Conflicted American Landscapes by David E. Nye

Author:David E. Nye [Nye, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262542081
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.3 David Killam, Headframe, Lost Orphan Uranium Mine, South Rim of the Grand Canyon, 2005. Source: Library of Congress.

Miners were seldom informed of uranium’s dangers, and state and federal agencies were slow to protect them.42 After exposure to radioactive dust and radon, they contracted lung cancer.43 By 1980, of 150 Navajo miners who worked at one Ship Rock mine between 1952 and 1970, 38 had died of lung cancer and 95 more had contracted it. In 1990, Congress recognized that uranium miners had suffered “an epidemic of lung cancer and respiratory diseases.” The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) apologized, declared that their health had been “sacrificed to the national security interests of the United States,” and offered them compensation of up to $150,000.44 By 2009, more than 21,800 miners, ore mill workers, and local residents had been compensated, at a cost of $1.455 billion. Yet many received nothing. Mining after 1971 was not compensated, nor was work done above ground. Miners were covered for lung cancer, but workers in uranium mills were not. Other cancers known to be caused by uranium were excluded from compensation. The applicants who were rejected included more than 70 percent of onsite workers (i.e., not miners), 44 percent of “downwinders” the name used to describe residents subjected to air pollution after above-ground nuclear blasts; and 46 percent of children with leukemia.45 Families who lived at mining sites were not eligible, even though a study of two Navajo communities in 1969–1970 found that they suffered birth defects at five times the national average. Another study of children in uranium mining towns found they contracted ovarian and testicular cancer fifteen times more than the national average. RECA did not cover these children.46 Those compensated often found it did no more than pay their medical bills.

The Navajo live near “more than half of the many small, abandoned uranium mines from the middle of the 20th century,” and illnesses still plague them. Radioactive dust from abandoned mines has contaminated the air and aquifers. Waste rock and tailings used as building materials in houses later proved to be radioactive. Drivers “traveling on roads made with waste rock were in danger of breathing radioactive dust.” In Grand Junction, Colorado, 4,000 radioactive properties and yards were decontaminated at a cost of $250 million.47 Decades too late, the 1978 Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act prohibited use of mine waste in construction.48 Some areas were declared Superfund sites, which released more than $1 billion to move families out of radioactive houses, supply them with safe drinking water, and begin the cleanup.49 Yet decades after the uranium mines closed, the EPA still had not contained all the radioactive waste. In 1978, Congress passed a law to ensure mine tailings would be “safely managed,” but not until the 1990s did the Nuclear Regulatory Commission transport millions of tons of radioactive material from Monument Valley to a former ore-processing site in Mexican Hat, Utah. Other former processing plants became disposal sites at Shiprock, New Mexico, and Tuba City, Arizona.

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