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As uranium firms eye Nation, Navajos are wary
by JC
Sunday, Mar. 30, 2008 at 1:23 AM
During mining’s peak, from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, about 400 million pounds of uranium were extracted from the region. At the end of the boom, around 1984, the price of uranium languished below $10 a pound. Mines shut down, and the United States began importing nearly all of its uranium, with the bulk coming now from Canada, Russia and Australia. But by last summer, the price had rebounded to a record high of $136 a pound. Though the mines created numerous jobs and substantial royalties for the Navajo and Laguna tribes, the decades of extraction took a heavy toll: lung cancer, kidney disease, birth defects and other ailments at notably high levels among miners and families who lived among piles of uranium tailings — the ground-up waste from milling — and even used the material to build their homes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srVjPp1TwdA
Twenty years after uranium mining ceased in New Mexico amid plummeting prices for the ore, global warming and the soaring cost of oil are renewing interest in nuclear power — and in the state’s uranium belt.
At least five companies are seeking state permits to mine the uranium reserves, estimated at 500 million pounds or more, and Uranium Resources Inc. (URI), a Texas-based company, wants to reopen a uranium mill in Ambrosia Lake.
Industry officials say a uranium boom could mean thousands of jobs and billions in mineral royalties and taxes for the state.
But the deposits are largely in and around Navajo land, and the industry’s poor record on health and safety as it extracted tons of the ore in past decades has soured many Navajos on uranium mining. In 2005, the Navajo Nation banned uranium mining and milling on its land, and thousands of tribe members are receiving or seeking federal compensation for the health effects of past uranium exposure.
Like many Navajos who worked in the mines, Larry J. King didn’t know then that there was anything dangerous about it.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032703432.html...