Navajo split on uranium plan

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 19, 1999 by Arthur Jones

Company wants to draw mineral through a pristine aquifer

Mitchell Capitan turned off the road, slipped his truck into four-wheel drive and churned dust as he forced the vehicle up an embankment onto a plateau. From this vantage point, for miles in every direction, all that can be seen is the occasional settlement, a few horses here, a few cows and sheep there. This is a parched and arid corner of a parched and arid state.

What can't be seen is the uranium, the radioactive and toxic silvery white element buried 2,000-feet down, in sand below the pristine Westwater Canyon Aquifer. The aquifer is the sole drinking water supply for an extended region of 15,000 people, including the adjoining Eastern Navajo Agency.

Crownpoint and Church Rock, two Navajo villages, are part of a region that sits atop the United States' richest and most extensive uranium deposits, deposits that spread throughout this Four Corners region where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah abut.

These two villages, close to the agency -- part of the enormous Navajo Nation -- also sit atop a growing controversy.

Capitan is leading a handful of Navajo desperately fighting -- and losing -- a legal battle to prevent three new mines from opening here. Despite almost five years of interventions and objections by the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), on Aug. 20 Administrative Law Judge Peter Bloch of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted Hydro Resources Inc. of Albuquerque the license to open the first of its three Crownpoint-Church Rock mines.

Highlights of the dispute, as protesting Navajos take their case to Washington:

* The extent to which, some say, the public is being cut out of the licensing process for any new nuclear U.S. domestic nuclear reactors;

* The extent of funding received by members of Congress from the nuclear power industry lobby;

* Accusations that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, threatened by 1998 U.S. Senate with budget cuts, has gone "belly up" and is giving the nuclear power industry everything it wants;

* Evidence of the continued easing of nuclear safety standards, from lowering of reactor safety regulations to permitting into circulation decommissioned nuclear weapon radioactive metals that will be manufactured, without public knowledge, into everything from "belt buckles to frying pans."

What the protesting Navajos are witnessing, said Diane D'Arrigo of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, is a regulatory commission "extremely supportive of uranium mining. It's part of [the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's] beholdeness to the nuclear power industry," D'Arrigo said.

Nuclear Information and Resource Service is headquartered in Washington, where the joke around town is that there has been a nonhostile takeover of the Regulatory Agency by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry lobby. In Crownpoint-Church Rock, that's no laughing matter.

Just 20 years ago Church Rock was the site of the largest radioactive liquid waste spill in U.S. history. On July 16, 1979, at 6 a.m., 93 million gallons of radioactive water breached the south side of United Nuclear Corp.'s earthen tailings dam, and along with 1,100 tons of uranium tailings containing other heavy metals, entered the Puerco River, which carried it through downtown Gallup, N.M., across the entire width of Arizona and finally into Lake Mead.

This Four Corners region has already been devastated by uranium mining, from the leaking Atlas Mine uranium tailings site in Moab, Utah, which government scientists say will dribble radioactive liquids into the Colorado River for the next 270 years, to Church Rock, where the radon levels in the air are 10 times the national average.

Poisoning the `Land of Enchantment'

In this "Land of Enchantment" state, Crownpoint and Church Rock are not solely the names of local settlements and mines. To many Navajos they are epitaphs in the making. Just as many Americans remember above- and below-ground nuclear testing, the Four Corners Navajos remember what fueled those tests: the 1950s to 1970s uranium boom-and-busts when fathers, uncles and grandfathers worked unprotected in radioactive open "dog pits," or jack-hammered uranium-bearing ore out of tunnels deep into mines.

Most of those men are dead now, many from cancer connected to the radioactive dust they breathed and the radioactive water they sloshed through. Only belatedly in 1990, and only in some cases, did the federal government agree to compensate the families.

Today, the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining, rebuffed by the administrative law courts, has switched the fight to Washington where it is attempting to rally political support against the mines.

ENDAUM'S predicament, say Washington-based public interest groups opposed to nuclear power, is that the nuclear power industry is coming back strong and sweeping the public and the regulatory agencies before it.

One predicament for the public is that the issue is so divisive independent authorities don't seem to exist. "Good luck," one university physicist told this newspaper when asked for the name of a physicist both sides would regard as a detached yet informed observer. "It's certainly not me. We're either on one side or the other."