Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation

Abstract

On a low, windswept rise at the southeastern edge of the Navajo Nation, Jackie Bell-Jefferson prepares to move her family from their home for a temporary stay that could last up to seven years. A mound of uranium-laden waste the size of several football fields, covered with a thin veneer of gravel, dominates the view from her front door. After many years of living next to the contamination and a litany of health problems she believes it caused, Bell-Jefferson and several other local families will have to vacate their homes for a third round of cleanup efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Decades of uranium mining have dotted the landscape across the Navajo Nation with piles of contaminated mine waste. The EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large commercial mining operations.1 The Navajo people did not have a word for “radioactivity” when mining outfits looking for vanadium2 and uranium3 began moving onto their land in the 1940s, and they did not understand that radiation could be dangerous. They were not told that the men who worked in the mines were breathing carcinogenic radon gas and showering in radioactive water, nor that the women washing their husbands’ work clothes could spread radionuclides to the rest of the family’s laundry.

Bell-Jefferson and her brother Peterson Bell played in and around the mines, splashing and swimming in pools of radioactive water that had been pumped out of the mines and then collected on their property. The contaminated water looked and tasted perfectly clean. Families used it for cooking, drinking, and cleaning. Hogans and corrals were built with mine wastes, as were roads.

All that changed on 16 July 1979. Just about a mile and a half from Bell-Jefferson’s home, a dam broke at the United Nuclear Corporation mill, where workers processed ore from the nearby Northeast Church Rock uranium mine. The spill dumped 94 million gallons of mill process effluent and 1,100 tons of tailings—an acidic, radioactive sludge—into a large arroyo that emptied into the Puerco River.4

The Church Rock spill occurred less than four months after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and it released three times as much radiation, making it the biggest nuclear spill in U.S. history, yet it received only a tiny fraction of the news coverage.5 Declared a Superfund site in 1983, the heaps of waste around the mill still cause radiation survey instruments to squeal from the invisible uranium atoms that remain active 30 years later.6

“This area used to be my playground,” Bell-Jefferson says. “Now it’s just a huge wound.”

For the Bells and other Dine (the term by which many Navajo people refer to themselves), the Church Rock spill was a turning point. When corporate and government officials appeared in the spill’s aftermath and began inquiring into exposure to the slurry and potential health problems, the Navajo people finally learned the truth—far from being harmless, these uranium mines were poisoning people, and researchers say they will continue to do so for decades to come.

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THE LEGACY OF URANIUM ON THE NAVAJO NATION
ONCE UPON A MINE
Waste outside an abandoned uranium mine on the Navajo Nation, Cameron, Arizona. © Joshua Lott

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O
n a low, windswept rise at the southeastern edge of the Navajo Nation,
Jackie Bell-Jefferson prepares to move her family from their home for a
temporary stay that could last up to seven years. A mound of uranium-
laden waste the size of several football fields, covered with a thin veneer of gravel, dominates
the view from her front door. After many years of living next to the contamination and a
litany of health problems she believes it caused, Bell-Jefferson and several other local families
will have to vacate their homes for a third round of cleanup efforts by the U.S. Environ-
mental Protection Agency (EPA).
Decades of uranium mining have dotted the landscape across the Navajo Nation with piles
of contaminated mine waste. The EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the
reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large
commercial mining operations.
1
The Navajo people did not have a word for “radioactivity”
when mining outfits looking for vanadium
2
and uranium
3
began moving onto their land in
the 1940s, and they did not understand that radiation could be dangerous. They were not told
that the men who worked in the mines were breathing carcinogenic radon gas and showering
in radioactive water, nor that the women washing their husbands’ work clothes could spread
radionuclides to the rest of the family’s laundry.

