Return of the Yellow Monster of the Diné: Uranium Mining on the Big Rez

A dark storm cloud of ignorant financial speculation hovers above the Navajo Nation, the largest indigenous reservation in the country, rich in mineral resources, livestock, farms and sacred landmarks. It stretches across parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico, and southern Utah. Some young billionaires and wannabes, with minds full of fungible narratives about new riches in data centers and small modular (nuclear) reactors, have begun to speculate on resuming uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau. Mountain-state members of Congress authored a successful bill to make buying Russian uranium ready processed for power-plant use illegal (except when no other source is available – which is most of the time), the moribund uranium-futures market has begun to rise, and the mining press has begun to write about a uranium boom.

A mine opened near the rim of the Grand Canyon last year, despite local protests, particularly by the Havasupai tribe living directly below the mine. It had already contaminated one aquifer in an earlier incarnation.  Four more mines on the Colorado Plateau are in late stages of permitting. Diné activists have begun protests against these mines.  A mill that processes uranium to power-plant specifications is operating in southern Utah and faces continual opposition from one of the Ute tribes living nearby, protesting against air and water pollution.

A battle is shaping up on the Colorado Plateau between its Native inhabitants and capitalist natural resource plunderers. The government and the speculators will pose the question in terms of property rights. But Diné activists, with more than adequate data, pose the issue in terms of their health, the health of miners who died of cancers and lung disease, and even of unborn children exposed to radioactive waste around abandoned uranium-mine tailings.

During World War II, the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed the atomic bomb, using uranium in part from the tailings of vanadium mines on the Navajo Reservation. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during the Cold War, the federal government played an unusually filthy role in the affairs of Native tribes living on the Plateau, mainly Diné. It used its property rights to tribal land “held in trust” to facilitate the opening of hundreds of practically unregulated mines on the reservations, its National Security authority to be the sole buyer of uranium, and even invoked National Security to prevent the Surgeon General from notifying miners, mainly Diné and Hopi, of the health risks from working in uranium mines. When rates of lung and kidney diseases and cancer began to soar among retired miners, the federal government, with few exceptions, ignored the growing health crisis among the miners, many of whom had been code talkers during WWII. “National Security” became a vehicle for the federal government to open the reservation for the plundering of as much uranium as it desired. Stuart Udahl, JFK’s Secretary of Interior, was an exception, however, who spent years after he left government representing victims of atomic bomb tests downwind and ailing miners and working on legislation which at long length became the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, providing (with some serious flaws) compensation to miners and downwind victims of radiation exposure from nuclear bomb tests.

Udall commented on the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission in his book, The Myths of August:

When AEC officials embraced the idea that their efforts would be discredited and disrupted if they admitted that radiation might cause cancers or that their activities were exposing innocent bystanders to excessive doses of radiation, they were entering a moral wasteland. All subsequent decision-making was perverted by that twisted reasoning. It fostered a conviction that it was more important to protect the tests than to protect civilians. And it spawned a policy that the impact of radiation on human health and all ‘harmful’ facts about radiation ‘accents’ had to be concealed from the American people.

RECA was allowed by Congress to expire in 2024 but was reauthorized in 2025, with yet another sunset provision. Evidently, Republicans focused on the political horror of imported Russian uranium decided to repress all knowledge of the domestic consequences of uranium mining, but later relented at least on behalf of the downwinder communities.

Despite whatever the rhetoric of the moment has been, the government’s de facto policy about health damage from uranium mining in Indian Country has been to try to wait out and not compensate as many of the sick and dying as possible. In the case of the Diné, the sickness of contemporary American “narrative” is on full display, making icons of WWII Navajo code talkers but ignoring completely what happened to so many of them who took jobs in uranium mines after the war.

Alongside RECA, years of frustrating efforts by the Diné and their supporters at last led to government surveys of abandoned mines and plans to remove radioactive waste, which, until warned, people were still using as material to build houses and fences. The problem with the achievement of these goals has been money. The only safe way to detoxify the Native lands on the Colorado Plateau is to remove the mine waste. But that has proved to be very expensive, in most cases more expensive than the finance caps the feds have placed on the enabling legislation. And there remains the problem of where to safely store material that is radioactive for more than four billion years.

