobs in the New Mexico uranium industry.

State Representative Patty Lundstrom of Gallup broached the idea of funding cleanup of “legacy sites” through a surcharge on new uranium production, which she described as “inevitable.” Van Horn and George Byers of Neutron Energy, a Phoenix company exploring for uranium on the Cebolleta Land Grant about 60 miles west of Albuquerque, both said they would support such a surcharge as long as it is not “punitive.”

Under questioning by State Senator Lynda Lovejoy of Crownpoint, Van Horn admitted that a “substantial amount” of the uranium produced at URI’s proposed mill could go to nuclear power plants in Japan as a result of its joint venture with the Japanese megaconglomerate, Itochu Corporation, to fund development of the new mill and HRI’s Churchrock and Crownpoint ISL properties. (URI is the parent firm of HRI). But none of the legislators questioned Van Horn’s assertion that a conventional uranium mill that crushes and grinds rock to start the uranium extraction process will have “zero discharge” or Byers’s claim that major environmental groups now back nuclear power as an alternative to the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant release of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Richard Abitz, a geochemist who provided expert testimony for ENDAUM and SRIC in their legal challenge of NRC’s licensing of the HRI project, told the Committee that the public and policy makers aren’t aware that the mining, processing, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of uranium into fuel pellets for nuclear reactors requires huge amounts of electricity that contribute to global warming.

Abitz said his experience cleaning up uranium-contaminated groundwater at the Fernald uranium plant in Ohio and his evaluation of HRI’s proposed ISL project convinced him that ISL mining is incompatible with high-quality aquifers like those in the Eastern Navajo Agency where HRI proposes ISL mining. He provided several graphs to show that the native water quality in the regional aquifers is very good, that restoration to pre-mining natural conditions is virtually impossible, and that HRI and other companies often manipulate groundwater data to suggest that the aquifers in which solution mining would occur are already unfit for human consumption.

Even though Abitz had been invited by the Committee staff to give a “technical presentation” on groundwater impacts of ISL mining, Committee members treated him as something of a hostile witness. Representative Rod Adair of Roswell asked industry representatives present at the hearing if they desired to respond to Abitz’s “allegations.” He also quoted from an unnamed “industry report” that repeated the claim that the aquifers in northwestern New Mexico are suitable only for uranium mining because they are already naturally contaminated. Abitz said he was simply analyzing HRI’s own data to reach his conclusions, and advised Adair to be careful of conclusions reached by companies with vested interests in moving uranium mining forward.

That attitude of state legislators is hauntingly reminiscent of the late-1970s when state and local officials routinely ignored evidence of repeated environmental violations at all of the active uranium mills, and belittled concerns of community members and environmental groups that groundwater contamination at mining and milling sites was worsening, and sickness was increasing in mining communities. Perhaps that attitude comes from the Uranium Boys paying for legislators’ meals, hiring tour vans, employing lobbyists who constantly talk in the ears of individual lawmakers, and making campaign contributions that community members, former workers and environmental groups can’t, or won’t, make.

However, industry claims of newfound environmental enlightenment and newly discovered corporate responsibility should ring hollow considering the industry’s track record: economically moribund for the last quarter century, creating contamination that they simply left for someone else to deal with, and implicated in the growing record of illness among post-1971 workers and residents of uranium-impacted communities.

VIDEO EXCERPTS

A video and written testimonies of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on October 23, 2007, can be viewed at http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1560.

Here are excerpts from the testimonies of the Diné citizen witnesses.

Edith Hood
Coyote Canyon Chapter
Navajo Nation, New Mexico

There is no place like Dinétah. If you are not from the Rez, you don’t know the white dawn of morning, you don’t know the clear blue sky, an autumn twilight and the twinkling stars of the night. Where I’m from, there are pinon-covered mesas, our beautiful and sacred mountains, sandy deserts. Where I’m from, in a placed called Red Water Pond Road, there is also uranium waste and sickness. I live on the Navajo Reservation, between two abandoned mine sites.

