OPINION: EPA finally doing the right thing with uranium waste in Red Water Pond Road Community

Uranium waste is a problem with no easy solutions. A proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to remove uranium mine waste from our community, the Red Water Pond Road community 11 miles north of Church Rock, to the Red Rock landfill property 5 miles east of Thoreau, has generated some disagreements among members of the Navajo Nation.

We are writing to give our community’s perspective and to help base the conversation on accurate information.

Some of us had to move out of the community because our health has been impacted from living next to uranium mine waste for nearly 50 years. We believe, based on our lived experience and recent health studies, that chronic, long-term exposure to uranium mine waste from the Quivira/Kerr McGee Mine has led to respiratory problems, various cancers and other diseases and too many premature deaths.

We miss our home and want to go back. This is where our umbilical cords are buried.

When we look outside the front door to the east, there’s a giant pile of uranium waste. We can’t teach our kids our traditional cultural practices because of the contamination left behind by the uranium industry. We can’t pray the way we used to, and we can’t gather herbs that come from our Mother Earth. Uranium mining and milling companies pitted communities against each other in pursuit of profits, and now the wastes they left behind are doing the same.

In Native communities like ours, the EPA usually remediates uranium mine waste by covering it in place. “Cap in place” involves putting uncontaminated soil on top of the mine waste, which is typically in piles above ground without liners between the ground and the waste to protect groundwater, and seeding the soil with vegetation. This “solution” is not protective of public health over the long term because the soil cover always erodes over time due to exposure to wind, rain, snow melt and burrowing animals. Once the soil cover erodes, we are again exposed to the mine waste.

EPA has finally done the right thing in the Red Water Pond Road Community. They have listened to us and have come up with a proposal to remove the Quivira/Kerr McGee uranium mine waste from our community and to transport it by truck to the Red Rock landfill property operated by the Northwest New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority.

We support EPA’s proposal primarily because it will reduce our exposures to uranium mine wastes, thereby reducing health risks. The wastes would be placed in a state-of-the-art engineered facility at the landfill property in a location separate from the municipal solid waste disposal facility that has topography that minimizes erosion from the wind or rainfall. The waste would be placed in below-grade lined trenches, each with a leak detection system. When the mine waste disposal cells reach capacity, the waste will be covered with an engineered cover designed to last centuries.

We want to make it clear that this uranium mine waste is not the same as high level radioactive waste or uranium mill tailings. This waste is dry dirt and rocks whose uranium has been mostly removed. It is considered a low risk to health when the exposure is short-term; health risks from uranium mine waste become significant with long-term exposure over many years.

We urge EPA to explore transportation routes that would avoid the trucks traveling through Thoreau to better protect community members there.

We want to go back to our homeland, once it is fully remediated to residential standards. This is the best alternative at the moment.

Teracita Keyanna and Edith Hood are members of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association. The community is 11 miles northeast of Church Rock on Navajo Nation.