Uranium Contamination: Not Much Progress In 30 Years : Residents Question Scope of Cleanup Plan

Comment: According to an expert "Nuke" has told us poor people in Virginia that the NRC and the EPA will protect us, really, I mean really.....Do not believe the nuke...they just love the glow of money or using people as test objects. Thirty years of uranium mining and milling ruining people's water and the federal government have no clue how to clean it up; well really, you cannot clean up uranium waste once it has seeps back in the ground and into the water tables. State of Virginia, the people of Virginia, once the uranium Jeanie is out of the bottle, it cannot be restored. No to uranium mining and milling!
Thursday, May 13, 2010
By Kathy Helms
Dine Bureau
Gallup Independent

GRANTS – Larry Carver has lived in Murray Acres since 1964. He says residents there believe they are the most affected by water problems due to uranium contamination, which they attribute largely to the former Homestake Mill.

He had several questions for federal and state officials gathered Tuesday evening in Grants regarding a five-year plan they are working on to clean up legacy uranium waste in the Grants Mining District, but mostly he wanted to know, “How is it going to speed up the cleanup of the water and the health hazards out here? “It's been 30 since we started this in 1975 and really, I can't see a whole lot of progress in that 30 years,” he said.

Donna Bahar of New Mexico Environment Department's Ground Water Quality Bureau said she couldn't specifically address when and how the plan will speed cleanup, but at least now all of the agencies are at the table.

“We're talking to each other and part of the plan is pooling resources, setting priorities and hopefully starting to address the immediate health threat and working down the line. When I first started to be involved in this discussion it was just EPA and NMED,” she said.

Johnnie Head, who also lives near Homestake and is a member of the Bluewater Valley Downstream Alliance, asked about tests the agencies are conducting on wells north of Homestake.

“We have studies and samples that were taken in 1958 and 1962 that show two wells that were fine at that time, before Homestake Mill became part of what are now contaminated areas. So we know that at that time, just north of Homestake, there was good water.”

Head said it is her understanding that the agencies will be conducting urine sampling from some of the residents living in the study area. “It's too bad that couldn't have been done 30 years ago. I don't know how quickly uranium comes and goes through a person's body ... and I'm not sure anybody is drinking from the wells that had been in the past.”

Thanks to the efforts of the New Mexico Mining and Minerals Department, she said, 12 people who previously had been drinking what was considered “bad water,” have now been hooked up to alternate systems. “I don't know if maybe the pipes that brought that bad water into a house would continue to put that into your system ... but that's something I would be concerned about.”

Head also questioned whether residents living near Homestake could use water from their wells for other purposes. “We're ready to do gardens this year. We've been at this 30 years – we should have good water by now. We'd like to use our wells to raise our gardens instead of paying Milan the water bill that we're paying.

“No one has said, 'Your water is good now. Thanks to Homestake's efforts for the last 35 to 40 years, you can now use your well.

' I'm concerned about that. I believe in my heart – and I've talked to a lot of people about this – the only way you're going to ever, ever clean up the mess that we live around is to move that big pile, because that's a continual source of contamination,” she said.

Paul Robinson, research director for Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque told agency representatives that the scope of the problem the five-year plan is attempting to address is very narrow and the plan they are sculpting leaves a lot of things off the table.

“The idea that this scope of issues can be identified, much less addressed, without a comprehensive budget, I think, is giving the community less than it deserves.” He said the agencies also are not taking the time to build a public communication and fact-finding program that invests in the people.

“People that live in the communities want to be involved in the cleanup,” he said, adding that a one month comment period on a five-year plan is “token community involvement. ... If you want serious comments on a five-year document, you need to treat the people more seriously.” He suggested they open a permanent office in Grants. “There's plenty of office space available.”

John Meyer of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 6 in Dallas agreed that funding is one of the hurdles they have to overcome with the five-year plan. “Nobody got any additional funding to do this.

Read more:
http://nativeunity.blogspot.com/2010/05/uranium-contamination-not-much-progress.html