On a warm July evening, Yolanda Badback described the noxious fumes that haunt the air where she lives. Unlike the fragrance of sagebrush or the sweet scent of juniper and piñon, the odor is astringent and sulfuric, hard to breathe. Sometimes it forces Badback and her family of eight to stay indoors. At its worst, it causes nausea.
Badback lives in White Mesa, Utah, on part of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. The smell comes from her neighbor, the White Mesa Mill, the last conventional uranium mill in the United States. When the mill’s tall smokestacks begin to billow and the winds roll off the blue Abajo Mountains, the stench floats five miles south to White Mesa. Badback, like most residents, can smell it from her doorstep...