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Federal and Navajo leaders support off-site disposal for Quivira uranium mine waste

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Federal and Navajo leaders support off-site disposal for Quivira uranium mine waste

By Danielle Prokop
Federal and Navajo leaders support off-site disposal for Quivira uranium mine waste
Description
An undated photos of the Quivira Mines sites, an inactive uranium mine operation located northeast of Gallup, New Mexico. Federal and tribal officials accepted a plan to remove 1 million cubic yards of waste to a disposal site outside of the Navajo Nation. (Courtesy of U.S. EPA)

Teracita Keyanna (Diné) has lived a life touched by uranium. Growing up in the Coyote Chapter in the Eastern Navajo Nation, her family members worked in the mine sites before the mid-80s, her grandmother was a custodian in the mine owner’s office building.

Approximately two football fields outside her front step, the land slopes uphill just below a steep wash, the mark of the remnants of the Kerr-McGee Quivira uranium mine.

“It’s the first thing that you see when you walk out the door,” she said, noting how it reshaped the land.

Kerr-McGee Quivira mine counts among more than 1,100 mines, milling sites and waste piles scattered across the Navajo Nation from the uranium mining period, many of them abandoned. Now, after years of advocacy from the Navajo communities of Red Water Pond Road and Pipeline Road, federal and tribal officials signed off on a plan to dispose of the legacy wastes off-site.

Specifically, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week approved a plan to transport 1 million cubic yards of uranium mine waste from three sites in trucks to a disposal site to the privately-owned Red Rocks Landfill, located about 6 miles east of Thoreau, New Mexico.

This decision marks the first of its kind, said Susan Gordon, coordinator for nonprofit Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, who has been organizing mining cleanup, and if successful could impact future cleanup.

“We see this as a strong first step,” Gordon said. “We’re hopeful this could set a model that could be repeated, perhaps in other states that are facing huge piles of uranium waste that need to be cleaned up – Arizona and Colorado, in particular.”

The waste includes broken rocks, dirt and sand containing natural radioactive and non-radioactive metals with too little uranium to be milled, according to the EPA.

Cleanup remains years away. Further permitting, construction of the disposal cell, and operation estimated to take at least six to eight years. The New Mexico Environment Department will then oversee the long-term monitoring in perpetuity.

Keyanna described oscillating between relief and gratitude toward cleanup and continued frustration about the damage radiation wrought on the Navajo Nation’s health. The fallout includes high rates of lung cancer in uranium miners, further heavy metals exposure and associations of higher kidney disease rates that University of New Mexico research connected to proximity to abandoned uranium mine sites.

“It’s bittersweet,” Keyanna said. “My whole community has been impacted by it before I was even born; that’s way too long to have to wait for any kind of positive action, moving forward with any type of cleanup.”

Navajo Nation pushes for radioactive waste remnants to be fully removed

The Quivira mine outside of Churchrock produced 2-4% of all historic uranium mining in New Mexico, according to the EPA, and is near one of the worst mining spills in history. On July 1979, a dam rupture spilled thousands of tons of radioactive waste and nearly 95 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Rio Puerco and nearby Navajo Nation lands.

And the Quivira mining site has faced severe erosion in recent years, posing a potential future threat if mining wastes are washed downstream in arroyos.

“It can’t stay there, it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” said Chris Shuey, a public health researcher at the Southwest Research and Information Center.

In contrast, the Red Rocks landfill has more protection for surrounding groundwater, separated by more than 350 feet rock and clay formations as a barrier, and has more protection from winds.

“The landfill at Red Rocks is a highly engineered, highly managed site that seems to fit all of the kind of ideal conditions that you would want to isolate waste from the environment and from people for forever, really,” Shuey said.

The plan faced backlash from Thoreau residents, who in meetings expressed concern about hauling any amount of uranium through the community, and said they had not given their consent for the disposal.

Keyanna and Gordon said they tried to address the initial pushback from residents, and noted “misinformation” about the types of waste or the threat of the harms of transporting and storing the waste.

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren offered his support for the plan in a press release.

“This solution is a compromise that will get radioactive waste in this area off of the Navajo Nation as soon as possible,” Nygren stated. “It’s not everything the three affected communities would wish for, but it’s action in the right direction now, rather than in the future. Most importantly, this will protect our people from harmful exposure.”

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