A big, dirty mess
The federal government is only beginning to cleanup decades of uranium contamination across the Navajo Nation.
Tsé bit'a'í ("Rock with Wings") or Ship Rock, one of the most prominent landmarks on the Navajo Nation, isn't far from a few of the reservation's many abandoned uranium mines and their deadly legacy. (Photo by Steven Semken)
RIO RANCHO -- Responding to congressional demands and a 2006 series in the Los Angeles Times, the federal government has laid out a $161 million plan to prevent the spread of radioactive contamination on sites across the Navajo Nation.
The plan, released earlier this month to the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform and its chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., calls for the clean up of the Northeast Church Rock Mine near Gallup as well as a survey of structures and wells for contamination.
Despite coming decades after the Cold War-era uranium mining and the legacy of sickness and public health hazards it left in its wake, federal officials call the plan a landmark.
"It's a very big deal," Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson Margot Perez-Sullivan says. It's the first time so many agencies -- the EPA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Indian Health Service -- have united their efforts to clean up the mess.
"In the past, BIA, Indian Health Services, DOE, NRC and EPA have each all done separate actions," she adds.
George Hardeen, spokesman for Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr. agrees.
"Now finally after many years of the Navajo Nation going to Washington to plead this case that this has been needed for decades .. something is finally happening," he says.
Of course, it took powerful people in Washington to take notice before the movement, says Chris Shuey of Southwest Research and Information Center, a non-profit focused on environment.
"Was the problem known to the agencies prior to this? Heck yes," Shuey says. "I think the L.A. Times did catch Waxman's attention. But something is finally happening. There's a lot of good things in the plan."
EPA's Superfund Branch Chief for the Pacific Southwest region acknowledges the impetus for the united effort was "the hearings before Oversight and Government Reform."
But not everyone is so optimistic this new plan will end up making that big of a difference.
"I'm hopeful -- about 5 percent," said Navajo Teddy Nez, whose family lives near the contaminated Church Rock Mine and who says his well is contaminated "real bad." "All it is information to get back to Waxman (to show) that these guys are doing something, but they are not doing anything. There's a lot of talk but no action."
A 40-year resident of the land near the Northeast Church Rock Mine, Nez says he is a virtual newcomer to the spot where he lives now. His wife's family has resided there for seven generations, he points out.
And, like others, his family has struggled with illness and disease.
"We have people that went through chemotherapy in Albuquerque," Nez said. "There's a lot of disease that we are trying to address," he adds.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which wrote a series on the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajos, the nation's largest tribal homeland, which encompasses parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, contains about 1,000 abandoned uranium mines and four old processing mills.
The paper goes on:
From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for nuclear bombs. After 1971, utilities also bought uranium for nuclear power plants.
"The mine operators often left behind open tunnels, shafts and piles of radioactive waste. Federal inspectors knew of the hazards but seldom intervened. Meanwhile, Navajo cancer rates doubled and certain birth defects increased."
One estimate placed at 10,000 the number of people who worked in uranium mining in the United States from the late 1940s into the 1980s, with a disproportionate percentage of the workers being American Indians because of the location of the mining areas, according to an article in September 2007 edition of American Journal of Public Health.
"These are the victims of the Cold War ... the miners who brought uranium out to protect the country," says Hardeen.
To give a sense of how big a problem is, the Navajo tribal officials in Ocober asked Congress for at least $500 million to finish cleaning up lingering contamination on the reservation.
The plan itself provides a sense of the magnitude, and complexity, of the task at hand.
Indian Health Service says that the estimated cost of providing alternative water supplies for eligible Indians consuming water from 41 unregulated and potentially contaminated water sources to be up to $65 million, including planning, design, and construction costs.
That agency also will continue to review existing databases to develop plans for improved cancer case surveillance, review water contamination data for potential future health studies, and develop plans to assess the prevalence of cancer and other health conditions for populations near inactive mill sites.
The Department of Energy, meanwhile, will work with other federal agencies and El Paso Natural Gas to determine whether clean up is required at a site different than the Northeast Church Rock Mine. If so, the DOE will work with them to consider sending the contaminated materials to its site in Grand Junction, Colo.
The five federal agencies will work together with the Navajo and Hopi tribes to assess whether interim actions are needed on still another site. By August, the Bureau of Indian Affairs plans to have completed an assessment of the need and feasibility of an interim measure to prevent contamination of nearby Hopi water supplies.
The report's authors write:
If an imminent threat to water supplies is identified, the agencies will determine the most appropriate authorities to achieve an interim remedy. These authorities might include a Superfund response or enforcement action.
But the highest-priority project is the Northeast Church Rock Mine, 17 miles northeast of Gallup, one of the worst contaminated places, federal officials say.
United Nuclear Corp. operated the site from the late 1960s into the 1980s -- with mining starting in 1968 and a mill opening in 1977.
Over the years, uranium from the mill tailings -- the metal detritus of the mining process -- has leached into the groundwater. Exacerbating the situation, EPA officials say, was the water that was pumped out of the shafts underground and dumped it into a nearby arroyo at a rate of 1,500 gallons a minute. "For a number of years it was untreated," says Montomergy of the EPA.
As optimistic as officials are, there is a question of where the money will come from to pay for the major clean up the plan proposes. If history is an indicator, there may be reason to worry.
"If this was in any other part of the country, I'm confident that the resources would have been provided. The Navajo nation is very remote. It's not a developed area. Most people know it through tourism," says Hardeen, who holds out hope nonetheless this time around a major cleanup will occur.
Perez-Sullivan of the EPA acknowledges that the cooperating agencies must perform the cleanup tasks within their existing budgets. But she adds that the EPA is spending $6 million to $7 million this year on the clean up effort, or four times what the agency spent each year over the past decade.
The signs of the agency's emphasis on cleaning up the contamination are ubiquitous, she says. The agency has 30 people working on the project.
The money, which comes out of the federal Superfund program, also is paying for the survey of wells and structures for contamination -- it has discovered at least 13 contaminated structures. Agency employees also are going door to door to tell people not to drink out of wells. And the agency is running public service announcements on radio in Navajo and English, too, to get the message out, she says.
About 54,000 people in the area don't have access to regulated water systems, and some may use the wells for drinking water.
"We're working with local officials to identify sources of water people can use," says Montgomery.
Ultimately, the plan calls for United Nuclear, now owned by GE, to reimburse the federal government for the cleanup of the Northeast Church Rock mine. But federal officials won't say what that may cost.
"The Navajos have asked us not to release our options that we have developed. So we can't talk cleanup costs," Montgomery says.
The Navajos are in negotiations with the company, he adds.
GE spokesperson Pat Zerbe said via e-mail Thursday that United Nuclear Corp. was acquired in 1997, long after UNC had discontinued uranium mining in the 1980s. She added that the company had been working cooperatively with the "US EPA to address the former UNC mill and mine sites."
Asked what response GE had to paying for the cleanup, Zerbe said the company "is currently actively engaged in dialogue with the US EPA and the Navajo Nation EPA to develop the long-term closure plan for UNC's former uranium operations. UNC is committed to meet its obligations under the current law and regulations to complete the mine closure and reclamation activities."
Meanwhile, the work continues out on the Navajo land.
The EPA has spent five years and roughly $13 million identifying 520 abandoned mines in the area. "There hasn't been site-specific investigations on a lot of these mines," Montgomery says. But the EPA has agreed to identify the worst of the 520 mines and to figure out the clean up process.
"A large percentage of them are probably not going to rise to the level of federal superfund cleanup," Montgomery says.
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