This story is republished from NM Political Report, a nonprofit news outlet, as a part of our commitment to bringing you the best in independent news coverage that matters to Albuquerque.
By Hannah Grover
Teracita Keyanna’s son was born with a heart murmur and her 10-year-old daughter has already had multiple surgeries to address skin nodules.
“These are things and issues that are happening to people that are living in these contaminated areas,” she said.
Keyanna is a member of the Red Water Pond Road Community in Navajo Nation near Churchrock where uranium mine waste threatens both human health and the environment. The community has been fighting for decades to get the waste rock removed.
In January, they celebrated a victory in that effort — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that waste from the Quivira Mine site in the Red Water Pond Road community would be moved to the Red Rocks Landfill near Thoreau.
But legislation introduced by Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, would have put a stop to those plans. SB 316 would have required disposal of uranium tailings and uranium waste from the mining, milling, or processing of uranium ore in underground depositories. It was tabled Tuesday by the Senate Indian, Rural and Cultural Affairs Committee on a 3-2 vote after Red Water Pond Road community members and allies spoke up against it. Committee Chairwoman Sen. Shannon Pinto, D-Tohatchi, cast the deciding vote. Because it was tabled, SB 316 will likely not advance this session.
Keyanna said she opposed SB 316 because “my children deserve to go home and be safe.”
“Why are you overlooking our communities? Why are you overlooking our people? And that’s that’s our future, right there. My children are part of that future,” she said. “If you guys don’t care about the state of our state and its future, then continue to overlook the community. Go ahead, but we’re not going to stop fighting. We deserve the same thing that you guys all have and all want a clean home, a clean environment and a bright future for our children.”
Larry King lives nearby in the Church Rock community, which is also impacted by uranium mine waste.
“This bill will be very detrimental to our community,” he said.
King said the SB 316 would prevent cleanup of the uranium mine waste because the bill calls for it to be disposed of in a federally-managed underground repository.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico is a licensed underground depository for nuclear wastes, however it is only authorized to take transuranic waste and cannot accept uranium mine tailings — something Sen. William Soules, D-Las Cruces, noted during the committee debate.
Muñoz argued that the mine waste shouldn’t just be moved from one Navajo Nation chapter to another. He said SB 316 will not prevent the cleanup of the uranium mine waste.
Instead, the Navajo Nation is looking toward the White Mesa Mill in southeast Utah as a potential solution, Daniel Moquin with the Navajo Nation Department of Justice told committee members.
The company that owns the White Mesa Mill — Energy Fuels Resources — may be willing to take in the mine waste, extract any remaining uranium, vanadium and critical minerals using a relatively new type of separation technology known as ablation, and then dispose of the rest in an underground repository near the mill site.
That plan would also entail moving the waste from one Native American community to another. The White Mesa Mill is on the ancestral lands of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and abuts the tribe’s White Mesa community. The mill is also located near several Navajo Nation chapters and near the Bears Ears National Monument, which is the sacred ancestral homeland of several Indigenous groups including the Puebloan peoples of New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.
The White Mesa Mill, which is the only remaining uranium mill in the country, has also been taking in uranium waste from overseas, including from Japan.
Moquin argued that White Mesa Mill could begin taking the uranium mine waste much faster than the Red Rock Landfill, which still needs to get all the necessary permits.
“We could start moving material off the site within a month and not have the uncertainty of creating a repository [at the Red Rocks Landfill],” he said.