Uranium Milling and the Church Rock Disaster
Church Rock, New Mexico, would seem an improbable spot for a nuclear disaster. A dusty cluster of industrial machinery set in the arid mesas of the great Southwest, its most distinguishing feature might be considered a large pond of murky liquid, unusual in such dry terrain. Church Rock also hosts a series of underground uranium mine shafts, a mill, and a scattered community of Navajo families who survive by herding cattle, goats, and sheep. A deep gully leads from the mine site into the Rio Puerco, which once flowed only when fed by spring rains. Now it is wet year round, bolstered by water pumped from the mine shafts to keep them from flooding. That water flowing from the mine is laced with radioactive isotopes. And the pond hides a burden of contaminated waste. The 350 families who water livestock in the Rio Puerco rely on their small herds to eke out a meager existence. Many are members of the Dine--Navajo--Nation, with incomes in the range of two thousand dollars per year. During the hot days of the desert summer local children would play in the stream as their parents tended the goats, sheep, and cattle. A Wall of Radioactive Water In the early morning hours of July 16, 1979--fourteen weeks after the accident at Three Mile Island--all of that changed. The dam at Church Rock burst sending eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid pouring toward Arizona. The wall of water backed up sewers and lifted manhole covers in Gallup, twenty miles downstream, and caught people all along the river unawares. "There were no clouds, but all of a sudden the water came," remembered Herbert Morgan of Manuelito, New Mexico. "I was wondering where it came from. Not for a few days were we told."[1] No one was killed in the actual flood. But along the way it left residues of radioactive uranium, thorium, radium, and polonium, as well as traces of metals such as cadmium, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, sodium, vanadium, zinc, iron, lead and high concentrations of sulfates.[2] The spill degraded the western Rio Puerco as a water source. It carried toxic metals already detectable at least seventy miles downstream.[3] And it raised the specter that uranium mining in the Colorado River Basin may be endangering Arizona's Lake Mead, and with it the drinking water of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and much of Arizona. Except for the bomb tests, Church Rock was probably the biggest single release of radioactive poisons on American soil. Ironically it occurred thirty-four years to the day after the first atomic test explosion at Trinity, New Mexico, not far away. The source of the catastrophe was uranium mill wastes. Usable uranium is extracted from the sandstone in which it is usually found by grinding it fine and leaching it with sulfuric acid. The acid carries off the desired isotopes. But the leftover waste sands--"tailings"--still contain 85 percent of the ore's original radioactivity, and 99.9 percent of its original volume. There are now some 140 million tons of them scattered around the West. NRC commissioner Victor Gilinsky and others consider them "the dominant contribution to radiation exposure" of the entire nuclear fuel cycle.[4] The acid milling liquids--called "liquor"--also dissolve dangerous traces of thorium 230, radium 222, lead 210, and other isotopes. Because of their high radioactivity the tailings and liquor both must be isolated from the environment--but nobody has yet demonstrated a method with any long-term success. At Church Rock several hundred million gallons of the liquor were being held in a large pond so the liquids could evaporate off and the solid tailings be stored. The whole complex was owned by the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC), a Virginia-based firm with assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and influence in the New Mexico state government. Its dam and pond at Church Rock were opened with the understanding that they would operate just eighteen months; twenty-five months later, at the time of the accident, no alternative sites were being developed. The UNC dam wall was an earthen structure with a clay core, twenty-five feet high and thirty feet wide. On the morning of the accident a twenty-foot-wide section of it gave way, wreaking havoc downstream. In the desert, water is synonymous with life. In contaminating the Rio Puerco, UNC had threatened the basis of existence for all of the people who lived downstream. For the first time they confronted the terrors of radioactivity. "Our hearts have been broken," said Bodie McCray of Tsayotah. "We don't sleep worrying about it. I worry about our children and their children." Indeed the hundreds of families living near the spill now had to live with the same kinds of uncertainties just beginning to plague the people of central Pennsylvania. "Ever since the accident we've been wanting the truth," said Kee Bennally, a silversmith playing a lead role in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit against UNC. "They say it's not dangerous and in a couple of days they say it is dangerous. It's been really confusing, especially for the old people. They don't know anything about this, the contamination, the radiation. . . ."