Uranium Mining in Navajo Nation PDF

Comment and Controversy Why Has It Taken So Long NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational to Address the Problems...

Comment and Controversy Why Has It Taken So Long NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational to Address the Problems Health Policy 2016, Vol. 25(4) 436–439 Created by Uranium ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: Mining in the Navajo sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1048291115610344 Nation? new.sagepub.com Doug Brugge1 Abstract Following the start of uranium mining after World War II, progress toward address- ing the hazards it created for workers and nearby communities was slow, taking many decades. This essay asks why it took so long and suggests several factors that might have contributed. Keywords Uranium mining, native Americans, Navajo, history, politics, media Uranium was mined for centuries before people knew that it was a radioactive substance and that one of its isotopes could undergo nuclear fission. By the late 1800s, it was seen that miners in Eastern Europe who mined uranium ore died at an extremely high rate. By the 1920s, it was shown that the disease was lung cancer. And by the late 1940s, science had shown that the causal agent was radon daughter isotopes (just radon hereafter) that deposited in the lungs and delivered high doses of alpha radiation internally to sensitive tissues. Thus, by the start of the nuclear weapons era, it was well established that uranium mining carried a substantial hazard to workers.1 Although there were many other popu- lations affected, my focus here is on Navajo workers in underground mines who were drawn into the burgeoning industry in the Southwestern United States in the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, the way to reduce this risk through adequate ventilation that would dilute radon levels was also known at the time, as evidenced by 1 Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA Corresponding Author: Doug Brugge, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA. Email: [email protected] Brugge 437 recommendations given to the U.S. Public Health Service during their study of health consequences for underground uranium miners. However, instead of taking strong preventive action, the U.S. Public Health Service prioritized con- ducting a longitudinal study (one of 11 similar studies worldwide) that would produce the data needed to determine the quantitative dose–response relation- ship between radon and lung cancer. It was in 1990, 20 years after the start of the U.S. uranium mining “boom,” that federal regulations were put in place to limit the exposure that miners could have to radon. That standard has since been suggested to be too lenient but remains in place today.1 By the early 1970s, inspired in part by the “Black Lung” compensation pro- gram, Navajo leaders and communities who had suffered considerable mortality among men who worked in the mines, began to seek compensation. Their initial efforts were thwarted, including a legal decision that privileged national security over their ability to sue the U.S. Government (which was the sole purchaser of uranium until 1971). It took until 1990 for Congressional action to establish a compensation program, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA).1 However, RECA was flawed in many ways that resulted in unfair denial of compensation to many miners and their surviving families. After a decade of advocacy led by Navajo people, RECA was amended to address many of the shortcomings of the original legislation. Today, there continues to be complaints about the extent and nature of compensation decisions, but large numbers of miners and their families have received US$150,000 and more in compensation. Still, it took over thirty years to reach this level of justice.2 When uranium mining petered out in the United States in the 1980s, thou- sands of abandoned mines and mills and hundreds of homes built with mine waste remained. The process of addressing these sites went through multiple incremental phases, including a large, well-funded federal program to decom- mission the mills. However, as late as 2015, most abandoned mines in the Navajo Nation have not been remediated at a satisfactory level.2 While the link between lung cancer and radon exposure in underground mines was established by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the risks that uranium mining might pose to the families of the miners and nearby residential commu- nities went largely unstudied until about the turn of the century. Starting around the turn of the century and proceeding to the present, a series of federally funded studies were launched at the University of New Mexico.3,4 As findings from this research begin to emerge, it raises the prospect that more stringent remediation as well as possible compensation for community members might be needed in the future. Thus, the long path, stretching over sixty-five years, to address the legacy of uranium mining in the United States does not have an end in sight. Which brings us to the central question, why did it and why does it continue to take so long to correct the damage wrought by uranium mining in the Navajo area? 438 NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 25(4) Despite having followed this issue and worked with Navajo communities for over twenty years, I am still not able to fully answer this question. Perhaps, I am conditioned as an academic to want evidence before drawing conclusions. Nevertheless, I would propose that the following are likely contributors: 1. In the early years, especially the 1950s and early 1960s, uranium mining was shrouded by the cloak of national security and paranoia the start of the Cold War. The lives of uranium miners, let alone Native American uranium miners, were probably seen as small relative to the geopolitical drama in which they played a critical but distinctly working-class role. 2. The status of the Navajo Nation, as both a tribe that has a signed treaty with the U.S. Government and an impoverished population with little political power provided both an opening (the treaty) and a huge chasm to cross (lack of political influence) to first gain the attention of and then achieve redress from “Washingdoon” as it is often referred to on the Rez (Reservation). 3. Related to political sway, the Navajo Nation is located far from major media markets. I have noted elsewhere that the large release of radioactive waste at Church Rock, NM, which followed closely on the heels of Three Mile Island, is comparatively less well known despite its greater magnitude. 4. Finally, and not least among factors in my opinion, the private companies that conducted the mining depended on externalizing many costs, including health and remediation, to be profitable. It was, therefore, not in their inter- ests to devote money to forestall the harms that were being created. There is a need for more scholarship about why progress was so slow in responding to the impacts of uranium mining in the United States. Certainly, the United States was not alone, and other countries have been as slow or even worse. Today, there is an effort to revive the uranium mining market that has taken form over the last decade, with foci on Africa and Central Asia where regulation and policy are not too different from the United States in the 1950s. Both to accelerate the work that remains to be done in the United States and to head off similar half century-long legacies in countries newer to uranium mining, there is a need to understand what went wrong in the United States. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica- tion of this article.