Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series examining uranium mining. The first part focuses on a Colorado company that is mining uranium in Arizona. The third part will delve into the realpolitik of uranium supply and nuclear energy.

Eighty years after the beginning of the radioactive disaster that has decimated the people of the Navajo Nation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in March this year added hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that have been poisoning the Navajo people since 1944 to the Superfund list.

The Lukachukai Mountains Mining District is the first Navajo addition to the EPA National Priorities List. The designation makes federal funds available for long-term, permanent remediation of 230 of the 523 mines on Navajo lands. The designation ceremony took place at the Cove Chapter House, about 75 miles north of Gallup, New Mexico, on March 7.

“Adding the Lukachukai District to the National Priorities List is a significant milestone in EPA’s work to address uranium contamination on the Navajo Nation,” said Superfund Division Director Mike Montgomery in a statement to The Denver Gazette. “When we add a site to the National Priorities List, EPA is committing to permanently addressing contamination on-site and ensuring surrounding communities receive the protection and support they deserve.”

The slow-moving radioactive disaster changed the health of the Diné — The People — from a population noted for a remarkable resistance to cancer to a people ravaged by cancer and other diseases, according to author Judy Pasternak’s acclaimed 2010 book on the subject; “Yellow Dirt — A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos.”

The discovery of uranium intricately tied America’s national security to the Navajo Nation. The deposits on Navajo lands helped to secure victory for America and its allies in World War II.

Today, domestic sources of uranium remain key to America’s energy sustainability, particularly at a time of realpolitik uncertainty.

And a Colorado company may yet play a crucial role in that sustainability.      

To many supporters, nuclear energy is the only real path to a sustainable, efficient, plentiful and practically carbon-free energy. To critics, its risks, including vulnerable plants and radioactive waste, far outweigh the benefits. Uranium mining is also caught in the crossfire between environmentalists and their allies in government seeking to transition away from “fossil” energy, and the oil and gas industry and its supporters, who argue that a balanced energy portfolio is the more practicable and reasonable path. 

Away from its political and national security implications, uranium mining is, when done right, foremost a source of jobs and steady income for workers and their families. When done wrong, it can lead to environmental and health catastrophe.

And to the Navajo Nation, plenty of things went wrong in the past.     

The Navajo reservation, established by the Treaty of 1868, comprises about 25,000 square miles — more than 17.5 million acres — mostly in Arizona, and is about the size of West Virginia. While it is a sovereign, domestic dependent nation now called the Navajo Nation, the land and mineral rights are held by the U.S. Government in trust for the tribe. Leasing and permitting for mineral extraction are controlled by the tribe, subject to federal laws and regulations.

In 1919, Congress opened the Navajo reservation to mineral exploration and mining claims. Many prospectors came looking for gold but found little. Coal was plentiful, along with other minerals, particularly vanadium, a mineral used to harden steel.

But the real mother lode was the as-yet unappreciated uranium, a bright yellow dirt, or łeetso in the Navajo language, found in the many layers of sandstone and shale comprising the Colorado Plateau.

The Manhattan Project

In 1943, during World War II, the Manhattan Project was created to develop nuclear weapons. On the slopes of the Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains, about 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe, N. M., a top-secret lab called Project Y was built. Now known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, this was the genesis of the uranium boom in the Four Corners, region where the states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona meet.

The U.S. military had been obtaining its uranium from the Belgian Congo in Africa and northern Canada for its experiments, but international supply lines were vulnerable and tenuous, so it was decided to seek out sources of uranium in the United States, according to historians.

The top-secret effort involved deploying teams of mining engineers and prospectors to search for deposits of vanadium throughout the Southwest, including Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

Vanadium is a mineral used to harden steel in battleship hulls and is an indicator mineral often found along with uranium.

The prospectors were not told they were searching for uranium. In fact, codewords were used, like S-37, SOM and SOQ.

The Diné accepted a patriotic duty when the war broke out and some members became “Code Talkers,” who were essential to the ultimate victory over the war in Pacific — thanks to their native language used to pass critical messages that, even if intercepted, were indecipherable by the Japanese.

Another part of their cooperation with the war effort was to void an anti-mining law to facilitate vanadium extraction, and many thousands of Navajos became miners, pleased with the paychecks that allowed them to buy luxuries, such as trucks and build better homes than the traditional hogan they had lived in for centuries.

