BY TALIA BOYD
On a beautiful Saturday afternoon last May, as mesmerizing mesas blanketed by shadows of clouds passed me by, I began to feel anxious. I was going to the last and only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States.
For years while organizing around uranium legacy issues in northwestern New Mexico, I had heard of this place — the White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. I had heard how close it is to the Ute Mountain Ute community of White Mesa.
When I arrived at the third annual White Mesa Ute Community Protest and Spiritual Walk, my heart sank. It is true: the White Mesa Ute people are less than four miles from the mill. It really hit home for me. I grew up being unknowingly exposed to uranium tailings from the Tuba City, Arizona Disposal Site, a former uranium mill, also known as “Rare Metals,” located within the Navajo Nation and close to the Hopi reservation. My family then moved to Church Rock, New Mexico — ground zero for the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history. I know the fight for survival against the nuclear fuel chain — I’m living it. Did you know that over 90 percent of uranium milling in the U.S. has happened on or near tribal lands? All too often, for Indigenous peoples, our homelands are considered sacrifice zones for the nuclear beast, and we, the Indigenous peoples, are seen as expendable.
On the Ute Mountain Ute reservation just north of Bluff, Utah, the White Mesa Ute Concerned Community group has been organizing for years for the closure and cleanup of the mill. The protest walk has been gaining momentum and participation each year and amplifies tribal voices and concerns. We gathered together at the end of the walk near the turnoff to the mill, as community members shared stories of how they don’t go outside anymore because of the toxic smell, the increasing fears of water contamination, and the huge trucks that incessantly haul in loads of radioactive material at night.
TIM PETERSON
“When the mill’s running, it smells like chemicals at my house. We take in radiation from the mill, me, my kids, my mom, my family, my people,” community organizer Yolanda Badback told the crowd.
The mill was built in 1979 to process uranium ore from nearby mines on the Colorado Plateau. But around the early 1990s, the mill’s owner began trying to make additional money by processing “alternate feed material” and discarding the resulting waste at the mill, a practice that continues today.
These “alternate feeds” include uranium-laden waste from distant sites contaminated by federal atomic testing programs and highly polluted industrial sites. The alternate feed is run through the mill, uranium is extracted, and the resulting waste is discarded in pits at the mill site.
Though the mill was not intended for disposal of these materials, it is now licensed to receive them. The cost to clean up, remediate, and reclaim the mill could be astronomical, and there’s an immense financial incentive for the company not to set aside enough of its current revenues to pay for the mill’s final cleanup. When other uranium mills have closed, companies have declared bankruptcy and walked away.
Now, contaminants in the groundwater beneath the mill site are migrating toward springs that are used by and spiritually important to members of the White Mesa Ute community. The mill belches radioactive and toxic air pollutants that travel with the wind, including radon, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. Stockpiled ore and alternate feeds that are not adequately covered also blow off-site.
As I stood there listening to the speakers, waves of memories came racing into my mind: of having that lived experience of being unknowingly and unwillingly exposed, of the small trailer-park community located right next to the Tuba City Disposal Site, where some of my elementary- school friends lived and whom we picked up each day on our bus route to school. These children used to play on top of the unfenced uranium-tailings pile — there were no warning signs — especially after it rained and water would gather in puddles at the bottom. They were later forced to relocate after decades of being exposed and after losing family to different cancers.
My heart began pounding faster and faster with the beat of the drum. As my Ute relatives shared stories and sang traditional songs, I felt a loss of breath, a deep hurt within my heart and a lump in my throat… we are still fighting to survive. What does long-term exposure to radioactive contaminants do to the human body, the environment, our economy, and our social structures? Impacted communities have been requesting long-term studies to assess the cumulative impacts to begin establishing baselines and gathering data, to little or no avail.
The mill is located right beside the original Bears Ears National Monument, and the mill’s owner has a permitted uranium mine just outside Bears Ears, whose expansion the Grand Canyon Trust has challenged. The matter is currently on appeal. Recently, a Moab miner reopened a uranium and vanadium mine on lands cut from the monument in 2017. If not reversed by the courts, the president’s unlawful cuts to Bears Ears National Monument mean the mill could process uranium and vanadium that has been mined in and near the original Bears Ears.
