Navajos mark 30th anniversary of uranium spill

CHURCH ROCK, N.M. — The leader of the Navajo Nation marked the 30th anniversary of a massive uranium tailings spill by reaffirming the tribe’s ban on future uranium mining.

Speaking in Navajo and English, President Joe Shirley Jr. addressed about 100 people who made a seven-mile walk Thursday to the site of the July 16, 1979 spill and to the land of Navajo ranchers who live near another contaminated site.

What Shirley called “the largest peacetime accidental release of radioactive contaminated materials in the history of the United States” occurred when 94 million gallons of acidic water poured into the north fork of the Rio Puerco after an earthen uranium tailings dam failed.

Within days, contaminated tailings liquid was found 50 miles downstream in Arizona.

Shirley said the spill — the same year as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania — barely registered on the consciousness of the United States but will not be forgotten by the by Navajo and non-Navajo residents “who still worry today about the potential impacts of this tragic accident.”

It also helped mobilize the effort that resulted in the Navajo Nation’s 2005 ban on uranium mining and processing until adverse economic, environmental and human health effects from past uranium activities are eliminated or substantially reduced to the satisfaction of the Navajo Nation Council, Shirley said.

“We will stand our ground until the terms of the Dine (Navajo) Natural Resources Protection Act are met,” he said.

Substantial progress has been made in cleaning up one site, the Northeast Church Rock mine, Shirley said.

But, he said, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to move the bulk of that contaminated material to a nearby Superfund site at a former United Nuclear Corp. mine. That, the Navajo president said, would not be considered a final solution by the Navajo tribe.

Shirley proclaimed July 16 as Uranium Legacy and Action Day, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Church Rock spill and 60 years of uranium mining impacts.

“The American people need to be educated and reminded about the disproportionate sacrifices made by Navajos so the United States of America could win the Cold War,” he said.

Back at the Church Rock chapter house after the formal ceremonies, area Navajos talked about problems they blame on the spill. They talked about fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and friends who died of kidney disease or cancer. They also talked about sick livestock and sheep found to have yellow intestines when butchered.

The community’s concerns have been heighten by renewed interest in the last couple of years in uranium mining.

New Mexico was a leading producer of uranium from the 1950s into the 1980s, when the price of uranium plummeted and mines and mills closed. The era’s legacy remains in hundreds of abandoned uranium mines in New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.

Uranium mined from the 1940s into the 1970s went to the nation’s defense, and many say that history obligates the federal government to help reclaim areas the mines damaged.

There have been no significant water quality studies of the Rio Puerco since the late 1980s or early 1990s, said Chris Shuey of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based environmental organization.

Studies have shown high radioactivity in runoff and flood waters, but “whether that can be traced to mining has not been determined,” he said.

Impacts downstream are less certain, he said.

Studies earlier this decade under the auspices of the Southwest Research and Information Center, the Church Rock Navajo Chapter and others found high concentrations of uranium in soils around mine sites but only background conditions — what’s considered normal radiation levels —away from those areas, Shuey said.

An ongoing federally funded health study with the University of New Mexico’s Community Environmental Health Program, Crownpoint’s Indian Health Service hospital and Southwest Research is looking into health impacts of living near a mining district.

Shuey said decades of mining activity in the Church Rock area “contributed more radioactivity than the spill did,” adding to the difficulty of tracking the effects of uranium mining and milling and discharges over a long period of time.