Uncertainty about the health effects of abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation risks drawing out for decades the clean up of radioactive waste piles the EPA designated as Superfund sites in March.
The EPA added waste piles from derelict uranium mines near the Navajo community of Cove, Ariz., and the nearby Lukachukai Mountains to the National Priorities List on March 5, paving the way for the federal government to help clean up sites left behind by companies that mined uranium there from the late 1940s to 1986.
More than 30 million tons of uranium ore were mined during the Cold War from more than 500 places on the sprawling Navajo Nation that spans three states—one of the country’s primary sources of uranium used for nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants until the 1980s.
Cancer cases among Navajo miners were rampant at the time. Most of the mines have never been cleaned up, leaving a long-lasting legacy of radioactive waste considered one of the region’s most significant environmental justice challenges.
The addition of the sites to Superfund—one of about 20 on tribal land nationwide—is just one step in a clean up process that can take many years to complete. The EPA next plans to investigate problems the waste poses to the environment and public health, then it will decide on the feasibility of cleaning up the piles before creating a plan and making a final decision. All of that has to happen before cleanup projects are designed and executed.
Every mine waste pile will be treated differently, Cliff Villa, director of the US EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management, said in an interview.
“Some mines are a safety hazard but not necessarily a chemical hazard,” and those that are contaminating surface and groundwater will require more investigation before the sites are cleaned up, he said.
“Any uncertainty with human health risks is either going to prolong the decision-making process,” and possibly lead to the Environmental Protection Agency keeping some of the uranium waste in place against community wishes, said Jonathan Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.
Navajo communities want the waste to be fully removed from the reservation and disposed in a site that is monitored so the waste won’t spread—a remedy many expect the EPA to oppose because of its cost, said Nadine Padilla, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law.
“It is important the concerns of the community are heard and that the most protective plans are those selected, regardless of cost,” Padilla said.
Uranium’s Long Legacy
Cove, a remote community in Apache County, Ariz., about 360 miles northeast of Phoenix, is surrounded by red sandstone cliffs where dozens of piles of uranium mine waste—rocks strewn like talus on a cliff side—have sent radioactive particles washing into streams and groundwater.
“There’s a lot of potential transport of the waste products from these mines through waterways and channels that come off the mine,” Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview in Cove. “We know there’s the possibility that the radioactivity and the contaminants can affect the plant life in the area.”
A similar site, the Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine on New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, was added to Superfund in 2013, and more than a decade later, the EPA is still conducting its remedial investigation and feasibility study for the site—two of the earliest steps in the process. Other Superfund sites on tribal land remain in early cleanup stages, including a dump site on Makah Reservation in Washington state added to Superfund in 2013, and another in Minnesota that was added in 1984.
Leaders of the Navajo Nation’s Cove Chapter in March urged EPA officials to expedite the cleanup, but legal experts warn that the agency is unlikely to act fast.
“It’s going to be a very slow process,” said Chris Winter, executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School. “Those steps are designed to study the amount of contamination that’s actually out there and also to assess the risk to people and the environment.”
Cancer Link Unclear
The legacy of Cold War uranium mining on the Navajo Nation can be heard in the stories residents tell about lost loved ones and their fear of farming in an arid region where they once grew crops.
“Cove used to be a thriving farming community and pastoral lifestyle,” said James Benally, president of the Navajo Nation’s Cove Chapter in northeast Arizona. “That’s all been on the wayside now. A lot of people are scared of the negative impact that a lot of the waste piles have on our waterways, grazing areas, etc.”
Cancer has touched everyone in Cove—all related to uranium, he said. But a direct connection between cancer and uranium mine waste on the Navajo Nation remains unclear.
“I can’t definitively link cancer to the mine waste,” Etsitty said, adding that there’s more data showing incidents of cancer among the workers who mined uranium decades ago.
Cancer rates in Apache County are stable and are the lowest in Arizona and among the lowest in the country, averaging about 287 incidence per 100,000 residents annually, according to the Arizona Cancer Registry and National Cancer Institute data. A 2015 University of New Mexico study found a link between incidence of chronic disease, especially kidney disease, and living near uranium mine waste on the Navajo Nation.
But “federal and state agencies have been unwilling to investigate the true extent of contamination and the extent of harm it has caused the people living in uranium-contaminated areas,” Padilla said. “There is still a lot we don’t know about how uranium has affected water supplies and people’s health.”
Superfund is a risk-based program, and EPA will assess the public health risk of each uranium waste site before deciding if and how to clean up radioactive rock, Winter said.
“You don’t have to demonstrate causation of cancer and other diseases, you just have to demonstrate risk,” he said. “They’re really going to have to study these sites in some detail to figure out not only where the contamination originated from, but where is it going now? How far has it spread?”
Trust Obligation
The EPA hasn’t decided how the waste will be cleaned up, but considers the risk dire.
The health impact of that mining and the waste it left behind is “inter-generational,” Villa said. “What we need now is to not wait for more harm and to get serious about cleanup.”
Perry Charley, director of the uranium education program at Diné College in Shiprock, N.M., said he’s concerned that Cove and nearby communities can’t meet the federal criteria for determining cancer risk connected to the abandoned uranium mines. The Navajo People call themselves Diné.
It’s highly probable that the EPA’s cancer risk determination for the area will be “negligible,” and Charley said he worries that the EPA’s cleanup won’t meet the Navajo Nation’s standards.
“We are tied explicitly to our environment, our land, and maintain interrelationships with all living species,” he said. “The method of ‘cleanup’ varies greatly between western concept and Diné concept.”
It’s essential for Navajo communities to be persistent in pushing the EPA to clean up the waste in a way that meets their expectations because EPA will clean up each site based on its own data, not necessarily community priorities, Winter said.
“There’s often a disconnect between what the impacted communities believe is going on and what the consulting firms or the scientists develop in terms of data,” Winter said. “It can be very difficult to make those two things match up.”
Etsitty says he worries that past bipartisan support for cleaning up the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation could vanish in today’s hyper-partisan political landscape.
The Navajo Nation provided the uranium and vanadium that allowed the US to become a world power, and many Navajos are proud of that, Etsitty said.
“We’re living with the legacy of that, and we just want our lands to be cleaned up because all those prior actions have helped the United States people maintain peace, prosperity and the ability to pursue happiness, and we want that here,” he said.
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