I grew up with cultural teachings of a loving grandfather, a medicine man, a traditional leader. He taught us to respect Mother Earth, for she gives us all the necessities of life. There is a Navajo concept called Hózhó. Hózhó is how we live our lives — it means balance, beauty and harmony between we, the Five-Finger People, and nature. When this balance is disturbed, our way of life, our health, and our well being all suffer. The uranium contamination and mining waste at my home continues to disrupt Hózhó.

I think it was in the 1960s — I was only a teenager when strangers arrived. They [were the] exploratory drilling people. I remember Grandmother running to stop them from making roads into the wooded areas. The stakes she drove into the ground did not keep them out. No one ever told her what was happening. The exploratory drilling people had arrived. There was no respect for people living there, and certainly no respect for Mother Earth.

Today, as I pray in the early morning dawn, there is a man-made mesa of radioactive and hazardous waste about a quarter of a mile northeast of my residence. In the other direction, to the south about one thousand feet away, is another mound of uranium mining waste. The one to the south has been left uncovered since it was created in 1968 and since the company stopped mining twenty-five years ago. From my front yard I can see these waste piles. This waste seems to be piled everywhere. There are mountains of it — fifty, sixty feet high. This is the tailings or muck of pulverized uranium ore. This stuff is spread by wind and water. We breathe it and live with it every day.

Our community continues to live under these conditions. The mining companies have gone, but there is still equipment and tools, concrete blocks, pieces of protective clothing, bolts, mesh wire, and vent bags sticking out of the Earth, scattered about. My family and relatives live among these sites. Children still play in the fields and ditches, among the rocky mesas, in the arroyo that once carried contaminated mine water. The sheep still get through the fence that is supposed to barricade these uranium mine tailings. We eat these sheep.

These places are still contaminated. I know because I learned how to survey the ground for radiation when our community got involved in a monitoring program in my area four years ago. I know because the government people told us it was. I watched as the EPA people dug up the contaminated soils from around the homes of my sister and other relatives this May.

I worked at the Kerr McGee mine, 2000 feet underground. I was diagnosed with lymphoma in the summer of 2006. My father has a pulmonary fibrosis. My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My grandmother and grandfather died of lung cancer. Many of my family members and neighbors are sick, but we don’t know what from.

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 of the old mines? Mining has already contaminated the water, the plants, and the air. People are sick and dying all around us.

We need your help to clean up the mess that the mining companies and the U.S. government have burdened us with. We need help to stop mining companies from coming in and making a new mess. We need to restore Hózhó so that we may live in balance and harmony with each other and nature as Navajo people, as Diné.

Larry J. King
Churchrock Chapter
Navajo Nation, New Mexico

In the Navajo clan system Edith Hood is my sister. I was born and have lived all of my life in a traditional Navajo community called Church Rock Chapter. In the Church Rock area, we raise sheep and cattle in the traditional Navajo way. I still raise cattle on the land my father left to me and my two sisters. Between 1975 and 1983, I worked for United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) as an underground mine surveyor and mill worker.

Church Rock and its neighboring communities of Pinedale, Coyote Canyon and Iyanbito have suffered widespread impacts of past uranium mining. The biggest spill of radioactive wastes in United States history occurred in our community on July 16, 1979 — only about two miles from where I live. The contaminated fluids that escaped from the UNC uranium mill tailings pond ran through our property, into the Puerco River, where we watered our livestock. I remember the foul odor and yellowish color of the fluids. I remember that an elderly woman was burned on her feet from the acid in the fluid when she waded into the stream while herding her sheep. Many years later, when water lines were being installed in the bed of the Puerco, I noticed the same odor and color in a layer about eight feet below the stream bed. To this day, I don’t believe that contamination from the spill has gone away.

Our community also continues to suffer from the poisons left from the mining operations that began in the early 1950s. There are about 20 abandoned uranium facilities in the Church Rock area. More than half of those were developed by companies that sold uranium ore to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for use in the nation’s nuclear weapons program, and have not been cleaned up.

