Navajos mark 30 years since spill that led to uranium-mining ban

Speaking in Navajo and in English, President Joe Shirley Jr. addressed about 100 people who made a seven-mile walk Thursday to the site of the July 16, 1979, spill and to the land of Navajo ranchers who live near another contaminated site.

What Shirley called "the largest peacetime, accidental release of radioactive contaminated materials in the history of the United States" occurred when 94 million gallons of acidic water poured into the north fork of the Rio Puerco after an earthen uranium-tailings dam failed.

Within days, contaminated tailings liquid was found 50 miles downstream in Arizona.

Shirley said the spill — the same year as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania — barely registered on the consciousness of the United States but will not be forgotten by the by Navajo and non-Navajo residents "who still worry today about the potential impacts of this tragic accident."

It also helped mobilize the effort that resulted in the Navajo Nation's 2005 ban on uranium mining and processing until adverse economic, environmental and health effects from past activities are eliminated or substantially reduced, Shirley said.

Substantial progress has been made in cleaning up one site, the Northeast Church Rock mine, Shirley said.

But, he said, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to move the bulk of that contaminated material to a nearby Superfund site at a former United Nuclear Corp. mine. That, the Navajo president said, would not be considered a final solution by the Navajo tribe.

"The American people need to be educated and reminded about the disproportionate sacrifices made by Navajos so the United States of America could win the Cold War," he said.

Chris Shuey of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based environmental group, said decades of mining in the Church Rock area "contributed more radioactivity than the spill did," adding to the difficulty of tracking the effects.