Dangrous half-life
Protesters allowed to speak to mining officials

Protestors stand outside of Hydro Resources Incorporated, a division of Uranium Resources Incorporated, shouting and chanting slogans before a public hearing on the company's proposal to begin uranium mining on the land in Crownpoint. Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington D.C. were visiting the area along with several other proposed mining sites to determine the feasibility of beginning mining in the area. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

CROWNPOINT — When Hydro Resources Inc. heard of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's plans to send a few staffers down from Washington to visit its proposed uranium mining sites around Crownpoint, company officials were expecting something quiet.

It didn't quite work out that way.

Just minutes after company and commission officials arrived at HRI's Crownpoint office for their 8 a.m. meeting Tuesday, a column of over 30 protesters showed up waving banners reading "uranium kills," chanting "HRI go home."

For HRI, the meeting was a chance to fill the federal government in on its latest plans. For Ron Linton, the commission's new project manager for the area, it was a chance for HRI to bring him up to speed. For the protesters, it was another chance to demand that they stop.

Boots on the ground
Like HRI, the NRC didn't seem to have expected all the attention either.

The NRC had publicized the meeting and invited the public to attend, but had only a short list of people who RSVP'ed by the time Linton arrived. So when the protesters showed up outside of HRI's Crownpoint gates that snowy morning, after marching almost a mile from the local chapter house, they hesitated, unsure of exactly what to do with them all.

After staring at the crowd from behind HRI's locked gates for a few minutes, Linton, William von Till, the NRC's environmental protection bureau chief, and Richard van Horn, HRI's vice president of operations, eventually stepped out.

As Linton told the protesters, he and von Till had come for three days of site visits, to get a first-hand look at some of the projects the commission had already licensed or was considering licensing. They would be in Crownpoint today, visiting an old milling plant outside of Milan on Wednesday that the Homestakes Mining Co. is still cleaning up 17 years after ending operations, and meeting with two other companies in Grants proposing to build a pair of new milling plants nearby on Thursday.

Nothing, Linton insisted, would be decided during the trip.

"This isn't for any approvals," he said. "It's just to look at what's been approved and get our boots on the ground."

Not wanting to leave all the protesters out in the cold, though, Linton and von Till agreed to let five of them in on their meeting with HRI, in addition to the people on their list. With HRI staff opening the gates just enough to let one person in at a time, the protesters headed in.

Drinking Culligan water
After scraping together enough chairs to accommodate everyone around a makeshift conference room, van Horn walked them through the basics.

HRI says it has 25 million pounds of uranium sitting beneath its three New Mexico claims, two within a few miles of Crownpoint and a third just north of Church Rock. To get at it, the company wants to use in situ leach mining, a process that involves injecting chemicals into underground rock to loosen the uranium and pumping the mixture to the surface for processing.

The NRC issued its final approval last year. But ENDAUM, or Eastern Navajo Din Against Uranium Mining, the group behind Tuesday's march, has been fighting those plans since HRI bought the land in 1986, convinced that the mining will contaminate their water resources.

"For almost 12 years we've been saying no," said Mitchell Capitan, the group's president.

With the NRC turning down appeal after appeal, though, it's been a losing battle. But inside HRI's Crownpoint office, ENDAUM's Lynnea Smith promised they would not stop.

"This company is here because they want money," she said. "But money comes and it goes. We hold our people at a higher value than we do money."

When the uranium — and money — dry up, she said, the community will be left with the consequences and the company will move on.

"This is where we were born and raised," said Larry King, who lives a few hundred yards from HRI's Church Rock site. "We're not going nowhere."

"He's not going to drink the water," Smith added, speaking of van Horn and pointing at a Culligan water jug sitting in a corner of the room.

Van Horn remained quiet. But the company has invariably defended both its work and the safety of leach mining. By pumping more water out of the ground than in, it says, the contaminated water stays put. Just in case, it surrounds the fields with monitoring wells to catch any excursions, the movement of contaminated water outside the field. And while excursions happen, HRI insists they can — and are — easily reversed.

After 30 years of leach mining, said Mark Pelizza, vice president of environmental affairs for HRI's parent company Uranium Resources Inc., "there has never been an underground water resource that has been contaminated."

100 percent guarantee
While leached fields have been restored, even HRI and the NRC will concede that none has ever been completely restored to its original conditions. The only way any company has ever been able to claim restoration is after it's convinced the NRC — or, in the places it's ceded control, the state — to lower its standards. While the companies manage to restore some mineral levels to "baseline," they can't seem to restore them all.

King asked von Till a yes or no question: Has a company ever completely restored an aquifer after leach mining?

Von Till answered no, but not without qualification. He said that companies mine where there's uranium, and because there's uranium, those parts of an aquifer are usually unsuitable for human use anyway. So as not to waste any useful resources, the Environmental Protection Agency must designate a field unsuitable before a company can mine.

But King asked von Till another question: Has a company ever leach mined this close to an in-use water supply — one of HRI's Crownpoint sites sits about half a mile from one of the community's wells — before?

The answer, again, was no; but again, not without qualification. HRI's opponents worry the contaminated water will reach the wells. But HRI's license, von Till said, requires the company to replace the wells before it can ever start mining. And whether or not HRI gets to replace the wells, he added, is completely up to the community.

"If the community doesn't agree that that's the thing to do here, then the company won't mine here," he said.

But again, it's not that simple. HRI can always petition the NRC to amend its license, noted Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist for the Southwest Research and Information Center, one of the groups helping ENDAUM. And anything, including the condition that HRI replace the wells, is fair game.

"It's good and well that it's written on paper," said Navajo Nation Council Delegate Alice Benally (Nahodishgish/Crownpoint), "but what is the guarantee?"

They came wearing suits
Danny Charley has all the guarantee he needs. As one of the locals leasing his property to HRI, Charley stands to make some good money from the uranium under his land — if HRI ever gets to mine it — and he doesn't appreciate others telling him what to do with it.

"I want to sell what's mine. That's my sovereignty," Charley said.

According to HRI's Final Environmental Impact Statement, the document that earned it an NRC license, the nine lessors of Unit 1, the proposed mining site nearest Crownpoint, could collectively earn up to $1.1 million a year. But Charley also urged the others to think about what the rest of the community could get out of HRI's plans. According to the same HRI statement, the company's three sites could mean up to 100 jobs.

"We need jobs here," Charley said. "This is going to bring jobs."

But King has heard it before, back when the United Nuclear Corporation mined the Church Rock area. And this time he's not buying it.

"I have not seen a millionaire Navajo in my area. Yeah, they were living high lifestyles for a while," he said of the people who leased their land to the company back then, "but in the end, they were back down again."

Then there's the legacy of past uranium mining most Navajos still can't shake off. During the country's first uranium boom, primitive mining practices and weaker government regulations left many Navajo miners dead, hundreds chronically ill, and their land deeply scarred. Decades after those companies packed up, the tribe is still struggling to clean up the mess.

Benally remembered watching her children climbing over an abandoned tailings pile before the government arrived.

"Our children played in them, in their bare feet, and these white people, these bil'gaans (sic), came in wearing suits," she said.

Things may be safer now, but King still believes that all the rewards just aren't worth the risks.

"How many more lives do we have to lose before we say enough is enough?" he asked.