nuclear-news

A start to addressing the scandal of Navajo radiation contamination from uranium mining

The cleanup at the Skyline Mine represents not only a reduced risk of exposure for Begay and her family, but marks the first significant remediation of a mine on the country’s largest American Indian reservation where such sites number in the hundreds.

Tests have found gamma radiation activity greater than two times the background level at 80 locations on the site. In the traditional Navajo home where Begay once lived with two of her sons, the radiation levels were up to 100 times the acceptable level. The two sons have died — one of lung cancer and the other from a tumor.

Navajo woman helps prompt uranium mine cleanup, Houston Chronicle, FELICIA FONSECA,   September 5, 2011 MONUMENT VALLEY, Utah (AP) — The stretch of high desert on the Arizona-Utah border gives way to towering rock formations that resemble huge mittens, chimney spires and castles. But to the west of Monument Valley lies a reminder of what has been blamed for much heartache and tragedy in Elsie Mae Begay‘s family: A mesa stained with a gray streak where uranium was mined decades ago.

Begay, 71, has spent more than 30 years living among residue piles that her children slid down when they were younger, and other contaminated waste carried down the nearby arroyo or kicked up by high winds. She’s taken her story of the dangers of uranium to college campuses and Congress, along with a documentary outlining her family’s plight.

Now it’s being cleaned up, and Begay is partly to thank.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is wrapping up a $7.5 million project that uses a cable system to transport some 20,000 cubic yards of material up Oljato Mesa, where it came from. A lined repository atop the mesa will hold the waste that Navajo Nation officials eventually want taken off tribal land.

The cleanup at the Skyline Mine represents not only a reduced risk of exposure for Begay and her family, but marks the first significant remediation of a mine on the country’s largest American Indian reservation where such sites number in the hundreds.

Tests have found gamma radiation activity greater than two times the background level at 80 locations on the site. In the traditional Navajo home where Begay once lived with two of her sons, the radiation levels were up to 100 times the acceptable level. The two sons have died — one of lung cancer and the other from a tumor. TheEPA tore down the home in 2001.

“What we’ve been asking for is not fallacy,” said Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the tribe’s EPA. “It’s not stuff we’re making up. There are real problems out there that need to be addressed.”……

Many Navajos, unaware of the dangers of contamination, built their homes with chunks of uranium ore and mill tailings, which is the residue from ore preparation. Begay hand-washed clothing that carried uranium dust. By the late 1970s when the mines began closing, some miners were dying of lung cancer, emphysema or other radiation-related ailments.

Begay moved below Oljato Mesa in 1978, years after production ceased at Skyline Mine. She recently had throat surgery due to thyroid cancer……

“You’re going to see more people come to understand uranium’s pervasiveness,” Etsitty said. “We’re going to do everything we can to take care of manmade activities. We’re going to have to go back to some of the teachings, advice from long ago, which is ‘leave it alone.'”

Navajo woman helps prompt uranium mine cleanup – Houston Chronicle

September 6, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues, USA, women