Comment: Great comment on the read: “It’s sad,” says Slattery. “It’s disgusting. And somebody is making those decisions. ‘We ain’t living here, we ain’t breathing this air.’ Gov Bob wanted more time for the uranium ban but puts in place writing uranium mining regulations which is really the next step to lift the ban. Maybe we should ask all the prouranium people in Virginia to live at this reservation for a year, drink the uranium water, breath the uranium dust, live in the houses of the families, look at the cancer suffering, the deformed animals but do not give me info, this is the old way of mining, the new uranium mining with the "Best Practice according the NAS". this will not happen! Yeah sure, the Best Practice the NAS taunted you with are written by the mining companies and the nuclear companies. ProUranium Mining people walk in the shoes of these guys now! Keep the uranium mining ban!
By Tristan AhtoneJanuary 19, 2012
Kenny Slattery has lived on the Wind River Reservation for 51 years, and just across the street from the old Susquehanna-Western uranium mill tailings pile for that entire period of time. “They say there’s a cancer cluster in this area,” says Slattery. “I don’t know, but my mother died of lung cancer, and my father died of prostate cancer. My cousin’s husband died of esophageal cancer just a half-mile from here, and other people have died from cancer around this area too. Dogs have died of cancer. It’s strange.”
The site is just a few miles southwest of Riverton, the ninth-most-populated city in Wyoming.
It has a long history of contamination, as well as a cloud of rumors. “People say there’s a one-eyed fish over here,” says Slattery as he points to the pond in question. “Just one eye,” he says again, then laughs.
It sounds funny, but over the years, officials have begun taking these kinds of stories very seriously. “We know of some of our tribal members down there who have suffered some real serious cancers,” says Wes Martel, Shoshone and Arapaho Joint Business Council co-chair. “Thyroid disorders and nerve disorders and respiratory disorders and babies being born with deformities and things like that.”
It’s stories like these that prompted tribal officials to contact Folo Akintan, senior epidemiologist for the Montana-Wyoming Tribal Leaders Council and acting director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Epidemiology Center and ask her to lead an epidemiological study of the area. “One community member told me about seeing creatures with defects,” she says.
“They saw a frog with more than four legs, they saw a snake with two heads, and so I had to tell them, ‘Scientifically, you have to take pictures to get this.’ So I gave them cameras and said, ‘Start taking pictures.’ ”
Akintan also took a tour of the area. “By the time we went around that neighborhood, I could count on one finger how many [of the deceased] didn’t die of cancer,” says Akintan. “Practically all of them [who are over 50] had died of cancer or have cancer right now, and that was quite alarming.”
Over the next two years Akintan will collect scientific data to prove or disprove the stories that go back over 50 years.
In 1958 Susquehanna-Western started processing uranium and vanadium ore in the Wind River Reservation using sulfuric acid to extract the elements from rock. The mill closed in 1963 but its sulfuric acid plant is still in production. But when the Susquehanna-Western mill closed, they left behind massive piles of contaminated materials commonly known as tailings. “Those tailings sat uncapped and unlined from the early 1960s until they were removed in the late 1980s in an uncontrolled manner,” says Sam Vance, an environmental scientist and tribal program manager with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “During that time, with the natural processes of rainfall, snow accumulation and snow melt, water percolated through those tailings and drove contaminants—uranium included—down into the ground and ultimately into the water table in that area.”
In 2010, floods hit the reservation and the DOE recorded tremendous spikes in their monitoring wells, some as high as 100 times the maximum contaminant levels set by law. Art Shoutis, a consultant and macro-invertebrates scientist with the Wind River Environmental Quality Commission, says those sudden spikes pose a serious problem to the DOE’s expectation that the site will clean itself up in 100 years. “We just saw that after 20 or 30 years of monitoring, levels that the flood brought were higher than the initial ones,” says Shoutis. “Even a nonscientist can look at these graphs and understand that there’s no way [the DOE is] going to meet that 100-year natural-attenuation plan.”
That data is available on the DOE website—but to give a better sense of how some of the graphs look, imagine a heart-rate monitor on which the patient has flat-lined for a few minutes and then suddenly come back to life. Some are that dramatic. “In September after the flood last year, we had the highest levels [of uranium] ever measured in the lake: .522 milligrams per liter,” says David Haire, a consultant and water-quality scientist with the Wind River Environmental Quality Commission. “The [EPA’s maximum contaminant level for uranium] is .03 mg/L—so that’s several orders of magnitude over the maximum contaminant level for the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
“It’s sad,” says Slattery. “It’s disgusting. And somebody is making those decisions. ‘We ain’t living here, we ain’t breathing this air.’ Why isn’t [that guy] over here sucking the air, drinking that water? He’s letting these Indians, the most precious people on the earth, do it, and it’s killing them.”
Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/19/cancer-riddled-wind-river-reservation-fights-epa-over-uranium-contamination-73103
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/19/cancer-riddled-wind-river-reservation-fights-epa-over-uranium-contamination-73103#ixzz1kJodnppq
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/19/cancer-riddled-wind-river-reservation-fights-epa-over-uranium-contamination-73103
