Impending Environmental Disaster: Uranium Mining Begins Near Grand Canyon

Comment:  We are all fighting our government to stop nuke plants and uranium mining.  What is the federal government excuse this time for uranium mining: GREED and MONEY, period with nukes backing their agenda!  The Nuke cycle, The Cycle of Death!  No to Uranium mining and milling!

by Klee Benally

Grand Canyon, AZ — In defiance of legal challenges and a U.S. Government moratorium, Canadian company Denison Mines has started mining uranium on the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

According to the Arizona Daily Sun the mine has been operating since December 2009.

Denison plans on extracting 335 tons of uranium ore per day out of the “Arizona 1 Mine”, which is set to operate four days per week. The hazardous ore will be hauled by truck more than 300 miles through towns and communities to the company’s White Mesa mill located near Blanding, Utah.

After being pressured by environmental groups, U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar initially called for a two-year moratorium on new mining claims in a buffer zone of 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park, but the moratorium doesn’t include existing claims such as Denison’s. The moratorium also doesn’t address mining claims outside of the buffer zone.

The Grand Canyon is ancestral homeland to the Havasupai and Hualapai Nations.


In July of 2009 members of the Havasupai Nation and their allies gathered for four days on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at their sacred site Red Butte to address the renewed threat. Red Butte has long been endangered by the on-going threat of uranium mining.

The Colorado River, Water & Uranium's Deadly Legacy

Uranium is a known cause of cancers, organ damage, miscarriages & birth defects.

Drilling for the radioactive material has been found to contaminate underground aquifers that drain into the Colorado River, and sacred springs that have sustained Indigenous Peoples in the region. In addition, surface water can flow into drill holes and mine shafts which can also poison underground water sources.

Today there are more than 2,000 abandoned uranium mines in the Southwest. U.S. government agencies have done little or nothing to clean up contaminated sites and abandoned mines.

At Rare Metals near Tuba City on the Diné (Navajo) Nation a layer of soil and rock is the only covering over 2.3 million tons of hazardous waste. A rock dam surrounds the radioactive waste to control runoff water that flows into nearby Moenkopi Wash.

Throughout the Diné Nation, Diné families have been subject to decades of radioactive contamination ranging from unsafe mining conditions to living in houses built from uranium tailings.

Flocks of sheep and other livestock still graze among radioactive tailing piles and ingest radioactive water.

According to the Navajo Nation up to 2.5 million gallons of uranium contaminated water is leaching out of the Shiprock Uranium Mill near Shiprock, New Mexico into the San Juan River every year. At the Church Rock Mine in New Mexico, which is now attempting to re-open, up to 875,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste continue to contaminate the land.

In July 1979 a dirt dam breached on the Navajo Nation at a uranium processing plant releasing more than 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and nearly 100 million gallons of contaminated fluid into the Rio Puerco (which ultimately flows into the Colorado River) near Church Rock, NM. This was the single largest nuclear accident in US history. Thousands of Diné families that live in the region, including those forced to relocate from the Joint Use Area due to coal mining, continue to suffer health impacts resulting from the spill.

In 2005 the Diné Nation government banned uranium mining and processing within its borders due to uranium’s harmful legacy of severe health impacts and poisoning of the environment. And yet, high cancer rates, birth defects and other health impacts still bear out the uranium industry’s dangerous legacy.

At the 2006 Indigenous World Uranium Summit on the Diné Nation, community organizations such as Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) joined participants from Australia, India, Africa, Pacific Islands, and throughout North America in issuing a declaration demanding “a worldwide ban on uranium mining, processing, enrichment, fuel use, and weapons testing and deployment, and nuclear waste dumping on native lands.”

Klee Benally (Diné) is a collective member of Indigenous Action Media, on the Board of Directors of the Shundahai Network, and is a musician with the group Blackfire.
Author Mary Sojourner assisted editing this article.

For further information and action:

Southwest Research and Information Center: http://www.sric.org/
Shundahai Network: http://www.shundahai.org/
Nevada Desert Experience: http://www.nevadadesertexperience.org/
The Center for Biological Diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/
Grand Canyon Trust: http://grandcanyontrust.org/
Uranium Watch: http://www.uraniumwatch.org/
World Information Service on Energy: Uranium Project: http://www.wise-uranium.org/
Western Mining Action Network: http://wman-info.org/
Network Sortir du Nucléaire: http://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/

Read more:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18116