This one's for Ray!
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/uranium-mines-dot-navajo-land-neglected-and-still-perilous.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120401&pagewanted=all
Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
An abandoned uranium mine on the Navajo reservation in Cameron, Ariz.,
emits dangerous levels of radiation.
By LESLIE MACMILLAN
Published: March 31, 2012
CAMERON, Ariz. — In the summer of 2010, a Navajo cattle rancher named
Larry Gordy stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the middle of
his grazing land and figured he had better call in the feds. Engineers
from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived a few months later,
Geiger counters in hand, and found radioactivity levels that buried
the needles on their equipment.
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Lucy Knorr says her father’s death was related to his work at the mine.
Enlarge This Image
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Larry Gordy discovered the mine on his land in 2010, but it has not
been cleaned up yet.
Enlarge This Image
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
At a mine in Cameron, Ariz., the radioactivity levels exceeded Geiger
counters’ scales.
The abandoned mine here, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon,
joins the list of hundreds of such sites identified across the 27,000
square miles of Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico that
are the legacy of shoddy mining practices and federal neglect. From
the 1940s through the 1980s, the mines supplied critical materials to
the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank
contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and
other diseases.
The radioactivity at the former mine is said to measure one million
counts per minute, translating to a human dose that scientists say can
lead directly to malignant tumors and other serious health damage,
according to Lee Greer, a biologist at La Sierra University in
Riverside, Calif. Two days of exposure at the Cameron site would
expose a person to more external radiation than the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission considers safe for an entire year.
The E.P.A. filed a report on the rancher’s find early last year and
pledged to continue its environmental review. But there are still no
warning signs or fencing around the secluded and decaying site.
Crushed beer cans and spent shell casings dot the ground, revealing
that the old mine has become a sort of toxic playground.
“If this level of radioactivity were found in a middle-class suburb,
the response would be immediate and aggressive,” said Doug Brugge, a
public health professor at Tufts University medical school and an
expert on uranium. “The site is remote, but there are obviously people
spending time on it. Don’t they deserve some concern?”
Navajo advocates, scientists and politicians are asking the same
question.
The discovery came in the midst of the largest federal effort to date
to clean up uranium mines on the vast Indian reservation. A hearing in
2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform led
to a multiagency effort to assess and clean up hundreds of structures
on the reservation through a five-year plan that ends this year.
Yet while some mines have been “surgically scraped” of contamination
and are impressive showpieces for the E.P.A., others, like the Cameron
site, are still contaminated. Officials at the E.P.A. and the
Department of Energy attribute the delay to the complexity of
prioritizing mine sites. Some say it is also about politics and money.
“The government can’t afford it; that’s a big reason why it hasn’t
stepped in and done more,” said Bob Darr, a spokesman for the
Department of Energy. “The contamination problem is vast.”
If the government can track down a responsible party, he said, it
could require it to pay for remediation. But most of the mining
companies that operated on the reservation have long since gone out of
business, Mr. Darr said.
To date, the E.P.A., the Department of Energy and other agencies have
evaluated 683 mine sites on the land and have selected 34 structures
and 12 residential yards for remediation. The E.P.A. alone has spent
$60 million on assessment and cleanup.
Cleaning up all the mines would cost hundreds of millions of dollars,
said Clancy Tenley, a senior E.P.A. official who oversees the uranium
legacy program for the agency in the Southwest.
Some say the effort has been marred by bureaucratic squabbles and a
tendency to duck responsibility. “I’ll be the first to admit that the
D.O.E. could work better with the E.P.A.,” said David Shafer, an
environmental manager at the energy agency.
Determining whether uranium is a result of past mining or is naturally
occurring is “a real debate” and can delay addressing the problem, Mr.
Shafer said. He cited seepage of uranium contaminants into the San
Juan River, which runs along the boundary of the reservation, as an
example. “We need to look at things like this collectively and not
just say it’s E.P.A.’s problem or D.O.E.’s problem,” he said.
E.P.A. officials said their first priority was to address sites near
people’s homes. “In places where we see people living in close
proximity to a mine and there are elevated readings, those are rising
to the top of the list for urgent action,” Mr. Tenley said.
