Hazardous half-life
Uranium tailings cleanup still leaves questions

TOO HOT TO HANDLE?: Kara Iyott plays on a concrete slab near the home of Teddy Nez in the Red Water Pond Road community Tuesday. The soil around where she plays was recently replaced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because of radium contamination. The EPA suspects the radium originated from the mining waste pile in the upper right corner of the photo. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

Teddy Nez, who lives in the Red Water Pond Road community north of Churchrock, recently moved back to his home after the Environmental Protection Agency finished a cleanup of the radium contaminated soil around the area. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

CHURCH ROCK — There is little sign today of the tractor fleet that spent most of May digging into the radium-rich soil of Coyote Canyon, decontaminating it of the radioactive dirt washed and blown off the top of a massive waste pile the United Nuclear Corporation abandoned 25 years ago.

From May 5 through June 6, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's bulldozers and backhoes dug almost 5,000 cubic yards of that dirt out of the yards of five local families. Those families are glad for what the EPA has done. But they worry about how much is left to do.

"To get rid of that stuff is a good thing," said Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist for the Southwest Research and Information Center, a nonprofit that's been helping area communities address the fallout of past uranium mining. "What people are concerned about ... is that nobody sees this as the final cleanup of the soil."

Around the edges ...
A month after the last family moved back, life in the sleepy canyon north of Church Rock is returning to normal. The little red flags the EPA planted in the ground to mark its radium readings are gone. The cacophony of diesel engines and hydraulic pumps has been replaced by rustling trees and the crunch of the occasional pickup truck pulling onto a gravel driveway.

The only sign that anything's changed is the color of the dirt the EPA used to replace what it removed. In place of the canyon's typical brown soil, a pale red driveway now leads to a gray lot in front of the Nez home, surrounded by a thin bed of yellow mulch where patches of grass used to grow.

Back in November, the EPA measured radium levels in the yard over 30 pico-Curies per gram, more than a dozen times what the agency considers safe for a home site. Andrew Bain, one of the EPA's two site managers for the project, said the cleanup has brought average levels below a safe 2.24 pCi/g.

None of that makes Teddy Nez feel any safer.

"I don't feel any different than when they first came through here," Nez, who lives in the canyon with his wife, daughter and two grandchildren, said, "but I miss my grass."

Putting aside the green tarp he was sewing together on an outdoor work bench, Nez pulled out an aerial map of the canyon pockmarked with colorful dots standing in for the spots where the EPA took its readings. Each color stands for a different range of radium levels, from zero to 50-plus. He draws a finger around the area the EPA cleaned up, a few hundred yards out from his house in most directions.

What worries Nez are the dots just beyond that line the EPA didn't even touch, dots with radium readings well past safe. Bain said the agency was only trying to address the most immediate risks with the cleanup, the spots where residents were most likely to come in direct contact with contaminated soil, right around their homes.

But as Nez pointed out, kids and animals don't much respect invisible boundaries. And as always, he added, "the wind still blows."

It is that same wind — in tandem with runoff from the occasional heavy rain — the EPA blames for contaminating Nez's yard in the first place. And although the waste pile the radium came from still sits 500 yards from Nez's back door, Bain said he saw little immediate risk of recontamination.

Even so, canyon residents want the pile gone. Bain said the EPA was in negotiations with UNC to have it removed. It convinced the company, now a subsidiary of General Electric, to pay for most of the soil cleanup, and hopes it can do the same with the pile. He expects to have a cost estimate for UNC ready by the fall.

And below the surface
But none of that even touches upon the contamination SRIC believes still lies beneath canyon residents' feet. Shuey said it has taken preliminary — if admittedly limited — samples that show abnormally high levels of uranium as much as 3 feet below the surface. The EPA removed only inches.

And that's not to mention the nearby tailings pile UNC left behind next to its uranium processing mill. Because the company never lined the pile's bottom, contaminants leached into the ground. After 10 years of reclamation efforts, it still has not cleaned up the underground plume of radioactive water.

Coyote Canyon isn't alone. As Shuey notes, its troubles are shared by dozens of communities across the Four Corners, from Grants to Tuba City. But it is, he added, "symbolic of the intractable problems these mining companies have left behind."

To solve them, he believes both the federal and tribal governments need to adopt policies that deal with the legacy of uranium mining directly, tailored to tribal conditions. The EPA's Superfund program can open the door to vast sums of federal funding, but other types of contamination — not just the radioactive variety — vie for its attention, and it gives considerable preference to densely populated areas. Neither bode well for the reservation. The tribe's own mine reclamation department was designed for coal — not uranium — mines, so it can handle immediate risks like open shafts but little else.

Shuey believes the right people are starting to realize the policies need to change.

"Everyone now sees that there is a critical need for a comprehensive program," he said. "They're starting to think about how to deal with this in a holistic sense."

To that end, the Navajo Nation's Natural Resources Committee is meeting in Window Rock Wednesday, to figure out what rules the Council needs to adopt to address the problem head on.

In the meantime, Nez and his neighbors are staying put. Nez said he's considered moving, but his children insist on staying.

"If that's what they want," he said, "that's what I want."

And despite a case of cancer he attributes to the canyon's contamination, Nez concedes to a personal wish to see his family's ties to the land — already seven generations deep — continue. His wife is making plans to plant corn next to the house, but Nez still isn't sure that's a good idea.

The recent cleanup should help, Shuey said. But no one, he added, including the EPA, "should be losing sight of the fact that this still isn't a very safe place to live."