Four Corners, Uranium, and Coming Back Home

What has changed and what has stayed the same at the White Mesa uranium mill.

BY CHAITNA SINHA

Western scientists now believe that time is both linear and circular. If this is true, then every object must eventually return to its own beginning — to the past. I have been thinking a lot about the past lately. In February of this year, I started as a staff attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust and moved to Durango, Colorado from Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s been both new, and deeply familiar. For 20 years I have come and gone from the Four Corners. This is the first place I lived as an adult. It is where I applied to law school, where I learned about Indian law and the role tribes play in managing natural resources, and where I met my husband. If time is circular, then the Four Corners and the uranium that is embedded in both the rock and the history of the region have been my focal point. 

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, but from an early age I was drawn to the wild landscape of the Colorado Plateau. I liked its contradictions; they felt reflective of my own experience. It was wild and remote, and where we looked to satisfy our unquenchable desire for more energy. You passed tour buses of international tourists and hogans on the same drive. The soundscapes transitioned from ATVs roaring to wind blowing through ponderosa pines in a few short miles. The wide-open spaces held a place for someone like me, the child of East Indian immigrants, even when my own community didn’t.

A home in White Mesa, Utah, with the Abajo Mountains in the background. BLAKE MCCORD

As a young college student, I studied environmental issues. When I was ready to graduate from college, I found myself uncertain about the world I was walking into, and convinced that our current framework was unsustainable, but I wanted to try to make a difference. So, at 23, I made the five- hour drive from Salt Lake City to White Mesa, a small community of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, near what would become Bears Ears National Monument, and just down the road from the White Mesa Mill — now the last operating conventional uranium- processing mill in the country. I took up residence in the last pink house on Cowboy Street along with three other AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers and the black lab that was living on the front porch when I got there.

The community was gracious enough to accept a recent college grad with good intentions, and kind enough to teach me what it really means to fight for equity.

If I had once thought change was a war that could be won; what I learned at White Mesa is that real change is about slow and steady progress. It can take generations of unfaltering commitment. Every day I saw people working to improve the education their kids received, enhance the economic opportunities available to them, and preserve the culture and traditions of the tribe.

During that year on the White Mesa Reservation, I would pass the mill every day. I would come to learn that the people regulating the mill live in Salt Lake City, five hours and 300 miles away. The corporate decision-makers for the mill work even farther away, near Denver, approximately 430 miles and seven hours away. I heard stories from community members about the mill, and listened to their concerns about how it was impacting the air and the water. I saw how their concerns were being dismissed by the mill’s operators, by regulators, and by politicians.

40-acre waste pits Cell 4A (bottom right) and Cell 4B (bottom left) at the White Mesa Mill on July 7, 2022. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the mill has been violating the Clean Air Act since at least June 2020 by leaving radioactive material in Cell 4B exposed to open air rather than covered in liquid to control radon emissions, as legally required. TIM PETERSON, ECOFLIGHT

I didn’t know then that this mill, and the uranium it represents, would become an overarching presence in my life. I could see it from my porch. It loomed large while I studied for the LSAT. It became the source of an ongoing conversation with my father — an engineer who has worked in the mining industry for decades primarily focused on site investigation, mine design, closure, and reclamation. I wanted to know how the mill worked, how it was regulated, and how the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe could protect its resources and its members. What was the balance between needing minerals and protecting the environment? Is such a thing even possible?

Twenty years later I am still looking for answers to many of these questions, but my father told me two things that continue to hold true for me: We do not have the right to exploit every last corner of the Earth, and just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. 

A few years later, law degree in hand, I would find myself back in the Four Corners, this time as associate general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. The kids I’d tutored were older, and another generation was growing up in the shadow of the mill.

In 2007 the mill applied for a renewal of its operating license, which would reveal that liners in several of the tailings cells — massive pits where radioactive waste from uranium processing is stored — consisted of a single PVC membrane about the thickness of a credit card. These liners were installed in the 1980s. The liner, a little bit of dirt, and a layer of crushed rock are all that prevents radioactive material from escaping into the natural environment. The state of Utah had previously called the leak-detection systems — the systems designed to alert regulators and the mill’s operators if the liners are leaking — “grossly inadequate.” Since the tailings cells were constructed, the industry standard has shifted to double liners that are thicker and made of different material. The newer cells at the mill adopted these standards.