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Once Upon a Mine
Bell-Jefferson and her brother Peterson
Bell played in and around the mines, splash-
ing and swimming in pools of radioactive
water that had been pumped out of the mines
and then collected on their property. The con-
taminated water looked and tasted perfectly
clean. Families used it for cooking, drinking,
and cleaning. Hogans and corrals were built
with mine wastes, as were roads.
All that changed on 16 July 1979. Just
about a mile and a half from Bell-Jefferson’s
home, a dam broke at the United Nuclear
Corporation mill, where workers processed
ore from the nearby Northeast Church Rock
uranium mine. The spill dumped 94 mil-
lion gallons of mill process effluent and
1,100 tons of tailings—an acidic, radioactive
sludge—into a large arroyo that emptied into
the Puerco River.
4
The Church Rock spill occurred less than
four months after the partial meltdown of
the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and it
released three times as much radiation, mak-
ing it the biggest nuclear spill in U.S. his-
tory, yet it received only a tiny fraction of the
news coverage.
5
Declared a Superfund site in
1983, the heaps of waste around the mill still
cause radiation survey instruments to squeal
from the invisible uranium atoms that remain
active 30 years later.
6
“This area used to be my playground,”
Bell-Jefferson says. “Now it’s just a huge
wound.”
For the Bells and other Diné (the term
by which many Navajo people refer to them-
selves), the Church Rock spill was a turn-
ing point. When corporate and government
officials appeared in the spill’s aftermath and
began inquiring into exposure to the slurry
and potential health problems, the Navajo
people finally learned the truth—far from
being harmless, these uranium mines were
poisoning people, and researchers say they
will continue to do so for decades to come.
Canaries in the Uranium Mines
The arrival of prospectors signified the
Navajo Nation’s entrance into the modern
wage economy.
7
Some welcomed the poten-
tial income. In 1995 former uranium miner
George Tutt recollected, “We were blessed,
we thought. Railroad jobs were available
only far off like Denver. … But for min-
ing, one can just walk to it in the canyon.
We thought we were very fortunate, but we
were not told, ‘Later on this will affect you
in this way.’”
7
Yet researchers had noted as early as 1879
that uranium miners in Europe showed sig-
nificantly elevated levels of lung cancer.
8
By
the 1930s, they suspected radiation as the
culprit.
9
As early as 1951, government scien-
tists had begun to work out what made ura-
nium so deadly. The answer, as it turned out,
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Top: Miners prospecting uranium minerals in New Mexico, 1950. Bottom:
A Navajo miner hauls ore in a mine. Studies of white and Navajo uranium
miners starting in 1950 provided definitive evidence that radiation was
responsible for the lung cancers seen in these workers.
Top: © Peter Stackpole/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Bottom: © Loomis Dean/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

