A Uranium Mine, the Navajo Nation and a Six-Month Standoff

Published Jan 30, 2025, 11:12 PM

On Wednesday, the Navajo Nation and the mining company, Energy Fuels Inc., announced a new agreement detailing how uranium could be transported through tribal lands.  

The agreement ends a stalemate between the two parties. And it comes at a time when interest in nuclear energy — and the cost of the uranium that fuels it — is surging.

On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Jacob Lorinc joins host Sarah Holder to break down the painful history of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation and what the dispute reveals about the human costs of “clean power.”

Read more: Uranium Fever Collides With Industry's Dark Past in Navajo Country

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. On any given day, there are a lot of trucks that pass through Cameron, Arizona. It's a small town of fewer than one thousand people on the western edge of the Navajo Nation, but Bloomberg Medals reporter Jacob Lawrence says that in late July there was one particular truck passing through town that raised concerns.

What was unusual about it was this sign on the back that is yellow and red radioactive.

The truck was coming from the Pinyon Plain Uranium Mine. It's one of a half dozen uranium mines that have recently opened or reopened in the southwestern United States as interest in nuclear power has surged. The truck was carrying the mine's first shipment of uranium ore to a processing plant in southern Utah, and to get there it would have to pass through the Navajo Nation.

So it was noticed by a few resident who live in this small outpost town and it immediately provoked alarm.

That's because the Navajo have a long complicated history with uranium mining. From the mid nineteen forties to the mid eighties, nearly thirty million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands. They've been dealing with the health and environmental consequences ever since. So when those residents spotted that truck with its radioactive cargo, they fired off an email with a picture to the Navajo Nation President Boo Nigrin.

And when he heard about this shipment going through Navajo land, he was adamantly opposed, and pretty soon after dispatched a whole bunch of tribal police to go and intercept the truck.

Dozens of officers fanned out across the nation, which is about the size of West Virginia.

They search Cameron, they search these other little encampments across Navajo Nation, and they're searching for this truck.

The truck slipped out of Navajo Nation before the officers tracked it down, But Jacob says the police pursuit was just the start of the story.

What happens from there is it effectively sparks a bit of an uproar across the nation and across the state. In some ways, it even reaches the office of the governor. The Navajo Nation is in sense that there's a uranium shipment crossing the territory. It's unusual for them, and they're saying that this shouldn't be alled, that the state needs to intervene. The governor needs to intervene to ensure that they're no further shipments.

The company behind the mine, Energy Fuels, agreed to pause shipments until they could work out agreeable terms with the Navajo Nation, and now, after a six month standoff, the two sides finally struck a deal this week. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, a renewed interest in nuclear power dug up old wounds in the Southwest, and what the agreement between Energy Fuels and the Navajo Nation reveals about the human costs of clean power and the challenges they pose for the green energy transition Pinion Plane. The uranium mine that produced the ore at the heart of the standoff sits a few miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Bloomberg's Jacob Lawrence went to see it.

It's an underground mine, so from surface level it doesn't look that big. It's about the size of a Walmart parking lot, and it's carved out of this little old pine forest that surrounds the Grand Canyon. And looks more like the bucolic topography of New England than what you would expect from the sprawling desert bad lands of the Grand Canyon.

The mine's origins go back decades, so.

It is discovered by prospectors in the nineteen seventies at a time when the price of uranium was very high and there was very strong incentive to find American uranium.

After World War Two, the US was in a nuclear arms race against the USSR and also trying to sell the public on the peaceful Atom, the idea that nuclear energy could drive economic growth and provide near limitless clean power. But in the late seventies and eighties, the American public started to sour on nuclear power after high profile disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Safety concerns cooled the demand for nuclear energy and for the uranium that powers it. Energy fuels CEO Mark Chalmers told Jacob he remembers what that moment was like for the industry.

People just were like, no, we don't need nuclear power, we don't need go ahead and generate from coal, only generate from hydro natural gas.

So over the next few decades there was no mining happening at Pinion Plane, That is until American interest in nuclear power started to boom again in the last few years. Concerns about global warming and surging energy demand from AI have made nuclear energy more appealing, and after the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine, many countries needed an alternative to Russian oil and gas. Russia is also one of the world's largest producers of uranium, so as the US and other countries started to levy sanctions against it, the price of uranium started to climb, and Chalmers saw an opportunity.

When was it that you decided that it was time to start producing? What had happened if they working? At that point the price of uranium had got up to about fifty bucks.

So in twenty twenty two, Energy Fuels started the process of getting Pinion Plane ready for production. The price of uranium fluctuated a bit that year, but eventually it continued to rise.

We see the price of uranium go from around twenty thirty bucks a pound to now about seventy bucks a pound. In the past five years, we've seen it go up about two hundred percent.

When Jacob visited the mine, he got a tour from some of the miners who work there. They piled into an elevator essentially a metal cage, and started heading down twelve hundred.

And thirty feet and the next level is basically the top of the or body. Okay, so our or body, you'll see.

It's a blink of an eye.

It's from this next level to the level we're going to get off at. It's only two hundred and thirty feet right, so it's about as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. It's dark and cavernous and muddy, and not for the claustrophobic, of which I am a little bit. So it was certainly a bit of an unsettling experience. And when you get down to the bottom of the mine, you walk through these tunnels that they sort of coil around the perimeter of this mine, all sort of winding around this long body of uranium ore that sort of shoots right down the middle, almost like a drill. It was only Sol's scrape it off and put it in. Really soon, we'll put it in what we call the Boulder Bay. And so the tunnels are slanted and you can see miners who are drilling into the sides of the walls there in search of higher grade uranium ore that's within this body.

