[Pharm Girl]

Guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment: If you live downwind from us, you might want to pay a little attention to what's happened to Navajos living on a 26,000 square mile reservation that spans the Four Corners region where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. For three generations now, they have been breathing uranium-laden dust from mine tailings and drinking from wells tainted with minute traces of radioactive mining waste. From 1946 into the late 1970s, more than 40 million tons of uranium ore was mined near Navajo communities.

More than a thousand mines were abandoned on the reservation.

For every 4 pounds of uranium extracted, 996 pounds of radioactive refuse was left behind in waste pits and piles swept by the wind and leached into local drinking water. In addition to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Navajo miners who sickened and died of cancer and respiratory illnesses -- it's hard to say just how many, since nobody in power bothered to keep track -- epidemiological studies reveal a terrible ongoing toll. Navajo children living near the mines and mills suffered five times the rate of bone cancer and 15 times the rate of testicular and ovarian cancers as other Americans. Exposure to uranium has also been linked to kidney damage and birth defects.

Recent research indicates that, in addition to being toxic and radioactive, uranium is also an endocrine disruptor and can have a devastating effect on health -- even when only scant traces are present in the air we breathe or the water we drink. Uranium's ability to bind to and deceive hormone receptors evidently interferes with cellular communication that governs metabolism, cell production, organ development, and gland function. Dr. Stephanie Raymond-Whish, a Navajo scientist, believes, for instance, that uranium exposure is one explanation for sky-high rates of breast cancer on the reservation.
No wonder, then, that the Navajo Nation imposed a ban on uranium mining and milling on Indian lands in 2005. Despite the ban, Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI) is trying to open four major mines near the Navajo communities of Crownpoint and Churchrock. HRI specializes in mining uranium by pumping water and bicarbonate into uranium-bearing strata, then withdrawing the solution and recovering the uranium in it.

Assisted by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, the Navajo tribal government has been resisting, insisting that it, and not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees all aspects of the nuclear energy industry, has the authority to keep the company off tribal lands. The tribe fears that the kind of injection-leach mining that HRI plans to do will consume vast quantities of scarce water, while contaminating precious groundwater used for drinking by people and livestock. At just such an operation in Grover, Colorado, groundwater radioactivity was found to be 15 times greater than before mining began.

Nor will mining be limited to Indian lands. As with oil and gas exploration, the likelihood is that nothing will turn out to be off limits. Claims for the right to mine within five miles of Grand Canyon National Park, for example, have jumped from 10 in 2003 to 1,100 today. The Grand Canyon Trust, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club just blocked a mine proposal for nearby Deer Tank Wash because flashfloods could easily carry left-over radioactive materials down into the park. As applications pile up, however, conservationists will be hard pressed to keep ahead of the onslaught of challenges to the Grand Canyon's integrity. So if you want to see this national treasure, fill up this summer on $4-5 a gallon gas and come soon, before a dusty haze envelops the area, dump-truck traffic becomes the norm, and the wildlife flees.

Virtually all of southern Utah's famed national parks and monuments -- Arches, Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Natural Bridges, and Grand Staircase Escalante -- are surrounded by potential uranium deposits. Unlike the first uranium boom of the atomic era, which took place in sparsely populated and remote canyons and mesas, the new boom is likely to go wherever uranium is found. To take but one example, the Powertech Uranium Corporation is opening a mine just ten miles from the sprawling city of Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University.

Here's the reality of the new West -- like the old West: The boom will suffer no limits because speculators and mining companies enjoy so few restrictions.

Manifest Destiny on a mule: In the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny sometimes rode in on a sleek stallion, armed with guns and a sword, but sometimes it carried a pick and shovel and arrived on the back of a mule. Mining was encouraged and empowered by laws that provided prospectors and investors with every imaginable incentive. Public lands were seen mainly as storehouses for commodities like timber and metals. No ecological context was considered, because none was available -- other than the rantings of that ol' crank John Muir and the mumblings of defeated Indians.

Today, we know better but, unbelievably enough, the Mining Act of 1872 still rules. That Act is, in fact, the Methuselah of taxpayer boondoggles. It obligates the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service and the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management to approve applications for exploratory drilling without environmental review. Once ore is found and taken, no payment of royalties is required. The giant mining conglomerate, Phelps Dodge, recently acquired the mineral rights to national forest land in Colorado for just over $100,000. The company expects to extract $9 billion in molybdenum from the land. If, to speculators, the prospect of mega-profits is like sex, the Mining Act of 1872 has always been their Viagra.

To add insult to injury, the Act makes taxpayers responsible for any clean-up of the land after the mining companies are through extracting its mineral wealth. Utah, for instance, has 5,000 abandoned uranium mines that have yet to be cleaned up. They were simply abandoned after the first boom 50 years ago. A massive uranium tailings pile between Arches National Park and Moab sits right beside the Colorado River, leaking radioactive and toxic debris into water that is eventually used for agriculture and drinking by 30 million people downstream in Arizona, Nevada, and California. Because one enormous flashflood could wash tons of that radioactive milling waste into the river, a $300 million federal clean-up is underway. Taxpayers will pay for 16 million tons of uranium milling waste to be moved away from the river.

Almost half the headwaters of Western rivers are polluted by some kind of mining waste. In Colorado, 37 cities and towns depend on drinking water that exceeds federal levels for uranium and its associated nuclides. It would take an estimated $50 billion to clean up all the abandoned mines and processing sites in the West.

Big, dumb, dangerous cousins: Nuclear power is now offered as an alternative to coal power. But, in actuality, Big Nuke is Big Carbon's mad-scientist cousin. Both externalize their costs: to the land, to the atmosphere, to miners, to consumers, to communities near the mines and refining facilities, and especially to future generations who will live with the long-term consequences of our short-term gains. The damage that both do is, of course, justified as necessary and unavoidable.


In addition to the ecological devastation they cause, their most compelling similarity is that both can get under your skin and make you sick. Westerners who live near uranium mines and mills will tell you that those activities can be as dirty and noxious as coal mines, coal-fired power plants, tar sand pits, and oil refineries. Cancer from inhaling coal dust feels the same as cancer from uranium dust. In the age of carbon and fission, what we refer to as "environmentalism" could just as well be called "embodimentalism," since the decisions we make about what we allow into our air, water, and soil get translated into flesh, blood, bone, nerve, and experience.

Perhaps those iconic cooling towers we picture when we think about a nuclear power plant are like industrial cathedrals, monuments to our hubris and the unsustainable materialism it generates. Our fervent faith in economic growth makes us blind to natural processes, ecological relationships, the long scales of time, and ultimate consequences.

We believe that, because we live above and beyond nature, we can act without context or caution. Our industrial missionaries drive thumper trucks, drill holes, send samples to the labs, and convert investors. Like the conquistadors of old, who searched for gold, they stake their claims on the land for its imagined riches. They declare ownership, no longer for church and king, but for corporation and investors. Ecosystems, communities, and future generations are sacrificed, and still salvation recedes.