Agency officials said they planned a more thorough review of the
Cameron site — which still has no warning signs posted — within the
next six months.
Meanwhile, Navajos continue to be exposed to high levels of
radioactivity in the form of uranium and its decay products, like
radon and radium. Those materials are known to cause health problems,
including bone, liver, breast and lung cancer.
Lucy Knorr, 68, of Tuba City, Ariz., grew up near the VCA No. 2 mine
operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, now defunct. Her father, a
former miner, died of lung cancer at age 55 in 1980, and her family
received a payout of $100,000 under the Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act, a law that was enacted after her mother hired a
lawyer and testified before Congress.
The program has awarded $1.5 billion for 23,408 approved claims since
it was enacted in 1990.
Ms. Knorr’s father was one of hundreds of Navajos who did not wear
protective gear while working in the mine. “He’d wash at a basin
outside” after leaving the mine, she said, “and the water would just
turn yellow.”
The government has been successful in tracking down and holding some
former mining companies accountable. The E.P.A. is requiring that
General Electric spend $44 million to clean up its Northeast Church
Rock Mine, near Gallup, N. M. Chevron is paying to clean up the
Mariano Lake Mine, also in New Mexico.
When the government cannot locate a responsible party, which is most
often the case, the E.P.A. and the Department of Energy work with the
tribal authorities to reach cleanup decisions. In general, the E.P.A.
handles mines, while the Energy Department is responsible for the
mills where the ore was processed and enriched.
One of the Department of Energy’s biggest priorities is a billion-
dollar uranium mine cleanup that is under way in Moab, Utah, and that
received $108 million in federal stimulus money and the backing of
nine congressmen.
Some Navajo officials point out that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
signed a 20-year moratorium on new uranium and other hard-rock mining
claims on one million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon in
January, saying it was needed to preserve the mile-deep canyon and the
river that runs through it. The mining industry is challenging that
decision in court.
But the Navajo Nation, considered a sovereign government entity, has
not gotten similar treatment from the federal government for its land,
some of its officials say. The nation has asked for $500 million for
mine cleanup, but the money has not materialized, said Eugene Esplain,
one of two officials with the Navajo E.P.A. responsible for patrolling
an area the size of West Virginia.
Taylor McKinnon, a director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an
environmental group that worked to halt new mining claims near the
Grand Canyon, said the Cameron site was the worst he had seen in the
Southwest. He has even seen cow droppings near the mine, he said, an
indication that cattle are grazing there. And “people are eating those
livestock,” he said.
Ronald Tohannie, a project manager with the Navajo advocacy group
Forgotten People, said the locally grown beef was tested at the
slaughterhouse, but not for the presence of radioactive substances
like uranium.
When E.P.A. officials in the California office overseeing the region
were asked to accompany a reporter to the Cameron mine site, they
countered with an offer to visit the Skyline Mine in Utah, on the
northern boundary of the reservation in Monument Valley, where a big
federal cleanup was completed last October.
The onetime mine, atop a 1,000-foot mesa, provides a sweeping panorama
of the red valley below. Just one tiny dwelling is visible, the packed-
earth hogan of Elsie Begay, a 71-year-old Navajo woman. Ms. Begay was
featured in a series of articles in The Los Angeles Times in 2006
about serious illnesses that several of her family members developed
after living in the area for many years.
The publicity “might have bumped the site up the priority list,” said
Jason Musante, who oversaw the $7.5 million cleanup of the mine for
the E.P.A.
In trailers and cinder-block dwellings on the Navajo reservation,
there is deep cynicism and apprehension about the federal effort.
“That’s what they want you to see: something that’s all nice and
cleaned up,” said the Navajo manager of a hotel near the Skyline
mine. He asked not to be identified, saying that he had already come
under government scrutiny for collecting water samples from the San
Juan River for uranium testing at a private lab.
For some Navajos, the uranium contamination is all of a piece with
their fraught relationship with the federal government.
“They’re making excuses, and they’ve always made excuses,” Ms. Knorr
said. “The government should have had a law in place that told these
mining companies: you clean up your mess when you leave.”
A version of this article appeared in print on April 1, 2012, on page
A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Uranium Mines Dot
Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous._______________________________________________
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