Editors for American Indian Republic described the living situation on the reservation in October 2017 in harsh terms:

Despite many of these efforts to reconcile the damaging effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation reservation, pollution from the uranium has made it unsafe for many people to live on the reservation long term. While many of the abandoned mines shut down years ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt as the radioactive dust has become a primary issue for many local Tribal residents, with the continued struggle to restore their sacred land and to remove the contaminated material still underway.

The idea that it is no longer safe “to live on the reservation long term” suggests a more sinister federal motive: simple relocation, making the Navajo homeland one huge, uninhabitable federal energy-resource region for oil and gas drilling, and coal, uranium and other rare earth mineral mining.

The idea of relocation programs for Natives was made unpopular by the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, the former federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, and by the subsequent Lakota uprisings and political agitation on other reservations during the 1960s and 70s. But that generation is largely just a memory now, while demand for energy resources continues to grow.

At the 1992 World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Diné activist Phil Harrison Jr. described the situation on the Colorado Plateau:

My father, when he died two years ago, was only 43 years old. It was very, very hard for me to see him die a painful death. He weighed only 90 pounds when he left us. I have never witnessed anything like the way he died. And I watched my mother suffer. My mother had to pick up the responsibilities of raising us. . . . Hundreds have died now of similar patterns, mostly from lung cancer and respiratory problems. The first 16 miners who died: their average age was only 43 years…Today, we still have to look for solutions and continue to explore options of how we have to deal with this, providing proper health services and cleaning up of leftover tailings and abandoned uranium mines. There are over 1,200 mines abandoned right now. The radioactive waste is still very hot and ranges 50 to 100 times above the natural background. The abandoned mines are still hot and pose health risks by emitting radon gases. One of these mines that leaks water, the livestock feed on it. 26 years after the mining has stopped, we are left with the waste, the sickness and sometimes no alternatives to restore what was the original. The genocide will never be forgotten. . . . Yes, compensation is available, but money will not make up for the loss of our loved ones. The radioactive waste they say is safe, why can’t they be placed in their own backyard?”

Perry Charley, Chairman of the Diné Uranium Remediation Advisory Commission, created a program some years ago to educate the Diné about the dangers of uranium in their own language, including a glossary of scientific and mining terms in Navajo. One of DURAC’s most recently selected commissioners, Leona Morgan, brings 20 years of activism with her, including most recently the Haul No! campaign against trucking uranium ore for 300 miles from an Energy Fuels Inc. mine through the reservation to an EFI processing mill in southern Utah. Haul No! was founded by Klee Benally, an artist, musician, writer and activist who was also participated in campaigns to preserve the four mountains and their forests sacred to the Navajos.  Benally’s sister and member of the family band, Blackfire, starred in a marvelous short film called “The Sixth World,” in which she carries Navajo corn in a spaceship to a colony of her people on Mars.

The Navajos have a tradition for celebrating a baby’s first laugh. When, at around three months, a child lets out its first “real giggle,” the witness of the event is tasked with holding a party to celebrate.

For four years, Anna Rondon, executive director of Gallup-based New Mexico Social Justice Equity Institute, was the co-principal investigator for the Navajo Department of Health in the ongoing Navajo Birth Cohort Study, part of a federal study of 55,000 children nationwide, which has found heavy metals in newborn Diné babies’ systems.

Dr. Tommy Rock, professor in the Earth Sciences Department of Northern Arizona University, has spent his life studying environmental damage on indigenous lands and advocating for change. He is particularly knowledgeable and eloquent on the subject of toxic windblown dust on the Colorado Plateau.

Doug Brugge and Aaron Datesman’s book Dirty Secrets of Nuclear Power in an Era of Climate Change deals with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, generally stored on site. The study looks at the danger of low-level radioactive leaking, some of it constant, from nuclear power plants. Datesman’s thesis is that the unacknowledged dangers of constant or frequent radioactive exposure would apply equally to radioactive mine wastes on the reservation that people pass by frequently, even daily, for example going to and from school.

Nevertheless, a new technological “solution” has been proposed and federally permitted to remediate toxic wastes from abandoned uranium mines throughout the Colorado Plateau and the Sonoran Desert.  It is called High Pressure Slurry Ablation, a proprietary technology of Casper WY-based DISA Tech.

DISA Tech CEO Greyson Buckingham described the process for Cowboy State Daily:

Imagine like a tennis ball being covered in mud and you’re shooting these tennis balls at each other. What happens when they hit? The mud breaks off, but the tennis balls stay intact. And that’s what we’re doing, effectively just shooting millions of particles at a time at each other.