As deposits of uranium and vanadium were identified, companies contracted with the U.S. government to mine them. Having allowed mining in the past, the Diné were happy to allow exploration and mining to further the war effort, but they were not told that the search was really for uranium, at least not during the war — nobody was, it was all top secret.

And it came with a steep cost.

The secrecy about the known health impacts of uranium mining persisted for decades after the war, said Pasternak, citing federal documents from the period.

A boom and bust leaves a deadly wake  

What the Diné didn’t know, and weren’t told, was that the mining methods being used on the Dinétah would lead to generations of disease and death from long-term exposure to radon gas, radioactive waste and heavy metals contamination.

“In that era, there was a lot more activity when it came to the extraction industries,” Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, told The Denver Gazette. “And, of course, like everywhere else in the United States, the local people were probably the most misinformed or uninformed.”

“The ones who were driving the initiatives knew of the dangers and knew how to at least have some protective information,” Etsitty said.

This, he said, led to the legacy of uranium extraction as a source of income and jobs for the Diné and the boom-and-bust of a uranium mining economy, leaving in its wake people with health issues because they didn’t have the protections.

“And that’s just, I guess, following the trajectory of the U.S. government as well, because throughout the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, you didn’t have an EPA. You didn’t have public health as a big priority to go along with all of this extraction activity that was happening,” said Etsitty.

Etsitty has spent much of his life in public service working in environmental protection, including stints with the tribal EPA, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as nine years working for the U.S. EPA. Etsitty capped off a decade of federal service and returned to the Dinétah to help his mother care for his elderly maternal grandfather, Archie Begay.

“My shicheii was a medicine man, and he lived to be 97 years old. My mother cared for him directly with a lot of support from her siblings, but she was living with him at the end in his house, and she needed more and more help,” said Etsitty. “He was a person of resource that people turned to in their time of need in his community in Luke, Arizona. It was my way of recognizing his importance in my life and being a part of my upbringing — to keep me on track and understanding of who we are as Diné people.”

Like many living on the Dinétah, Etsitty isn’t free of the specter of uranium. 

“Now that I know I’ve been living with this all these years — and I’ve already seen some health effect in my own life, maybe a cancer scare or lung issues — the questions still remain,” Etsitty added. “How am I going to live out the rest of my years. And the question then turns to how are my children going to continue to move forward? How are my grandchildren going to live? Because we’ve all been here 20, 30, 40-plus years. And for the youngest, they’re growing up in the midst.”

Etsitty said the Diné still haven’t done enough work in the area of public and long-term health impacts caused by un-remediated uranium waste.

“That’s what I really like to concentrate on,” Etsitty said. ”Because getting a mine cleaned up is one thing, but then laying to rest the emotional, mental anguish of these unanswered questions has not been adequately addressed yet in my view.”

The quest for uranium

In the early days of the WWII uranium boom, prospectors, including the Diné, would find a “hot spot” that set off their radiation meters that were often supplied by government or company agents, and would shovel a pickup-load of ore into their truck, then drive to a collection point where government buyers would assay the ore.

If it was concentrated enough to be worth milling, they would be paid. If not, the miner would often just dump the still radioactive ore somewhere in the vastness of the Navajo Nation, never understanding that it might contaminate people, homes and water tables.

Many of the more than 500 uranium mines created on the Navajo Nation were primitive, and safety precautions were perfunctory at best. Navajo miners were issued hard hats, and shovels and little more as their work gear, significantly not including dust-filtering respirators.

Many uranium mines were open pits scraped down to uranium-containing layers near the surface with bulldozers and other equipment. Once the high-grade ore was removed, the pits and scrapes — still filled with lower levels of uranium —were simply abandoned without any remediation.

Others were well-developed, hard-rock underground mines like those on Yazzie Mesa and the Northeast Church Rock Mine northeast of Gallup, N. M. and the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District, between Chinle, Ariz., and Shiprock, N.M.

While the Diné were pleased with the jobs and the money the mines brought to their communities, the mining and safety practices for Navajo uranium miners were, as Pasternak puts it, “a slow-motion environmental catastrophe.”

“I guess I would say our country’s rush to build atomic bombs — this was largely for nuclear weapons at the time — led to the poisoning of the Navajo homeland in the American Southwest,” said Pasternak in an interview with The Denver Gazette. “There were world-class deposits of uranium, and some of the richest were on the Navajo reservation. To get at them, the U.S. government deliberately used and discarded an entire tribe of people, and they set off a slow-motion environmental catastrophe that has lasted for decades.”

