Suppose you are a member of the Navajo Nation living on a
reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico in 1960. You hear of a great opportunity to earn money and help the
United States besides. Uranium has
been discovered in many locations in and around the reservation, and a private
company has opened a uranium mine in Shiprock. The work is hard and dirty, but the pay is better than
anything else you can find without leaving your land and your people. You apply for the job and you’re hired.
Something like this was the story for one hundred and fifty
Navajos who worked at the Shiprock uranium mine at various times from the 1950s
through 1970, when it closed. A
decade later, a public-health researcher managed to track down records of these
150 miners. By that time, as
little as ten years after some of them finally left their jobs when the mine
shut down, 133 of these men had died of lung cancer or various forms of lung
fibrosis. That’s 88 percent
mortality—a pretty big chance to take for earning a decent wage for a few
years. And it’s even worse when
you realize that most of these men had no idea of the chance they were taking
by working in a uranium mine. The
150 Navajos studied are just a sample of the thousands of native Americans
affected by uranium mining and its aftereffects.
Mining is dangerous, uranium can be dangerous, and uranium
mining can be one of the most risky occupations of all in terms of long-term
health hazards unless extraordinary precautions are taken to protect the miners
from radon and its products.
Radon, a heavy, odorless, highly radioactive gas, is produced by the
decay of U-238, the major constituent of uranium. Breathing radon and its decay products is one of the best
ways to get lung cancer, which is why basements with even very slight
detectible levels of radon are a health hazard. Extensive ventilation of uranium mines and continuous
monitoring of radon levels can reduce the risks of uranium mining to reasonable
levels, but in many of the mines in and near Navajo land in the American West
during the “uranium-boom” period of 1948 to 1970, these safety precautions were
neglected in a rush to exploit domestic sources of uranium for both peaceful
nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments.
And worse, the miners—many of them Navajos who spoke little or no
English—were not informed that they were working in conditions that would very
likely shorten their lifetimes.
The Navajo language did not even have a word for “radiation.”
Even after most of the mines closed following a global
decline in uranium prices, the hazards continued. In 1978, the same year that the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant suffered a contained meltdown, a containment dam broke that was holding
back 93 million gallons of radioactive and poisonous tailing solution. This hot muck ran into the Puerco River
and contaminated miles of the river and acres of aquifer recharge zones. Judging by the total amount of
radioactivity released, this was arguably the worst accident involving
radioactive materials in U. S. history, far exceeding the radiation that Three
Mile Island put into the biosphere.
But no official disaster declaration was made, few news outlets
mentioned the Puerco River disaster, and only in the last few years has some
effort been expended on investigating the full extent of the damage and cleaning
up the contaminated areas.
This story is not one of unmitigated gloom. Because many of the mines and Navajo
miners were in Utah, in 1989 congressmen of that state sponsored a Federal bill
to provide monetary compensation for uranium-mine workers whose health was
affected by their employment in mines and related processing industries. This measure was signed into law by
President George H. W. Bush in 1990, and by 2009 over 20,000 workers had
received a total of over $1.4 billion in reparations.
But no amount of money will bring back the lives of those
who died early deaths because they only wanted to earn a decent living doing
something they thought was helping the nation that had treated them so
shamefully in the past. This
situation echoes the dismal conditions imposed by early Spanish explorers on
the native Americans who were forced to work in gold mines under circumstances
that amounted to slavery. A person
of a different color who speaks a different language than you do is easy to
regard as a different species, unworthy of the consideration and justice that
you give to your own kind. Some of
the earliest protests against Spanish exploitation of the natives were lodged
by Catholic missionaries who saw the maltreatment of mine workers as a
blasphemy against the God whom they served.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I first learned of the Navajo
experience with uranium mining from a brochure I happened across which was
published by the Maryknoll Missioners, a group of lay persons, religious
sisters, and priests who devote their lives to serving the underprivileged of
the world. One of the sisters was
featured in an article about her activities in trying to establish the extent
of radioactive pollution from uranium mining in areas where Navajos live
today.
No doubt, there were engineers involved in the design and
operation of the U. S. uranium mines, and it would be easy to blame them in
retrospect for the harms done. In
their defense, it must be said that the hazards of uranium mining were poorly
understood as late as the 1950s, because until the advent of nuclear weapons
and reactors, uranium was only one of a number of specialty metals, and
experience with mining it was limited to a few European mines and scattered
studies of uranium miners. The
first substantial U. S. Public Health Study of the subject was done with a
sample of Navajo uranium miners, and by the time the results confirmed that
such mining without proper ventilation was very dangerous, most of the damage
had been done, because the lung cancer and other problems that radon causes
take twenty years or more to develop.
Nevertheless, enough information was available as early as the 1950s to
indicate that the mining of uranium was especially hazardous, and little or
nothing was done technically to account for this fact. At a minimum, the financial reparations
paid to the Navajos and their families are a partial acknowledgment that they
were deeply wronged, and teach us that long-term health effects are worth
considering in any kind of employment.
Sources: Besides the Maryknoll brochure from
which I first learned of this issue, I referred to a Science Education Resource
Center website maintained by Carleton College at http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/navajo/humanhealth.html
and the Wikipedia article “Uranium mining and the Navajo people.”
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