In a DISA Tech press release announcing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to grant his company a license to mine AUM tailings from Gallup to Spokane, Buckingham said:

This license represents a turning point in how our nation confronts legacy uranium contamination. For decades, AUM sites have been viewed as a burden too complex and costly to clean up. Today, we have a clear, regulated pathway to do it faster, safer, and at lower cost—while recycling valuable resources that support our nation’s energy future. We’re deeply grateful to Chairman Wright, the NRC Commissioners, the bipartisan leadership of Senators Lummis and Kelly, Navajo Nation leadership, and other key stakeholders for helping make this vision a reality.

A key figure Buckingham failed to acknowledge was DISA’s lead lawyer, Washington DC-based, Jeff Merrifield, a partner at Pillsbury Law and a former presidential appointee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Celebrating the license, a unique permit never before granted by the NRC, Merrifield said:

This is the kind of American innovation that unites environmental remediation, national security, and economic revitalization. It’s proof that when agencies work together, technology can turn legacy problems into lasting progress.

About that time, Merrifield was made a member of the board of directors of DISA Tech.

Meanwhile, in this developing struggle, Morgan told Source New Mexico that ongoing, if indecisive state and federal cleanup efforts are “better late than never,” but emphasized that the state should approach cleanup in a culturally sensitive manner and establish permanent monitoring.

Additional funds would unlock further cleanups, New Mexico Environment Department Uranium Mine Reclamation Coordinator Miori Harms told Source NM, noting that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “technically has the jurisdiction, but they tend to prioritize their sites, and these are the smaller ones that fall out the bottom. But they certainly present physical safety hazards and environmental hazards that we don’t want in our state.”

New Mexico state Senator Jeff Steinborn said it was “incumbent” on the federal government to pitch in further:  “It’s great that we’re appropriating money ($20 million) to clean up some sites and help people out. But it’s a much bigger cost than what our state can afford.’

However, if local, state, and federal decision makers, convinced by political and economic rather than scientific studies of the effectiveness of DISA’s technology, then governments, beginning, unfortunately, with the Navajo Nation itself, are expected to argue that it will be safe to mine uranium again. And DISA’s miracle technology will reduce or possibly eliminate the costs of cleanup.

Such a deal!

This “ablated” material, gathered outside abandoned uranium mines, will be trucked, despite a Navajo law against it, through the reservation to the mill in southern Utah. The precedent for breaking this law was established in 2025 when the Arizona governor brokered a deal between Energy Fuels Inc’s Pinyon Plain mine and the Navajo Nation that included the provision that the company would truck “as much as 10,000 tons of uranium-bearing cleanup materials from abandoned uranium mines within the Nation,” and, entering the twilight world of discretionary funds, “make further contributions to support the Nation’s transportation safety programs, education, the environment, public health and welfare, and local economic development on the Navajo Nation relating to uranium matters.”

A new agreement with DISA Tech, facilitated by the Director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency Steven Etsitty, will probably piggyback on the Pinyon Pine mine deal.

DISA Tech informed Cowboy State Daily in 2025:

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) accepted DISA ‘s application for a license to use its technology to remediate waste at abandoned mine sites in April, when the regulator set a schedule for a detailed technical review and developed and deployed a clear, first-of-its-kind regulatory framework which saw the licensing approval process completed in six months – much quicker than the 18-24 months it might have taken previously.

It is the first of its kind because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission somehow cut out the federal Environmental Protection Agency from the process after EPA tests of the ablation process in 2022 concluded that: “HPSA treatment did not achieve site-specific Navajo residential cleanup goals for uranium or for Ra-226 for waste processed at any of the three sites …” In any event, there would have been no way to produce a meaningful environmental impact statement according to NEPA requirements for a set of projects proposed across the length and breadth of the Colorado Plateau and the Sonoran Desert.

The federal government has never attempted to determine the costs for cleaning up the radioactive contamination on the Navajo Reservation caused by 40 years of uranium mining, although partial estimates exist.  The government’s interest in DISA Tech’s water-spray gadget is because it is a lot cheaper than any cleanup estimates and appears to do the job.