I think many of us knew in our hearts that we lived in a contaminated area. But it wasn’t until 2003, [w]ith the assistance of many outside organizations and agencies, [that] we sampled our air, water, and land. [We found] that the Old Churchrock Mine, which is located within one-quarter mile of my home and the homes of my two sisters, remains highly contaminated and has never been properly cleaned up….[S]oils around some of the homes of my relatives in the Red Water Pond Road area…were also [found to be] contaminated with high gamma radiation levels and with uranium in amounts up to thirty times what is considered natural….In April of this year, USEPA and Navajo EPA officials told my relatives that the soils around four of their homes were so contaminated with the radium that the dirt would have to be removed…and the families would have to live temporarily in hotels in Gallup while the cleanup was being done.

On behalf of my community and my family, I beg that you do something to end this horrible experiment that the nuclear industry and the United States government have been carrying out on the health of the Navajo people….

Phil Harrison
Red Valley-Cove Chapters
Navajo Nation, Arizona

I’m here to tell a story. In one sense it’s my story. But, in a broader sense it’s the story of my people. I’m also here to look forward, not backward, and to tell you what I think needs to be done to assist my people and my land in recovering from the devastation caused by short-sighted, and, in some cases, mean-spirited people who put their own private interests first and ignored the fact that their choices and decisions would result in an inhumane experiment being conducted on an indigenous people.

I grew up in uranium mining camps. I drank uranium contaminated water from those mines. We washed our clothes in uranium contaminated water. I watched children going into the mines and playing on waste piles. We made our coffee with the uranium contaminated water.

My father started working in the uranium mines in about 1950. [He] died of lung cancer at the age of 46. My cousin’s father, also a mine worker, died of lung cancer at the age of 42. All of my brothers and sisters have thyroid problems and disorders. They didn’t work in the mines but they grew up in areas contaminated by the mine wastes. My little brother, Herman James Harrison, died of a stomach ailment at the age of six months. He drank the uranium-contaminated water….

Please realize when I tell you about uranium-contaminated water we’re not just talking about a situation that occurred thirty, forty or fifty years ago. We’re talking about a situation that is occurring today in places like Tuba City, Arizona and other places throughout Navajo Indian Country where uranium mining occurred. The experiment on our health and welfare, being conducted with the complicity and support of the United States government, continues. We are an indigenous people. We raise sheep and cattle. We drink water where we find it and the sad story is that there is, in all likelihood, plenty of uranium contaminated water to be found on our land.

You have the power to end this tragic experiment….You can support the proposed amendments to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). You can remove illogical barriers to the provisions of compensation to former Navajo uranium workers and their families. For sixty-five years since 1942, Navajo men, women and children have been subjected to the catastrophic effects of exposure to uranium mining and milling, and the effects of downwind exposure to nuclear test sites….Apologies are appreciated, however, an apology is hollow without just compensation. Please change the laws to allow justice for the Navajo people….

Ray Manygoats
Tuba City Chapter
Navajo Nation, Arizona

I live near Tuba City, Arizona, on land that my family has lived on for many generations. A uranium mill was built near our home and the homes of other family and community members when I was a young child. My father and other family members were recruited to work in the mill. They had no training or background in the processing of uranium. The Rare Metals Corporation of America promised to train my father and other family members and to keep them safe, but these promises were lies….Today, I am a man who has lost his health, his family and his ancestral way of life because of uranium. I am here today to ask you act today to stop the suffering and needless deaths of my people.

…[T]he Rare Metals Mill…had been built across the highway from our home….When [my father] would come home each day, he was covered with a thick yellow dust. Each day we would wash his uniform. To wash the uniform, we would gather water near the uranium mill. We scrubbed but the uniform was always yellow with the dust.

The Rare Metals Mill had no fence around it. Our horses, sheep and livestock would graze on the grass growing in and around the mill…. We cooked on grills my father brought back from the Mill. These grills had been used to sift the yellowcake uranium. My father also brought home large metal drums from the mill. We played in the drums and used them to store our food and belongings.

My brother Tommy and I would often bring lunch to my father at the Mill. Yellow stuff was always everywhere. We would play in the…sand at the mill, jumping and rolling around in it. We also found many small metal balls at the mill. The balls were used to crush and process the uranium. We played marbles with them and had contests to see how far we could throw them. We saw liquids bubbling and tried to stay away from it. But one day, my sister Daisy walked through one of the open ponds near the mill and burned her feet.

