Oct. 12—Nearly four decades after a uranium mine on Navajo land closed up shop, a site was proposed for permanent storage of its waste left behind.
A portion of the municipal Red Rock Landfill in Thoreau was identified for a “geotechnically engineered facility.”
The location was ideal to store the low-level radioactive waste, which includes dry dirt and rocks contaminated with uranium, as well as mining equipment, said Eric Jantz, legal director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center. While the “hottest stuff” — the most radioactive debris — had already been removed from the mine site, there were remaining concerns about the health effects to nearby residents from long-term exposure to uranium-contaminated waste as well as other heavy metals like cadmium and mercury.
“They’ve been living with these chronic exposures for decades,” Jantz said. “For the first time ever, the United States government, through the [Environmental Protection Agency], has agreed to move the waste off of the Navajo Nation, away from their communities, into a sort of centralized, regional, disposal site.”
But there was a snag.
According to a complaint filed by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center against the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, “some Navajo Nation officials have alleged tribal or allottee ownership of subsurface rights under the lands of the Red Rock Landfill and consequently have objected to the development of the site by claiming the disposal site will limit their access to minerals beneath the landfill.”
The suit alleges the federal agency violated public records laws by not providing documentation of land and mineral rights for the proposed site.
The BIA did not respond to a request for comment.
A call to representatives of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency was not immediately returned.
The impact of existing mineral rights is uncertain without the records. Jantz said the BIA acknowledged the group’s request, but the law center has received neither the requested documents nor communications about when those records might be produced.
“I think it’s unclear what the implications of minerals rights underneath that portion of land at the Red Rocks Landfill would be,” Jantz said. “I think we need to know what we’re looking at before we can make any sort of determination.”
The mine is one of more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation.
After the mine closed, Jantz said, the waste piles were covered with dirt and seeded with grass and other plants. But time, weather and erosion allowed waste piles to become exposed.
Susan Gordon, coordinator of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, has been working with communities on abandoned mine issues for 11 years.
The EPA proposed several potential solutions for waste at the Quivira Mines, Gordon said, including leaving it in place, transporting it to other licensed facilities — around 200 miles away from the site — as well as the Red Rock Landfill plan, which Gordon said community members endorsed.
“These communities have been living with it forever,” Gordon said of the mining waste. “The mines came in when some of these people were in high school, and the mine shafts and the tunnels went underneath their village. It’s a very complicated cleanup process.”
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