The United States government granted “Indians” aboriginal title to tribal ancestral lands, property rights of occupation and use subordinated to the federal government’s ultimate ownership of the underlying soil.  The Navajo Tribal Council was created in the 1920s to sign oil leases negotiated by the federal government. Traditionally, tribal organization was very diffuse, reflected today in the 110 chapters of local government. by a generous federal government, until such time that the land is needed for something else, like mining for uranium, rare earth metals, coal, and drilling for oil.

Another bad-faith assumption behind the HPSA process is that uranium mining will be safe now because today we have environmental law and regulation. But this project violates the National Environmental Protection Act in numerous ways detailed in comment letters to the NRC; yet on it goes, exempted from NEPA.

Eric Jantz, staff attorney for New Mexican Mining Watch, commented on the DISA license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency.  He wrote:

In its speculative scenario where it assumes DISA’s hypothetical HPSA operations will perform flawlessly. NRC fails to consider the only actual data available that indicates HPSA waste (coarse fraction) will, in many cases, leach contaminants into the ground and groundwater. By any standard, the NRC failed to take the required “hard look” at HPSA…The TetraTech Report, which is the sole data source for the NRC’s analyses, indicates that ablation byproduct material, i.e., the coarse fraction left behind after ablation, would have uranium and radium concentrations high enough to make areas where the coarse fraction remains unsuitable for residential or agricultural use in most cases….Additionally, NRC fails to consider impacts of climate change on water availability. Had NRC done so, it would have found that water scarcity will increase dramatically in arid Southwest regions, including New Mexico, and a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact–ed) would be inappropriate…Given increasing water scarcity in New Mexico and around the Southwest and DISA’s proposed water usage, NRC cannot justify a finding of no significant impact, even on a generic level.

Speculative thinking on uranium recently achieved absurd arrogance in the New Mexico state Legislature when Sen. Anthony “Ant” Thornton, former executive director of Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos, tried to get uranium relisted as a renewable resource, which would circumvent a state law requiring half the energy for utilities to be renewable by 2050 to achieve the state’s requirement for clean air and water. Opponents, who stopped the bill in committee, argued that the waste from the small modular reactors proposed to be scattered throughout New Mexico would remain on their sites. The politicians didn’t want their districts to have to deal with the problems the Diné face.

A nuclear advocacy organization, Clean Energy Associates of New Mexico, is sponsoring a conference at the Pritzker-owned Hyatt Regency Tamaya resort on the Santa Ana Pueblo, 30 miles north of Albuquerque starting on April 20. The event title, “Nuclear New Mexico: Fueling the US Nuclear Renaissance,” indicates clearly that more than 40 presenters from nuclear energy companies and local, state, and federal government officials will be talking about uranium mining in New Mexico. Lately, there are frequent reports of mine permit-applications on the edges of the Navajo Nation. Morgan said that Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo EPA, will speak on the first day. DISA’s Buckingham will also present during the conference.

More from the Cowboy State Daily puff piece:

This license represents a turning point in how our nation confronts legacy uranium contamination,” said Greyson Buckingham, DISA’s CEO, President, and Co-Founder. “For decades, AUM sites have been viewed as a burden too complex and costly to clean up. Today, we have a clear, regulated pathway to do it faster, safer, and at lower cost—while recycling valuable resources that support our nation’s energy future. We’re deeply grateful to Chairman Wright, the NRC Commissioners, the bipartisan leadership of Senators Lummis and Kelly, Navajo Nation leadership, and other key stakeholders for helping make this vision a reality”…Investors include Halliburton Labs and Valor Equity Partners…

This unique license to process uranium-mine wastes from Gallup to Spokane without further environmental review, took many business, educational, social, and political connections. Former Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton before going to the White House. Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming, and called it home during his decade in Congress. Casper is the headquarters for DISA Tech. Sen. John Barrasso, author of the Senate bill to ban the purchase of Russian uranium for power plants, also lives in Casper. Barrasso was a student at Georgetown University, where he received a BS and an MD. DISA’s cofounder, Greyson Buckingham, also received a BA and MA in American government from Georgetown. DISA’s attorney and board member, Jeff Merrifield, received his law degree from Georgetown. Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Valor Private Equity Partners, which manages $17.5 billion in assets for more than 360 companies and funds, received a master’s degree from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service before going to law school at the University of Chicago, where he was a classmate of Liz Cheney. Gracias has raised  $30 million for DISA from Valor headquarters in Chicago, home of the Pritzker family. JD Pritzker, the current governor of Illinois, started college at Georgetown. Penny Pritzker sponsored Gracias for a seat on the board of the Aspen Institute.