Today I still live in the same area, the land of my family. The mill is no longer operating, but the waste from the mill is everywhere. Today I walk the land and see streaks of yellowcake uranium in our washes and our topsoil. It is always windy and the wind blows the earth into the air. I see the uranium marbles of my youth in areas where trucks dumped materials and waste from the mill back across the highway into our land. I see in the ground old rusting chemical drums and cables that once were used to operate the mill.

I am here on behalf of my community to ask for your help. To ask that we move past promises to actions. Actions that may save our children from the sickness and the poison that we are now living with.

George Arthur
Chairman, Resources Committee
Navajo Nation Council
Nenahnezad Chapter
Navajo Nation, New Mexico

We have maintained our language and traditions, including one where the umbilical cords of Navajo babies are buried in the land of their parents. The Navajos’ ties to the land where they are born is profound. We don’t just move when conditions become difficult. As a federal district court observed in a case where the United States unsuccessfully sought to relocate a Navajo woman from the land where she had lived all her life, relocating a Navajo from her ancestral land “is tantamount to separating the Navajo from her spirit.”

Uranium mining and milling on and near the Reservation has been a disaster for the Navajo people. The Department of the Interior has been in the pocket of the uranium industry, favoring its interests and breaching its duties to Navajo mineral owners. We are still undergoing what appears to be a never-ending federal experiment to see how much devastation can be endured by a people and a society from exposure to radiation in the air, in the water, in mines, and on the surface of the land. We are unwilling to be the subjects of that ongoing experiment any longer.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Mitchell Capitan: (505) 786-5209 Linda Evans: (505) 287-2304 Candace Head-Dylla: (505) 401-4349 Chris Shuey: (505) 262-1862 Robert Tohe: (928) 774-6103 Al Waconda: (505) 552-6817

NINE GRASS-ROOTS AND NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS’ RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FEDERAL RESPONSES TO THE URANIUM MINING LEGACY AND PROPOSED NEW URANIUM DEVELOPMENT ON THE NAVAJO NATION AND THROUGHOUT THE FOUR CORNERS AREA NAVAJO URANIUM ROUNDTABLE, WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 8, 2007 1. Seek legislation to impose a federal moratorium on new uranium development until environmental pollution from previous mining and milling is cleaned up, workers are appropriately compensated, and community health studies conducted. 2. Amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to, among other things, include certain New Mexico counties in the areas exposed to fallout from nuclear weapons testing, expand the universe of compensable diseases for uranium workers, and extend eligibility for compensation to workers who worked after 1971. Congress should also investigate compensation strategies for dependents of former uranium workers and for residents of communities impacted by uranium development. 3. Respect and protect the Navajo Nation’s sovereign right to enact the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act (DNRPA) of 2005, which prohibits uranium mining and processing by any means anywhere in Navajo Country. 4. Ensure full funding for health studies among residents of communities impacted by uranium mining and milling, and restore cuts in existing studies. 5. Require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to drop work on the proposed Generic Environmental Impact Statement for uranium in situ leach mining and to return to full and fair implementation of its statutory authority to protect public health and safety. 6. Amend the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Atomic Energy Act to make clear and certain that uranium mill and mine wastes are defined as “pollutants” and are subject to the same level of regulatory control and scrutiny as all other pollutants. Uranium mine and mill waste should not be exempt from any federal public health or environmental statute. 7. Enact a comprehensive federal abandoned uranium mine clean-up program, including funds for cleanup of abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation, Laguna Pueblo and throughout the Four Corners Area. Ensure that financially viable companies are held responsible for cleaning, or paying for cleanup, of the mining and milling sites they abandoned. 8. Reaffirm the principal of religious freedom by authorizing federal land management agencies to deny exploration, mining and milling permits on sacred sites or in sacred places, including and especially Mt. Taylor in northwestern New Mexico. RECOMMENDATIONS MADE BY: Bluewater Valley Downstream Alliance Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining Laguna Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee New Mexico Environmental Law Center Post ’71 Uranium Workers Committee Sierra Club Environmental Justice Office Southwest Research and Information Center