[5] What made the Church Rock disaster especially tragic was that it could have been avoided. Soon after the spill an angry U.S. representative Morris Udall (D-Ariz.) told a congressional hearing that "at least three and possibly more Federal and state regulatory agencies had ample opportunity to conclude that such an accident was likely to occur." Even before the dam had been licensed "the company's own consultant predicted that the soil under this dam was susceptible to extreme settling which was likely to cause [its] cracking and subsequent failure."[6] Cracks had developed in the dam the year it opened, said Udall. Aerial photographs revealed that liquor, which was supposed to be kept away from the dam face, was lapping against it. State-required seepage devices and monitoring wells had never been built or inspected for.[7] UNC's chief operating officer, J. David Hann, countered Udall by blaming the accident on "a unique rock point, beneath the breach." Because the dam had been built partly on bedrock and partly on softer ground, that rock point "served as a fulcrum, resulting in transverse cracking." The breach was "like many things you undertake," Hann told the congressional hearing. "They have a risk, and we undertook this. There was a circumstance that was not foreseen at the time."[8] But coming in the wake of Three Mile Island, and in light of considerable evidence of impending disaster, Hann's arguments seemed to carry little weight. In a special report the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers charged that if the dam had been built to legal specifications, according to approved design, "it is possible that the failure would not have occurred."[9] And a spokesman from the New Mexico State Engineer's Office added that a "consensus" of engineers who reviewed the accident agreed that "had the drain zone been constructed according to the approved plans and specifications, and had the tailings beach been in place as recommended by [UNC's] engineers, it is likely that failure would not have occurred."[10] At the time of the disaster the dam was carrying a load of tailings liquor at least two feet higher than allowed for in its designs. The company had also failed to tell the state that cracking had been observed. "There were significant warnings appearing before the dam broke," said William Dircks, director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. "I think that is the troubling part of it."[11] Ultimately, for the company, the accident would mean a loss of some revenue and bad publicity. For the people downstream life itself was at stake. "Somehow," complained Frank Paul, vice-president of the Navajo Tribal Council, "United Nuclear Corporation was permitted to locate a tailings pond and a dam on an unstable geologic formation. Somehow UNC was allowed to design an unsafe tailings dam not in conformance to its own design criteria. Somehow UNC was permitted to inadequately deal with warning cracks that had appeared over two years prior to the date the dam failed. Somehow UNC was permitted to continue a temporary dam for six months beyond its design life. Somehow UNC was permitted to have a tailings dam without either an adequate contingency plan or sufficient men and material in place to deal with a spill. Somehow UNC was permitted to deal with the spill by doing almost nothing."[12] Ironically the Church Rock dam was a "state-of-the-art" structure. Paul Robinson, an Albuquerque-based expert on mining issues, warned the Udall hearings that "UNC-Church Rock was the most recently built and the most carefully engineered tailings dam in the state." Similar dams owned by Anaconda, Kerr-McGee, UNC-Homestake Partners, and Sohio were "disasters waiting to happen."[13] ________________________________ 1. Kathie Saltzstein, "Navajos Ask $12.5 Million in UNC Suits," Gallup Independent, August 14, 1980 (hereafter cited as "Navajos"); for a general analysis of the relationship between Indians and uranium development, see Joseph G. Jorgenson, et al., "Native Americans and Energy Development" (Cambridge, Ma.: Anthropology Resources Center, 1978); for a broad range of information on the issue of uranium mining and milling, contact the Black Hills Alliance, Box 2508, Rapid City, SD 57709. 2. Edwin K. Swanson, "Water Quality Problems in the Puerco River," paper presented at the American Water Resources Association Symposium, Water Quality Monitoring and Management, Tucson, Arizona, October 24, 1980. 3. Edwin K. Swanson, interview, May 1981. 4. Victor Gilinsky, "The Problem of Uranium Mill Tailings," paper presented at the Pacific Southwest Minerals and Energy Conference, Anaheim, California, May 2, 1978 (Washington, D.C.: NRC Office of Public Affairs), No. S-78-3, p. 3 (hereafter cited as "Problem"). See also, EPA, Environmental Analysis of the Uranium Fuel Cycle, Part I--Fuel Supply, EPA-520/9-73-003-B, Washington, D.C: EPA Office of Radiation Programs, 1973, p. 26. 5. Chris Shuey, "Calamity at Church Rock, New Mexico," Saturday Magazine, Scottsdale Daily Progress, Part 1, February 14, 1981, p. 3 (hereafter cited as "Calamity"). 6. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Mill Tailings Dam Break at Church Rock, New Mexico, 96th Congress, October 22, 1979, pp. 1-4 (hereafter cited as Church Rock Hearings). 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 120. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 42. 11. Ibid., p. 39. 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. Ibid., pp. 225-232. http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO9.html Harvey Wasserman and Norman Soloman. "Uranium Mining and the Church Rock Disaster." in Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation. 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