Community Impacts

By Luke Danielson

The WARM Mine Reclamation field Course, organized by the Western Alliance of Reclamation Management, https://www.westernreclamation.org/ and the Society of Economic Geologists, https://www.segweb.org/ was mostly based at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

We saw numerous types of mining in several different settings, from former silver mines in the high San Juans in Colorado to copper mining in Utah, which will be the subject of future blog posts.

The focus of this post is the legacy  of mining on the Navajo Nation. While this includes mining of coal, gold and copper, the most frequent and visible mining impacts are those of uranium mining.

Humans have been mining for a very long time, far longer than they have domesticated horses or cows, or grown crops. They started by mining a very limited number of materials, maybe 50,000 years ago. But over time their technologies have required, and have made possible, the production of a longer and longer list of materials.

A relative newcomer to this list is uranium. Some very modest amounts of uranium may have been produced before World War II as a byproduct of the mining of vanadium or other ores. A type of dinnerware, FiestaWare originated in 1936, and used uranium glazes to produce plates with a bright orange/red hue.

FiestaWare

But mining for uranium as a primary objective awaited the invention, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, of the deadliest weapons human ingenuity had yet produced. The first of these new inventions was detonated in New Mexico, at the Trinity site in the Jornada del Muerto.

The Postwar Environment and the Uranium Boom

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the war, the world faced an arms race, which required more mining of uranium. There was also the potential that other important things, such as driving ships, or generating electrical power, might come from this invention, and the U.S. did not want to be left behind.

Government was concerned that supplies of uranium might prove too limited, or worse, that our nation’s adversaries might have more of it than we did. It was a crisis atmosphere, not too different from what we are seeing today with critical minerals. The Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies established a host of measures designed to promote and reward the prospecting for and production of uranium. This created the 1950s “Uranium Boom.”[1]

It turned out that a great deal of uranium was located, much of it in New Mexico. It was produced often in haphazard ways, leaving behind a massive and very troubling social and environmental legacy. Miners dug uranium from small, poorly ventilated tunnels with dangerous radiation levels. Mill waste leached into groundwater supplies.

Under the regime of government subsidies, so much uranium was located and produced that the government stockpile grew too large. And in the 1960s, when the subsidies were removed, uranium mining moved from boom to bust. 

The Uranium Bust

Because there was inadequate attention to planning for closure, there was a legacy of uncontrolled environmental impacts on the landscape.

There are still more than 500 federally recognized abandoned uranium mines left on the Navajo Nation alone, and more than 10,000 in the western United States. 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Defense-Related Uranium Mines (DRUM) program is a partnership between DOE, federal land management agencies, state abandoned mine lands (AML) programs, and tribal governments to verify and validate the condition of the mines that provided uranium ore to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for defense-related activities between 1947 and 1970.

We met with teams from the US Department of Energy, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Navajo Abandoned Mined Lands Department, Freeport McMoran, the Southwest Research and Information Center, and other organizations.

Mill Tailings Disposal Site at Shiprock, New Mexico

At Shiprock, New Mexico the group was hosted by a DOE team and contractors led by DOE Site Manager Joni Tallbull. There is a major repository for mill tailings from the former Shiprock Uranium Mill. This is one of a number of such repositories in the region.

The Shiprock tailings were originally placed on permeable soils in the alluvium along the San Juan River. This led to infiltration of contaminants into groundwater. And the protection of groundwater is a major focus of current reclamation efforts.

The uranium milled at Shiprock was produced at numerous small uranium mines, many of them in the area around Cove, New Mexico. Many of these are in the process of being remediated by Freeport McMoran, a mining company which did not create these legacies but is cleaning up many of them.

Abandoned Uranium Mine Near Cove, New Mexico

Our group saw numerous sites being managed by Jennifer Laggan, the Manager for Remediation Projects of Freeport Minerals Co., and the team she leads.

South of Shiprock is the site of the Church Rock uranium mill tailings spill. This spill was the largest release of radiation in U.S. history, and

“released 1,000 tons of tailings and 93 million gallons of acidic wastewater into the Rio Puerco, traveling about 80 miles downstream to eastern Arizona. People who waded unknowingly into the river immediately after the spill suffered acid burns on their feet and legs, and an unknown number of livestock (cattle, sheep, horses) were also lost in the river.”

Participants were hosted by members of the community of Church Rock, a community at the side of the largest uranium mine on the Navajo Nation, now closed. There is considerable remediation work still to be done at several sites in the immediate neighborhood of this community. 

Kenyon Larsen of EPA with students at Church Rock

There are deep concerns in the Church Rock community, which participants found very moving, about family members who suffered from lung cancer and other diseases as a result of their work in the uranium industry, areas no longer safe to live, and impact on agricultural livelihoods from the local experience with uranium mining.

We could not help but note the billboards on local highways informing people of their rights to file claims for these injuries.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), is a federal program administered by the Department of Justice that provides one-time compensation to eligible former uranium miners, millers, and ore transporters who develop certain radiation-related illnesses. Originally, it covered workers from 1942-1971, but recent legislation has extended the coverage for miners to 1990, and broadened the list of eligible diseases.

We hope in 2026 to have a more advanced version of this field course, that will see other sites beyond uranium sites, and involve collaboration with Navajo Technical University.