Navajo Community Split On Uranium Mine

by Danielle Knight

Navajo and environmental organizations, however, are worried that all this may now change. An Albuquerque-based mining company, Hydro Resources Inc. has received a federal license to pursue plans to leach uranium from the groundwater in three places in the Northwestern part of the state.

Larry King, a member of the Eastern Navajo community fighting uranium mining said these plans threaten the drinking water for an estimated 15,000 people. King, whose family has lived and raised livestock in the area for more than sixty years also points to the impact that uranium mining has had on thousands of Native Americans.

Many drinking wells now are fenced off because they are contaminated and, with this in mind, King said that mining the highly toxic radioactive uranium will threaten the health of the community for generations to come.

"My family lives more or less downwind from the proposed mining site and I am very concerned about contamination of the air, the water and the ground," he told IPS.

The company also said the mining will open up about 150 jobs in the community. "The people whose lands are being affected have come to me asking for my help because this is the first time they have been able to get any kind of revenue from their land. They have never gotten anything all these years," said Thomas Atsitti, former president of the Navajo Nation, "And if anything should go wrong the Navajo Nation could step in."

The underground leach mining process that Hydro Resources intends to use is different from traditional open pit or shaft uranium mines. Much of the mining occurs in the groundwater itself when oxygen laced with sodium bicarbonate is injected into the aquifer to dissolve the ore. The uranium is then extracted through wells and eventually converted into fuel for nuclear power plants.

Richard Clement, president of Hydro Resources, a subsidiary of Uranium Resources, a mining company based in Dallas, Texas, said the "trick" to containing the uranium is to pump out more water than is replaced. That creates a negative pressure within the mining area which prevents the uranium and other toxic by-products reaching drinking or agricultural wells.

This extraction process, said Clement, poses no threat to the ground water. "The area where an uranium ore body occurs is not drinking water," he said. "The properties involved in this process are miles from civilization."

Mining areas also are surrounded by monitor wells which are tested to see if any water contamination has occurred, he added.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) agrees that the proposed mine is safe and has granted Hydro Resources a license to mine. But according to Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist with the Southwest Research and Information Center, the commission's own environmental impact study reported that, the threat of permanent contamination to the Crownpoint drinking water supply is so high, local water wells must be moved before mining begins.

As a result the commission would require the company to replace the town water wells and construct new water pipes.

"No one from the commission consulted the community about whether it wanted its water supply removed," he said. "This is an outrageous example of the federal government dictating to a Native American community how it will manage a resource in exchange for uranium to be mined."

Opponents of the mine have brought their case to Washington, where in hearings before the NRC, they are trying to get the commission to revoke the company's permit to mine in the area.

"This is the first case where a community has ever challenged the issuing of this type of a license by the commission; it therefore is, by definition, a precedent-setting case," said Douglas Meiklejohn, an attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, who is advising the Eastern Navajo group.

"We believe that the license had been issued prematurely particularly when there were so many concerns about environmental contamination," he added.

Sometime next year Judge Peter Bloch with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will decide whether to revoke the company's permit. When he visited Crownpoint, New Mexico in September, he told opponents to the mine he would only side with them if they were able to prove substantial risk to the aquifer.

Mitchell Capitan, one of the founders of the Eastern Navajo anti-mining group, said community relations in Crownpoint are tense. He claimed the issue has divided families and people are afraid to openly oppose the mine. A motion before the local tribal government to oppose the mine sparked such controversy that the issue was never publicly brought up for debate again.

"This mining issue has damaged our clanship and relations among families," said Capitan. "We are facing a lot of misinformation from the mining company that said the project is not going to affect our water."