Uranium mining fight intensifies

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Members of the Eastern Navajo Allottee Association were expected to be out in protest this morning at the opening of the Navajo Nation Council's Winter Session in an attempt to call attention to proposed legislation which would ban uranium development on Navajoland.

The allottees question how they are going to develop property that belongs to them if there is a ban on uranium mining.

Benjamin House, president of Eastern Navajo Allottee Association, who lives in Continental Divide, said, "I think the councilmen are going down the wrong track, proposing to cap uranium not only on the reservation but to extend out to the Eastern Navajo Agency, which is considered Indian Country."

"We're concerned with our minerals, we're concerned with our land. It belongs to the allottees and they're very disturbed and upset about what's going on," said House, who also works as a consultant for Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI).

HRI recently announced plans to begin in-situ leach mining to extract uranium ore at the Church Rock Section 8 mine in McKinley County in less than two years. The Texas-based company plans to operate other in-situ leach mines through its Crownpoint Uranium Solution Mining Project.

Eastern Allottees took out a full-page advertisement in Saturday's Gallup Independent, asking that they be given due consideration by council pertaining to uranium issues and development of their land.

House said, "These allottees, they are people that signed a lease with the company. ... Somewhere between 1988 and 1992, that's when the leases were signed." Now, he said, the allottees "are afraid if they put a cap on resources, then it's not going to help them."

He believes the in-situ technology is safe and wants the matter opened up for research to demonstrate that "we still can mine without repeating what happened in the 1950s and 1960s." He claims that Resources Chairman George Arthur and his committee did not sit down with allottees to discuss the uranium legislation. "It's just like a railroad job, that's what it is,"he said.

Water and uranium
Hogback Delegate Ervin Keeswood brought up the allottee issue during the recent special session in which council approved a proposed settlement of the Navajo Nation's claims to water in the San Juan River Basin in New Mexico.

Keeswood said he believes the Navajo Nation is creating problems for itself in reference to including the allottees without consulting them on the matter of taking their water and making it part of Navajo water.

"I think this is going to become an interesting subject because that may stop the process until they're not only consulted, but until somebody tells them this is exactly the amount of water they're entitled to. According to the documents that we approved, the allottees would have to come to the Navajo Nation central government to ask for the privilege of using their own water," Keeswood explained.

That's going to be problematic for individuals, Keeswood said. When he brought up the issue during council, "the response from the Navajo Department of Justice was basically, 'If they want to utilize water for developing a homesite lease, then they just have to go through the process of coming to Water Development and there's no problem.'"

"If they go beyond that and try to develop something more in an allotment, basically, then they would probably have to adjudicate their rights as far as water is concerned," he said.

"But this is interesting. While we are saying its Navajo water, the process in the document shows that the waters at NIIP (Navajo Indian Irrigation Project) would actually be used when waters are requested through a certain process by the allottees. We would take NIIP water and satisfy them," he said.

Council will be asked this week to approve another piece of legislation from Arthur requesting New Mexico's congressional delegation initiate legislation which calls for fully funding and completing construction of NIIP. The San Juan proposed settlement agreement originally called for completion of NIIP, but that portion of the legislation was removed after complaints from New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici.

In-situ pros, consIn-situ leaching, also known as solution mining, involves leaving the ore in the ground and pumping liquids through it to recover the minerals by leaching. One of the advantages is there is little surface disturbance and no tailings or waste rock generated. Hazards to employees from accidents, dust, and radiation are reduced in comparison to conventional mining techniques. It is also relatively low cost.

But there are drawbacks to the in-situ leaching technology, such as the risk of spreading leaching liquid outside the uranium deposit and subsequently contaminating groundwater.

According to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on HRI's Crownpoint Uranium Solution Mining Project, site-specific tests conducted by HRI did not demonstrate that the proposed groundwater restoration standards could be achieved at a production scale.

A conservative analysis by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff suggests there is a potential risk that restoration of groundwater at the Crownpoint site might result in uranium concentrations at the town's drinking water wells that exceed the NRC standard for uranium in groundwater, but would still fall within the New Mexico Drinking Water Standard.

Righting past wrongs
The uranium legislation before council this week would enact the Din Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005. The legislation sponsored by Resources' George Arthur would ban any further uranium mining activities in whatever form "until such time as the federal government and all responsible people address the wrong that has happened in prior years," Arthur said recently.

"We still have a lot of unanswered questions that relate to health; the ongoing long-term effects that the uranium industry has exposed to the Navajo people," he said.

The federal government enacted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990 to provide payments to individuals who became ill from cancer and other life-threatening diseases as a result of their employment with the uranium mining industry during the Cold War.

In April 2003, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that since RECA was expanded in 2000, there has been a significant increase in the number of claims filed. In fiscal year 2002, RECA was appropriated funds to cover a 10-year period (through 2011).

However, the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Justice estimate that funding levels will not be enough to meet the number of claims anticipated. The Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee was to present a report to council today on the RECA Amendments of 2000.

The grass-roots group Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) is calling for support of the ban on uranium mining. If council does not pass the legislation this session, according to Lynnea Smith, project specialist for ENDAUM, it may be too late by spring session.

ENDAUM fears that Domenici could expedite legislation in Congress that could bar the Navajo Nation from regulating uranium mining.

"Water is more valuable than uranium. We still have people suffering from uranium mining illnesses who must be compensated. We still have people living next to uranium waste dumps that have never been cleaned up. The Navajo people have paid with their lives mining uranium and it has gotten them nothing," Smith said.