Last summer, Energy Fuels was ready to send its first shipment of uranium ore to the processing plant in Utah.

And in order to do so, the only economical way to transport is through the Navajo Nation.

Chalmers maintains that Energy Fuels had permission to use the federal highways that cut through the nation.

And it's important to note that just you know, standards for shipping radioactive material like uranium ore have increased substantially over the past several decades, and you know, they felt quite confident that regardless of where they were going to drive their trucks, these were going to be safe transports.

But what Energy Fuels didn't see coming was how the Navajo Nation would react.

I don't know that they were expecting quite the pushback that they then received.

After the break. Why the Navajo Nation pushed back so hard, and what that means for pinion planes future. The Navajo Nation has a long history with uranium mining, one Bloomberg's Jacob Laurin says still feels very present on the reservation today.

It didn't take long when I was driving into the territory to start seeing signs and graffiti and murals across the area explicitly calling for, you know, either an end to uranium mining in the area or you know, please to clean up the mines that have been left idled in the area. It's really part and parcel with you know, some of the main issues that are top of mind for people who live in that area, given the history. They're adamantly opposed even to new outfits like energy fuels that you know, while they're introducing a mine outside of Navajo Nation, you know, they still they don't want to see any transportation, any shipping of this material through their land.

At its peak, how big was uranium mining in the Navajo Nation? How many mines were out there?

In total, more than five hundred uranium mines were built across the area. Again, these are small mines, so it's not these massive open pit mines. A lot of them are underground, almost mom and pop style uranium just like these little projects.

And as the mind sprang up, jobs came with them.

It quickly became a major source of employment on the reservation. A lot of Navajo people went to work at the mines, and you know, unfortunately, at that time, health and safety standards around mining was quite limited. Consequently, they also experienced pretty profound hardship as a result of being exposed to these mines for such a long period of time.

In the nineteen eighties, when the uranium bubble burst, many of these mines were abandoned shut down without proper cleanup.

The miners effectively pack their bags, pick up their shovels, and walk away from a lot of these operations.

And tribal members are still dealing with health issues they believe were caused by the mining and the radioactive material that came with it.

There have been studies that have linked a lot of these mines to cancer, kidney malfunction, genetic deformities within people who live in the area.

In places like Cameron, people were literally surrounded by uranium.

Somewhat astonishingly, a lot of the homes that were built on Navajo Nation were built using radioactive uranium waste that was repurposed into concrete. Wow. So if you live in a house around Cameron, there's a good chance that you're living in a home that was built with radioactive material.

And while Jacob was in Cameron, he heard about other ways people there were exposed to the waste.

When I was in Cameron, I spoke to a man who's about fifty years old named Ray Yellowfeather, and he grew up surrounded by these mines, and from his backyard he could see and he could walk to these abandoned mines. There was no fences, there was nothing that closed off the mines from his access or that warned him of the dangers. And so what he told me was that after school he would hang out with his friends when they were about ten or eleven, They would get their sleds and they would go climb to the top of these hills and they would slide back down, and for them it was a great time. They called them the Blue Hills. And every day they would go and they would play on them. And it was only years later that they really discovered, you know what it was that they were playing on.

When Ray thinks about the mines that came to define his childhood, he can't help but wonder if they have something to do with the health issues that have plagued his family.

Of his family members have passed away, including his mother, all from stomach cancer, and as with most of these diseases, it's hard to sort of link one to one what exactly is the cause of it. We do know that there are a substantial number of stomach cancer victims on Navajo territory. And you know, for him, he connects the dots and he thinks, you know, I grew up around these radioactive minds. My whole family grew up around these minds. It seems like this may have been the cause of what my family experienced.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been working with the Navajo Nation to clean up mines and water contaminated with radioactive waste, but two decades after the EPA program began, only a small percentage of minds have been worked on at all, and Jacob says the legacy the industry is left on the land and on the Navajo people. Means many in the Navajo Nation oppose uranium mining and the nuclear movement. Even though the industry has tried to give assurances, it's hard for people to trust that this time around the practices are safe.

Given the history. They're adamantly opposed even to new outfits like energy fuels that you know, while they're introducing a mine outside of Navajo Nation, you know, they still they don't want to see any transportation any shipping of this material through their land.

So that Energy Fuels truck driving through the Navajo Nation last July filled with uranium. For the people that spotted it, it was a reminder of that painful history. That's why President Niagrin sent the police to try to intercept the truck, and it's part of why resolving the resulting stalemate was so delicate.

One of the things that President Buniagrin said to me was that, you know, no matter how much a mining company tells them that their project is safe and that their shipments are safe, he says, that's what we were told back in the sixties and seventies, and you know, look where that got us.

On Wednesday, Energy Fuel in the Navajo Nation announce the terms of their new deal. The mining company agreed to add additional protections to their trucks beyond those required by the Department of Transportation. Those include special cover systems to keep uranium or dust from escaping from the trucks, limiting transportation to certain routes and times, and not transporting or on days involving celebrations or public events on the Navajo Nation. The company also agreed to relocate ten thousand tons of uranium waste from abandoned mines across Navajo Land. In return, the company will be allowed to resume uranium shipments in February, but Jacob says the long road to resolution holds lessons for the rest of the uranium industry.

This standoff really forecasts some of the fights that are to come with this kind of on shoring. While these mines are really sprouting up across the United States and in Western countries, they also are going to come into conflict. And I think that will see this happen again and again. And it's this I think perennial paradox with the mining industry, which is that it supplies incredibly important material, but you know, at a cost.

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and David Papadopoulos. It was fact checked by Adrian Atapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sugiura. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole beemsterbor Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts, it helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow

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