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wasn’t uranium itself but its decay products,
including radium,
10
thorium,
11
and radon.
12
Radon is a gas, but with a half-life of four
days, it rapidly decays into solid products,
explains Doug Brugge, a professor of public
health at Tufts University.
13
“Being solids,
these are going to want to stick to things like
your lungs,” Brugge says. “Both radon and
its daughter products emit alpha particles,
and this is a very effective way to cause dam-
age that can lead to cancer.”
In just over a decade, Navajo miners were
being diagnosed with lung cancer,
14
a rela-
tively rare disease in this largely nonsmoking
population.
15
Beginning in 1950, workers
with the U.S. Public Health Service led by
Duncan Holaday and Victor Archer began
following uranium miners in the South-
west, both Navajo and white, to measure
their exposures and assess their specific can-
cer risks. To get access to the workers, the
researchers had to strike a Faustian bargain
with the mining companies: They could not
inform the miners of the potential health
hazards of their work.
2
Seeing it as the only
way to convince government regulators to
improve safety in the mines, the researchers
accepted.
16
By 1965, the investigators
reported an association between cumulative
exposure to uranium and lung cancer among
white miners and had definitively identified
the cause as radiation exposure.
17
In 1984 another team published results
of a case–control study that further implicat-
ed uranium mining as a cause of lung cancer
in Navajo men. The team analyzed 96 con-
firmed cancer cases from the New Mexico
Tumor Registry, 32 lung cancer cases and
64 cases of other cancers. Of the 32 Nava-
jo men who developed lung cancer, 72%
had worked as uranium miners, compared
with none of the controls. Furthermore, the
median age of miners with lung cancer was
44 years, compared with 63 years for non-
miners with other cancers.
18
Decades after
their exposure ended, standardized mortality
ratios and relative risks for lung cancer and
other respiratory problems were still nearly
four times higher in Navajo miners than in
nonminers.
19
Community Exposure to
Uranium
Getting the ore out of the ground was only
the first step in a long process. Miners
then transported the ore to a mill, where
it was crushed and soaked in sulfuric acid
to extract the uranium.
20
More chemicals
were added to precipitate out the uranium,
leaving behind a radioactive slurry. This
slurry was frequently stored in
large, unlined ponds, says Chris
Shuey, an environ mental health
specialist with the Southwest
Research and Information Cen-
ter in Albuquerque, who has
spent the last three decades
working with Navajo commu-
nities affected by uranium min-
ing and milling.
Mining in the area had
mostly ceased by the mid-1960s.
Today, after decades of inactivity,
the uranium from these ponds,
waste and tailings piles, and the
mines themselves is still pres-
ent in highly chemically soluble
forms
6,21
that have been leach-
ing into the area’s drinking water,
according to water testing by
the EPA and the Army Corps of
Engineers.
22
In a small, one-story adobe
building tucked into the far edge
of the University of New Mexico
campus, Johnnye Lewis, a pro-
fessor of toxicology, has spent
more than a decade studying
mining-related health effects in
the Navajo people. In 2000 she
received an environmental justice
grant from the National Insti-
tute of Environmental Health
Sciences to collect clinical and
survey data from people living on the Eastern
Navajo Nation. The DiNEH (Diné Network
for Environmental Health) Project was origi-
nally started to address community concerns
about the high rate of kidney disease in this
population, which some community leaders
and health professionals suspected was related
to drinking contaminated water.
Lewis and colleagues surveyed 1,304 resi-
dents, obtaining basic demographic informa-
tion, mapping the locations of their homes,
and taking samples from the wells where
they obtained their drinking water. Of these,
267 provided blood and urine samples so the
researchers could look for markers of bio-
logical damage.
23
The average age of study
partici pants was 51.5 years.
The data the team amassed over the last
13 years suggests that health problems from
these mines in fact aren’t limited to the
miners who worked in them but also extend
to those exposed through drinking water or
simply living near a mine. “We’re still ana-
lyzing data—it generated just an enormous
amount of data,” Lewis says. “But what
we will end up with is that we now will be
able to study three successive generations of
Navajos that have been exposed.”
Although the literature on chronic
low-level uranium exposure is still quite
Uranium mining occurred in six major areas of the Navajo Nation, now designated
as AUM (abandoned uranium mine) Regions. This map indicates the 521 sites
mapped by the EPA, but there are estimated to be hundreds more.
13
The Church
Rock spill occurred near the “keyhole” of the Eastern AUM Region.
U.S. EPA

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small, by 2003 researchers knew that the
dangers these exposures posed were due not
to uranium’s radioactivity but to its chemi-
cal toxicity.
24
Both animal
25
and human
26
studies have found uranium to be primarily
toxic to the kidneys. One such study, led
by Maria Limson-Zamora, head of Health
Canada’s Bioassay Section, compared bio-
markers of kidney function in the urine
of Canadians chronically exposed to high
(2–780 µg/L) or low (0.02 µg/L) levels
of uranium in their drinking water. The
investigators found signs of kidney damage
that increased with higher daily intake of
uranium in the drinking water.
27
Uranium appears to exert its chemical
effects on the kidney’s proximal tubules.
28
Arse-
nic and cadmium—which, along with other
potentially hazardous metals, are sometimes
found in uranium tailings
29
—create similar sig-
natures of metal damage in the kidneys.
30
Lewis’s early data from the DiNEH Proj-
ect suggest that self-reported kidney disease,
hypertension, and autoimmune diseases were
more prevalent among people who lived closer
to mine waste sites.
31
Her colleague at the Uni-
versity of New Mexico, immunologist Ester
Erdei, believes the increase in hypertension
and autoimmune diseases might be connected
to consumption of contaminated water.
A growing body of evidence links hyper-
tension,
32
heart disease,
33
and autoimmune
diseases
34
to markers of inflammation such as
C-reactive protein and assorted chemokines.
35
Erdei hypothesizes that uranium exposure
might contribute to these diseases through
effects on inflammation. She recently present-
ed findings showing an association between
increased levels of activated T cells in DiNEH
Project participants and greater residential
proximity to mine waste sites.
36
“If we see any of these activated T cells,
we know that the immune system is highly
reacting to something,” Erdei says. “We
didn’t know what it is. This is the next step
A backhoe dumps radium-contaminated soils into a truck during the first of three rounds of interim cleanup
in the Red Water Pond Road Community in May 2007. The waste came from the nearby Northeast Church Rock
Mine, the largest abandoned uranium mine on the Navajo Nation. The gray hill in the background is a waste
dump for another nearby abandoned uranium mine. Environmental health specialist Chris Shuey says the hill
has been graded and contoured several times in unsuccessful attempts to prevent runoff.
©
Chris Shuey/Southwest Research and Information Center

