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Members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe were at the state capitol in Utah on Friday to protest the continued operation of the White Mesa uranium mill, saying it's polluting their water. “We can smell the sulfur in our tap water when we turn it on,” said Yolanda Badback, a resident of the nearby White Mesa community for over 50 years.
The White Mesa uranium mill is the only American facility still accepting ore and other radioactive materials from around the country and the world, and is now far past its projected 15-year lifespan since opening in 1980. The owner of the mill, Energy Fuels Incorporated, acknowledges that uranium mills in the past have caused environmental and other harm to Native American communities, but in July it sent two truckloads of uranium ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine located in the Kaibab National Forest near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona north across the Navajo Nation to the White Mesa Mill. Buu Nygren, the Navajo Nation president, said he wasn’t notified of the transport, and the Navajo Nation has since strengthened its regulations for radioactive material transport.
In a recent blog post, CWP Policy Director Rachael Hamby digs into the complexity of uranium mining and enrichment, challenging recent congressional efforts to prop up the domestic uranium industry. “Considering the tiny amount of economically recoverable uranium in the U.S. compared to other countries and the high cost to extract it, it’s no surprise the industry has struggled in recent years—and given global market forces, domestic uranium mining is unlikely to ever be profitable without significant government intervention,” Hamby writes.
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The Gila River Indian Community is proud to be at the forefront of this groundbreaking solar-over-canal project, which not only generates renewable energy but also conserves our most precious resource—water.”