As a result of early investment in Tesla, Elon Musk put Gracias on the board of Tesla and later on the board of SpaceX. At Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, Musk put Gracias on the team investigating the Social Security Administration and later in charge of the task force on immigration. Gracias was encouraged to retire from DOGE when American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten complained that he and his executives weren’t adequately managing AFT’s $1.8 billion investment and other pension funds because of their work with DOGE. Finally, Rachel Pritzker, on the board of Breakthrough Institute, founded by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, is an ecomodernist heiress who believes fully that nuclear energy is clean and good for our climate.

“For decades, tribal and rural communities in Arizona, and particularly on the Navajo Nation, have lived with the health and environmental consequences of abandoned uranium mines,” said Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “This license is a meaningful step toward finally addressing legacy uranium contamination in a way that protects public health, strengthens our energy security, and delivers results for the communities most affected. I’m thankful to Senator Lummis, who has been a partner in advancing this work, the Navajo Nation, and to Chairman Wright and Commissioners Marzano and Crowell at the NRC for taking this important step.”

The senator is listening to money, not to his own constituents who are directly affected by AUM radioactive wastes. They say, in whatever public forum they meet, most often in their local chapter meetings, that they want the waste to be removed, not partially remediated. The senator’s job to get the policy and funding to make that happen instead of talking about “meaningful steps” at ceremonies of political corruption. What about the steps of the children who tend sheep on contaminated land?

“The extensive contamination remaining today is an ongoing breach of trust and a breach of specific treaty commitments,” wrote law professor Nadine Padilla in her Colorado Law article, “Abandoned Mines; Abandoned Treaties: The Federal Government’s Failure to Remediate Abandoned Uranium Mines on the Navajo Nation.” Padilla brilliantly elucidates the violations of law and ethics surrounding this issue. She concludes:

In a time of national need, the United States relied on and benefited from the uranium mined on Navajo lands. The Navajo people bore the burden of this extensive mining and continue to bear the burden as the reservation remains saddled with hundreds of abandoned mines that leach contaminants throughout the soil, water, and air. The extensive contamination remaining today is an ongoing breach of trust and a breach of specific treaty commitments…the federal government must take action and provide a full and fair remedy for impacted Navajo communities. The United States must honor its treaty commitments and trust obligations by providing the Navajo people a permanent home for their prosperity and happiness—as expressly agreed to in the Navajo treaties.”

People who believe in the philosophy of Moving Fast and Breaking Things are attempting once again to bulldoze people who believe in Áádóó naʹ nileʹ díʹ éí dooda, that delicate matters and things of importance must not be approached recklessly. It is a conflict between people with no respect for elders vs. people with great respect for elders in spite of the large loss of elders to diseases arising from uranium mining and abandoned mine waste.

Setting aside Amory Lovins’s observation a decade ago that “Nuclear prices only go up. Renewable energy prices come down,” DISA Tech’s HPSA project is bad business but it is a soft, calico catspaw hustle for reopening uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau. The performance by the boys from Georgetown U. was A #1,  elite, plutocratic political/economic corruption. Barrasso is a doctor; Gracias’s parents are a surgeon and a pharmacist, and he has two brothers who are doctors and a sister who is a dentist. Reason enough for their contempt for an ancient culture whose entire religion is based on the healing of individuals. What could the Diné know about their own health and environment that Dr. Barrasso and Mr. Gracias would listen to when they are betting millions and their reputations on the resumption of uranium mining?

The financial speculators are guided by plutocratic, ecomodernist think tanks. The Diné are defending what remains habitable of their homeland. Their guides include: the collective memory of a terrible history of exploitation, illness and premature death; their remaining elders; a few brave activists and intelligent, educated tribal members who must often oppose their own tribal council; and medicine men and women concerned with the physical, mental and spiritual health of their tribe. The Diné understand that energy from the dangerous, toxic business of uranium mining produces nuclear bombs, technology and cancer, and ask if the gamble is worth the health of their children.

Is the distribution of more nuclear power-plant waste worth the health of anyone’s children?

Regretfully, the limitless demand for more electricity resembles a Breccia-pipe uranium mine on the Plateau. Look down deep enough into it and you see old Leetso, uranium, the Yellow Monster of the Diné, grinning back at you and hoarsely whispering, “National Security.”

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