Feds interested in mining uranium again

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

FORT DEFIANCE — During spring session, Navajo Nation Council delegates will be asked to consider the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005 which would place a ban on conventional uranium mining and a lengthy moratorium on uranium processing.

Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr., at a meeting last weekend in Shiprock, told a crowd of more than 500 gathered at the chapter house that the federal government is once again interested in mining uranium and may turn to the Navajo Nation as a source.

"We're at a critical point in the country regarding the use of uranium," he said, adding that the war in Iraq has generated a need for oil, coal, natural gas and uranium.

The president was speaking to Navajos who worked in underground uranium mines during the Cold War era of the 1950s and '60s, as well as surviving spouses and dependent children who had come to hear about the federal government's plans to kick in an extra $125,000 to 100 percent-disabled uranium workers and their qualifying survivors.

At the same time, President Bush's proposed 2006 federal budget shows a sharp decline in the amount of money to be appropriated to the Radiation Exposure Compensation (RECA) Trust Fund for downwind victims and onsite participants during the 1950s-60s atomic weapons tests at Nevada Test Site. However, the budget provides $8.5 million to continue studies on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or "bunker buster"at Nevada Test Site.

In a March 21 letter to University of Utah researcher Joseph Lyon, the federal Centers for Disease Control announced it was yanking funding for his long-term radioactive fallout study begun in 1977 which looked at the connections between thyroid disease and fallout from the above-ground nuclear tests.

Lyons has been following a group of 4,000 residents of Washington County, Utah, and Lincoln County, Nevada, who were schoolchildren during the early years of testing, according to Preston Truman, president of Utah Downwinders.

In 1993, the study found that fallout-related thyroid tumors increased 3.4 times over the expected rate among school children exposed to the highest doses. The CDC already had invested $8 million in the study, which was in its third segment.

"A lot of us are cynical about the whole thing,"said Truman, one of the original members of a thyroid study in the 1960s."Maybe the CDC didn't like that Lyon's study was investigating other health effects caused by fallout exposure,"he said.

Other downwinders say they believe the government is trying to get away from helping downwinders because they want to start nuclear testing again.

Mary Dickson of the Downwinders group said the government is still funding at least two major studies of the health effects of fallout from Chernobyl. "Apparently U.S. citizens don't rank as high as Russian citizens, which is hard for me to understand.

"Maybe the government doesn't really want to know what the health effects of testing were on our population."