Trust is in short supply that the EPA will follow through on promises to clean up uranium mine contamination that has sickened generations of Navajo people, tribal members told agency officials visiting a contaminated mining area on Friday in Arizona.
The EPA added the uranium mining area, known as the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District, to the National Priorities List, or Superfund, on March 5. The site includes about 100 uranium and vanadium mine waste piles which have contaminated the soil and streamwater and groundwater in nearby Navajo communities.
About 30 million tons of uranium ore were mined at more than 500 sites on Navajo lands during the Cold War between 1944 and 1986. Many of those sites have never been cleaned up, leaving a long-lasting legacy of radioactive waste considered one of the region’s most significant environmental justice challenges.
Cove, Ariz., is surrounded by at least 42 abandoned uranium mines with above-ground uranium waste piles in the area dotting the landscape.
There is scant hard data to directly link uranium mine waste to cancer, “but we do know that there have been people, not just here in Cove but in other locations, who have been chronically over the years exposed to levels of radiation that are high enough to create problems,” Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview.
Homes in the area were built using radioactive waste from the mines, he said.
There are “lots of different points of contamination that need to be addressed,” and it will take many years to do so, said Kenyon Larsen, EPA project manager for the Lukachukai area, speaking in Cove on Friday.
“If you ever have an epitome of what the definition is of environmental injustice, it’s that we as the federal government caused the problem,” Martha Guzman, US EPA Region 9 administrator, said in an interview. “Through a lawsuit, the federal government owned up and settled its obligation.”
The EPA in 2022 entered into settlement and enforcement agreements with the Navajo Nation amounting to $1.7 billion to begin cleaning up some of the mines. But funding for cleaning up the Superfund sites is not fully secured.
The area is considered sacred to members of the Navajo Nation, and it is habitat for the Mexican spotted owl, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
“We’d like to see these remediation activities carried out in a timely fashion, not 40 years from now,” said James Benally, president of the Navajo Nation’s Cove Chapter, adding that numerous uranium miners in the area died of cancer.
“Uranium mining decimated our menfolk here in Cove,” he said. “Every family you encounter in Cove, all the menfolk are gone.”
The Superfund additions begin a long process to determine if the cleanup is feasible.
Navajos who breathe uranium mine dust in the air and drink it in their water say the EPA is doing too little to earn their trust that they’ll clean up the uranium waste, some Navajo Nation tribal council representatives said.
“The federal government continues to ask us for data,” and make residents prove they suffer from uranium mine contamination despite decades of health problems, said Amber Crotty, a Navajo Nation Council delegate, speaking to EPA officials Friday in Cove. “That’s not how to build trust.”
The Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency and other tribal officials said they spent years urging the US EPA to add the old mines to Superfund, and the Biden administration finally heard their pleas.
The Superfund additions represent “a promise, and an opportunity for resources,” Cliff Villa, director of the US EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management, said while in Cove. A tax imposed on the oil and chemical industries has been restored to ensure Superfund will be funded, assuring a revenue stream for the Lukachukai cleanup, Villa said.
But “this is one step—a Superfund site,” Crotty said. “In Arizona, there’s 10 other Superfund sites that have been waiting 40-plus years for funding.”
Skepticism About Cleanup
Some Navajos are skeptical that the Lukachukai Superfund designation will actually lead to a meaningful cleanup of the sites and any public health improvements.
Guzman said that the addition of the area to Superfund obligates the federal government to clean up the uranium waste, however.
“US EPA has ‘promised’ the Navajo many things over the years,” Perry Charley, who led the Uranium Education Program at Diné College in Shiprock, N.M., before he retired, said in an email. “The inclusion of Cove is another such promise.”
The EPA has yet to clean up a single uranium mine, and it continues to sew distrust among the Navajos by allowing uranium ore to be transported across the Navajo Nation from a newly-operating mine near the Grand Canyon to a mill in Utah, Charley said.
The Navajo Nation has imposed a moratorium on transporting uranium ore across its land.
The EPA “fails to recognize our sovereignty laws and policies,” Charley said.
The toxic legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation was key to its support for President Joe Biden’s 2023 declaration of a new national monument near the Grand Canyon, which was designed in part to block new uranium mining in the region.
“The uranium mining during the Cold War devastated the Navajo people, making many of our people sick from tailings and the runoff that made it into our communities,” Richard Begay, speaking on behalf of Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, told federal officials during a July 2023 public meeting about the monument in Flagstaff, Ariz.
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