This shows a gross and blatant disregard for tribal communities who have been confronting the intentional pollution of our homelands and the desecration of our cultural landscapes. Indigenous peoples and communities of color experience the worst pollution because of institutional racism used to separate us and suppress the voices of those most impacted.
TIM PETERSON
While we wait for the courts to rule on our national monuments lawsuits and restore the original boundaries of Bears Ears, we’ve also filed an administrative appeal before the Utah Department of Environmental Quality to contest the state’s decision to renew two major permits the mill needs to operate: a radioactive materials license and a groundwater discharge permit.
The Grand Canyon Trust’s primary goal is to ensure that the mill’s reclamation plan is as robust as possible, is carried out promptly, and that we have as much information as possible about how well the cleanup is protecting the environment and the health of the residents of the White Mesa Ute community. We’ve been working side by side with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, which has filed a similar appeal.
In 2018, the mill’s owner submitted an application to build two new 40-acre waste pits at the mill site. The mill lies within the White Mesa Archaeological District, home to countless Ancestral Puebloan and Ute sacred sites. Digging new waste pits would inevitably damage or destroy them. “The mill was built on top of burial grounds and contaminates the bones of my ancestors,” Yolanda Badback wrote in an opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune back in 2017.
The mill’s owner has also filed an application to accept radioactive waste from a metals processing facility in Estonia, raising the prospect of hazardous materials traveling over land and sea from all over the planet bound for the doorstep of the White Mesa Ute community.
Closer to home, the mill’s owner has expressed an interest in accepting uranium mine wastes that would come from Superfund cleanup of abandoned uranium mines on the nearby Navajo Nation. This goes back to the old model of industry — pitting tribal communities against each other after exploiting our homelands and our natural resources. They seek to divide us by moving radioactive waste between our communities. In 2018, the Cherokee Nation celebrated the removal of tons of radioactive waste from the Sequoyah Fuels uranium conversion plant, however that radioactive sludge was then hauled to the White Mesa Mill where the White Mesa Ute people could be exposed to the resulting radioactive pollution.
Because the uranium industry is beset by high production costs and low prices, a third of the mill’s workforce was laid off in January. In financial trouble, the mill’s owner and another uranium producer petitioned the Trump administration in 2018 to impose “buy American” quotas for uranium. That effort failed, but the president created a Nuclear Fuel Working Group to make recommendations to prop up the industry.
The president’s proposed budget released in February called for $150 million to create a strategic uranium reserve composed of American uranium, never mind that the Department of Energy already manages a sizable strategic stockpile of uranium. We’re not sure exactly where the newly mined uranium would come from, but any ore dug up in the United States would be milled at White Mesa if Congress accepts that portion of the president’s budget. The working group also promised further steps to boost the industry, though it remains a mystery what those measures might be.
TIM PETERSON
After the gathering and during our farewells, I had a huge headache and my eyes were slightly stinging. The toxic smell increased the closer we got to the mill and we protested at the mill turnoff for a couple hours. Some other attendees also mentioned having headaches and not feeling well afterwards. In that moment, we all truly understood what our White Mesa Ute relatives live with every day.
The Grand Canyon Trust’s Cultural Landscapes Program is working with the White Mesa Concerned Community group and partners to support a community-led environmental justice conference in the run-up to the fourth annual spiritual walk. Our goal is to mobilize support to clean up the White Mesa Mill that continually pollutes the air, land, and water, and desecrates significant cultural landscapes.
The nuclear fuel chain is rooted in placing the brunt of its pollution on poor, Indigenous, and other minority communities. Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples throughout the Colorado Plateau know the true cost and the permanent damage from the nuclear fuel chain. Everything from the mining, milling, and waste are burdens we will all carry for generations. As our communities work to heal, we continue to face nuclear colonialism. We invite you to join us in the fight as we move forward for justice and a healthy future for the coming generations.
In the words of White Mesa community organizer Michael Badback: “We’re not going to stop until we get something done with this, because it’s important to us, to our future, to our young ones that are growing up.”
Talia Boyd is Diné. Her clans are Todích’íí’nii (Bitter Water), born for Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flowing Together); maternal grandfather is Tl’aashchi’I (Red Bottom) and paternal grandfather is Tábą ą há (Water’s Edge). She has spent years as a grassroots organizer in rural and Indigenous communities on environmental and social justice issues.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocatecontributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
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