After World War II, uranium mining took a breather until it was restarted with the advent of the Cold War and nuclear power reactors in the 1950s and 1960s. Soon enough mining returned to feed the demand for refined uranium oxide (UO3), called “yellowcake” for its bright yellow color, that would be enriched for military and civilian purposes.

‘We did not know what the heck it was’

Concerns for the health of the Diné were still largely ignored during this second wave, despite the beginnings of the plague of lung cancer that eventually killed untold numbers of Diné, experts said. 

Pasternak said the authorities in Washington, including the Indian Health Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior and the Atomic Energy Commission all knew about the dangers inherent in uranium mining, but largely ignored preventative measures, such as adequate mine ventilation, filter masks, workers changing clothes and showering before going home and other safety practices that are required by regulation in uranium mining today.

As a result, many Navajo miner’s homes were contaminated by radioactive uranium and radium dust from worker’s clothing. Spouses and children were exposed to elevated levels of radiation daily merely from living in traditional homes.

Far worse, some tribe members unknowingly took radioactive stones from waste piles like the 1.2-million-ton Northeast Church Rock Mine waste dump — the largest uranium mine on the Navajo Nation — and used them to build their houses, exposing them to even higher levels of radioactivity.

Strong desert winds picked up radioactive dust from surface mines and waste piles and sprinkled it everywhere. Open-pit mines filled with water. The pastoral Diné watered their livestock at these welcome new sources of scarce water and drank from them, as well. They weren’t told of the radioactivity and heavy metal poisons and weren’t told to stop using them for decades.

Navajo Nation citizen Talia Boyd grew up in a mining impacted community — Alia — close to Tuba City, Arizona. In the 1980s, every morning on her way to grade school, she passed the Tuba City disposal site, also known as Rare Metals, an abandoned uranium mill where it was later discovered contaminated equipment and waste from the mill was buried illegally and secretly. Boyd said the pits were not capped to prevent radiation emissions until she was in junior high.

“It was not fenced — there were no signs,” Boyd told The Denver Gazette. “We did not know what the heck it was.”

At that point, said Boyd, there were clusters of cancer occurring in the community. People were forced to relocate away from the mill site.

“There was a small trailer park community located right next to it, and those were the kids I was friends with growing up,” Boyd said. “We would pick them up on the bus route on our way to school every day and they would tell me, ‘Yeah, my grandma’s sick. She has cancer. My mom’s sick, my dad’s sick’.”

Boyd would hear these horror stories of multiple generations being inundated with different health problems, cancer being the prominent one. But few people knew why it was happening, not just in Alia, but all over the northeast corner of the Navajo Nation, where uranium had been mined.

“They capped that site — and basically when they cap an area, they just put a bunch of dirt on top of it and it looks like a big, fun sand dune to kids in the community,” said Boyd. “And that’s what they did. They climbed on top of it and played on it. And when it rained, water would gather at the bottom of those pits (and) tailings piles and kids would play in it. People weren’t even on to what the hell radiation was.”

According to the EPA, contaminants in the uncapped piles of radioactive waste filtered down into water tables, creating underground plumes of polluted water that made some wells unusable and continues to threaten others as the pollution migrates from the mines. Discovering this contamination took a long time and continues even today. Meanwhile, some of the vital water sources in the desert communities were rendered unusable and water must be trucked in to supply residents.

The spill

Standing on the road next to the Northeast Church Rock Mine, Etsitty pointed across the road to the site of United Nuclear Corp.’s uranium mill tailings pond where, barely four months after the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown, the largest uncontrolled release of radioactive materials in American history occurred on July 16, 1979.

At about 5:30 a.m., said Etsitty, the tailings pond berm breached and released some 93 million gallons of acidic radioactive slurry containing more than 1,000 tons of toxic solids into the Pipeline Arroyo, mere yards from the pond. The slurry, a witch’s brew of radioactive and toxic metals, traveled to the Puerco River, and through Gallup to a total of some 80 miles downstream. The pollution got into groundwater and made the water of the Puerco River unusable for drinking, irrigation, and livestock.

The mill was built on private land adjacent to Navajo land, where the mine itself is. Operations were suspended briefly by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but resumed in November 1979. The mill site closed in 1982 and was placed on the EPA National Priorities List in 1983.