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to find out how it’s really happening on the
molecular level.”
Uranium’s Toxic Legacy
Human and animal studies elsewhere
have indicated the health legacy of urani-
um exposure may extend to the children of
exposed parents. A study of 266 cases and
matched controls among Navajo births
over 18 years suggested that children of
women who lived near abandoned uranium
sites were 1.83 times more likely to have
1 of 33 selected defects. Among these were
defects thought to be connected to radiation
exposure (e.g., chromosomal disorders, single
gene mutations) as well as distinctly non-
related defects (e.g., deaths due to obstetrical
complications). On the other hand, these
outcomes also were twice as common among
children whose mothers worked at an elec-
tronics assembly plant as in other children.
37
Animal studies suggest potential reproduc-
tive implications of exposure. A study in rats
exposed to uranium found the offspring had
a higher body burden of uranium than the
dams. These offspring also had higher rates of
physiological changes, including atypical sperm
formation.
38
And a mouse study produced evi-
dence that uranium in drinking water caused
estrogenic activity even at levels below the EPA
safe drinking water level of 30 µg/L.
39
To look more closely at the effects of
uranium exposure on human reproduction
and development, Lewis has recently begun
recruiting up to 1,500 pregnant women
to participate in the Navajo Birth Cohort
Study.
40
Besides tracking birth outcomes and
infant development, pharmacologist Laurie
Hudson of the University of New Mexico
is looking at molecular changes that may be
induced by exposure to uranium waste.
Arsenic is chemically very similar to
zinc and can replace zinc in proteins that are
important in DNA repair.
41
“Arsenic goes in
and kicks zinc out, but the arsenic doesn’t
replace the function of zinc. So the proteins
become incapacitated,” Hudson says. This
creates a hat trick of DNA damage: Uranium’s
radioactive
42
and chemical
43
properties both
can harm DNA, and the presence of arsenic
may prevent cells from repairing the damage.
Animal and cell culture studies have sug-
gested a potential solution: zinc supplemen-
tation.
44
Hudson and Lewis want to see if
zinc supplementation may prevent arsenic
from damaging DNA repair enzymes in
women enrolled in the Navajo Birth Cohort
Study, and they have identified an easy way
to do this. Prenatal vitamins, which contain
zinc, are generally obtained via a prescrip-
tion through the Indian Health Service.
Researchers can determine which women
are taking their vitamins by who refills their
prescription. Women who don’t take vita-
mins will serve as the control group. The
investigators will have information on the
women’s environ mental exposures and their
body burden of metals, so they can start to
zero in on how arsenic and uranium expo-
sures affect protein function and whether zinc
supplementation provides any protection.
The findings will provide a concrete way
for the researchers to give back to the com-
munity. “We’ve pretty much been clear from
the beginning that if we see something that’s
wrong, we’re not going to let it stick around
just to preserve the data,” Lewis says. “We’re
going to make sure people know their risks
and can take action.”
Carrie Arnold is a freelance science writer living in Virginia. Her
work has appeared in Scientific American, Discover, New Scien-
tist, Smithsonian, and more.

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