'Oh no, not again'
Meeting stirs up memories of 1979 uranium disaster

Chris Shuey, director of the Uranium Impact Assessment Program out of Albuquerque, discusses on Monday the 1979 uranium accident in Church Rock that contaminated the area's water. A forum at El Morro Theater was sponsored by McKinley Community Health Alliance. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — On July 16, 1979, the earthen dam of a United Nuclear Corporation settling pond in Church Rock gave way, releasing 94 million gallons of radioactive wastewater and 1,100 tons of uranium tailings into the Rio Puerco. According to the McKinley Community Health Alliance, it was the largest release of radioactive material by volume in the country's history.

Today, on the brink of what could become the latest round of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, the next generation of mining companies is touting the safety of the newest techniques. But local activists say they've heard it before, and they're urging locals not to buy it again.

To fight the uranium mining industry's latest charge, the Health Alliance brought together a panel of area professors, health care professionals and activists at El Morro Theater Monday evening. There they spoke to a crowd of more than 100 about the history of uranium mining in the area and about the specter of another round.

New technology
With uranium now fetching upwards of $50 per pound, Monday's panelists feared the renewed enthusiasm with which mining companies have begun pursuing new concessions. And with more than half the world's remaining uranium deposits, according to Johnnye Lewis, director of the UNM Health Sciences Center's Community Environmental Health Program, the Colorado Plateau and the Navajo Nation's Eastern Agency in particular is where many of them are looking.

The company troubling them most is the Texas-based Hydro Resources, Inc., which has its eye on a few sites near Church Rock and more near Crownpoint. The Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) has been fighting its plans since 1994. While the company has a license to proceed from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it's still waiting on a few final permits.

If it gets the chance, Hydro Resources won't be digging for uranium in cavernous underground or pit mines as its predecessors did. It will be using a relatively new process called in situ leach mining, a process that injects relatively harmless chemicals into the ground to dissolve the much more dangerous uranium in the sub-surface rock, then brings the mixture to the surface for refining.

The good news, said Mansel Nelson, program coordinator for Northern Arizona University's Environmental Education Outreach Program, is that the process does not come with the piles of tailings uranium mining used to. And without having to send miners underground, it keeps them that much safer.

The danger, he said, is that the dissolved uranium might seep out of the mining area before it's captured. Throw the Westwater Canyon Aquifer and the 15,000 McKinley County residents who depend on it as their sole source of drinking water into the mix, and Monday's panelists start to worry.

Old promises
With the new technology comes the promise of improved safety that the companies can restore the in situ mines to pre-mining conditions when they're done and the lure of new jobs. But the record on cleaning up these new mines is not encouraging, Nelson said. And Chris Shuey, director of the Uranium Impact Assessment Program of the Southwest Research and Information Center, sees few lasting gains from uranium mining booms of the past.

"We're listening to the same old promises that we've heard in the '50s and '60s," Shuey said.

Yet decades after those experiences, he said, hundreds of abandoned mines remain unrestored and thousands of reservation residents still await word on their claims for compensation. Lewis and her colleagues, meanwhile, prepare to study whether the contamination from those rounds of uranium mining played any role in the unusually high rates of kidney failure in the area.

The mining companies aren't backing down. One of them, said ENDAUM representative Lynnea Smith, opened up a local office to pursue land claims just months after the Navajo Nation Council approved the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, which bans uranium mining on Navajoland.

"The companies aren't stopping," she said. "They want the uranium and they want the money."

Those who live on the reservation know the potential future they're facing, said Health Alliance representative Jana Gunnell, who presided over the Monday's event. It's the people in Gallup, she said, who might not, and for whom her group organized the evening.

Gunnell insisted on the need to say no to Hydro Resources and its peers now, "so that we're not in a position to say, 'Oh no, not again.' "