According to reports, some cleanup efforts continued off-and-on through 2007.

Uranium’s legacy

Once fierce nomadic warriors, the Diné settled on the Colorado Plateau they call the Dinétah — The Home of the People — in the Four Corners area — and took up farming and raising sheep, horses, cattle and goats.

Over some 800 to 1,000 years on the Dinétah, they developed their own unique tribal society and traditions, according to anthropologists.

One tradition is caring and respect for the land they live upon. Their mythology includes two Diné brothers who defeated numerous monsters that preyed upon the people and the land, bringing peace and harmony with nature, said Pasternak.

Some say that one monster still exists and was loosed upon the Diné by rapacious, careless extraction of uranium.

Unlike other Native American tribes, the Diné live in small, scattered groups or clans spread across the vastness of the Navajo Nation, many of which don’t have central water systems and rely instead on individual wells.

Recently, some efforts have been made by the EPA and others to create purification systems that will clean community well water in affected areas, but such efforts are expensive and difficult to deploy in communities where there is still no electricity.

Nobody knows exactly how many Navajo miners there were, nor are there solid numbers of those indirectly contaminated and affected by uranium waste. But about 15 years after mining started, tribal members began showing up at Indian Health Service clinics with lung cancer and other diseases not previously seen in such numbers.

“I don’t have the specific numbers, but I do know from listening to stories of our people when we have meetings and conferences and we put forth together our policies and position statements on this, that we had thousands of miners and now we recognize that those miners also have delivered secondary impacts to their homes and their wives and their children,” said Etsitty. “Growing up, there were the creation of mining camps at some of the higher activity areas on the Navajo Nation and off the reservation, too, in Utah, Colorado — we have a lot of our Navajo men at that time actively engaged in mining in the whole region here in the southwest.”

More than a few researchers visited the area over the decades and tried to pin down sources of the diseases. But, in most cases, while the cancer and other diseases were treated by the Indian Health Service, little was done to locate, identify and remediate sources of radioactive contamination until relatively recently.

Author Pasternak said some of the Diné died very quickly once the cancer took hold, sometimes before they were seen by doctors, who were in short supply in the 1950s and 1960s.

According to Pasternak — whose years of research discovered report after report and communications among government officials acknowledging the danger — there was a demonstrated and persistent disinterest in spending money to clean up the contamination until the 1970s.

There is another spiritual aspect to uranium mining that Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren talks about. He expressed fears that by participating in the invention and use of the atomic bomb, the tribe is facing retribution from Mother Earth.

“One of the things I’ve been told is that the uranium that was extracted is material that probably didn’t need to be extracted from Mother Earth,” Nygren said in an interview. “And now, to this day, it’s affecting the Navajo people because we’re facing big challenges of poverty, big challenges of drug abuse, alcoholism, and just a continuing increase of our people leaving our reservation and not returning home.”

Nygren added: “A lot of the elders and the medicine people say that it’s probably because we used Mother Earth to hurt other people. And then, in return, it has affected not only our land, but it’s affected our people and our community and our nation.”

Uranium’s future

Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels Resources Inc, a Colorado company that is mining near the Grand Canyon, said the practices of decades past are no longer applicable or legal today.

He said the underground uranium lode at the Pinyon Plain mine can today be safely extracted to provide reliable, low-carbon nuclear energy, serving the needs of millions and millions of American households.

And when mining is completed, said Moore, the only evidence it ever existed would be a monitoring well.

And Moore said fears of contaminating aquifers are groundless, pointing to a 35-year record of research, permitting and lawsuits over the mine, in which every decision has been in the company’s favor.

Moore’s point is that mining uranium today, under current federal mining and environmental regulations, is nothing like it was in the past.

Pinyon Plain assistant mine superintendent Matthew Germansen told The Denver Gazette that the company has mined out and reclaimed eight or nine uranium ore sources in the region — and they’ve all had a “clean release,” which means they meet or exceed EPA standards for remediation.

Safety is the overriding concern for the company, Germansen said. And it’s not just the safety of the personnel at the mine that’s a priority. It extends to the public, as well, he said. 

“We’re going to do it right because we want to prove to the public that we can do it safely and that we have done it safely and we’re going to do it safely this time,” he added. “Energy Fuels wants to do it so that we have healthy miners and healthy equipment and healthy production, and the regulators want us to do it so that we can also have that health go beyond the fence line to the greater public.”