In 2008, the state of Utah found that multiple groundwater samples taken near the mill contained nitrate and nitrite. Today, there is a corrective action plan in place to address the nitrate plume beneath the mill. Meanwhile, back in 1999, almost a decade earlier, the Utah Division of Radiation Control had urged the mill’s owner to monitor groundwater for nitrate and nitrite, calling them “smoking gun” leakage parameters.

But after years of investigation and negotiation with the mill’s owner, the state of Utah determined both that it could not specifically identify the source of the nitrate plume, and that it could not rule out the mill’s activities as the source. The community of White Mesa, like everyone else living in proximity to the mill, is forced to live with this uncertainty. 

The 2021 rally and spiritual walk organized by the White Mesa Concerned Community to protest the nearby White Mesa Mill. TIM PETERSON

I would come to understand how the mill’s operations extend far beyond the community of White Mesa. I met my husband soon after I started to work for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. He is from Shiprock, on the Navajo Nation. His childhood home is two miles from a uranium disposal site managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Past milling operations have left contaminants in the groundwater system. There are at least 523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation that have yet to be remediated. Half of these mines still have gamma radiation levels more than 10 times the background level. Nearly all are located within a mile of a natural water source. And 17 are just 200 feet away — or fewer — from an occupied residence. Experts estimate that, as a result, 85 percent of all Navajo homes are currently contaminated with uranium. The White Mesa Mill’s owner views the waste from these mines as a source of potential revenue. 

Working as a staff attorney for the Colville Tribes near Spokane, Washington the mill would again reemerge. The Colville and Spokane tribes have worked for decades to help remediate the impacts from radioactive waste from the Midnite Mine, a highly contaminated Superfund site on the Spokane Indian Reservation that once produced uranium for nuclear weapons. Waste from this site has been transferred to the White Mesa Mill. The mill’s operators view this too as a source of revenue.

Since starting at the Trust I have been struck by how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. Many of the regulators from the state of Utah are the same as a decade ago, still 300 miles away. Many of the same community members I worked with as a VISTA volunteer still live in White Mesa; they are still concerned about the air and the water.

The mill has rebranded itself as a recycling facility, and most of its activities now involve processing so-called “alternate feeds” — low-level radioactive wastes. The mill extracts minimal amounts of uranium from these wastes and disposes of the rest, often for a fee. Groundwater monitoring data shows additional constituents of concern. Because the mill’s operators failed to comply with the laws designed to protect people from radon, a cancer-causing gas, in December 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency prohibited the mill from accepting wastes from other Superfund sites like the Midnite Mine, before reversing most of its decision, after pushback from the mill’s owner.

Public awareness about the mill has grown as well. The Trust recently released a first-of-its-kind report documenting the alternate-feed waste streams accepted at the mill. The local community in White Mesa is more active and more vocal about its concerns. The leadership of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has now called for the mill’s closure citing its severe impacts on the health of residents of White Mesa. 

The 2021 rally and spiritual walk organized by the White Mesa Concerned Community to protest the nearby White Mesa Mill. TIM PETERSON

So, here I am again, back in the shadow of uranium. Most of the uranium used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was processed in Durango, a few miles from my home. But now I have an even more pressing need to do this work. I have a three-year-old daughter. She’s half Navajo and loves to spend time with her grandma on the Navajo Reservation. She reminds me a lot of the kids I worked with in White Mesa. She has started asking me recently what I do all day. I hope that I’ll be able to say that I made things a little fairer, that I helped make sure that everyone plays by the rules, and that I worked hard to give everyone a chance to be heard. Most of all, I hope that I can help ensure that when she grows up, she will inherit a new legacy. The uranium can’t be put back in the ground, but we can and must do better than contaminated groundwater, liners from the 1980s, and abandoned uranium mines. The past didn’t go anywhere, but what we do with it is up to us. 

Prior to joining the Grand Canyon Trust as a staff attorney in 2022, Chaitna Sinha worked in the nonprofit and government sectors with a focus on federal Indian law and natural resources law.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.