Navajos fight against uranium mining

WASHINGTON — It is a story familiar to Utahns: A government leader lobbies Congress to block nuclear activities but watches helplessly as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issues a license anyway.

But this time it isn't Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. fighting the losing battle with the NRC, which last week issued a license to a consortium of nuclear power utilities to store spent nuclear fuel on Goshute tribal lands in Skull Valley.

It is Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, who is fighting his own losing battle to block uranium mining on tribal lands.

"We have control of our lands, but we do not have control of the NRC, and that is the reason I am here today," Shirley said in an interview.

The Navajo Nation, which straddles the borders of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is locked in a fierce battle with the NRC, which has issued a license to Hydro Resources Crownpoint Uranium Project to mine at four sites in New Mexico — despite a Navajo law that prohibits it.

Shirley was in the nation's capital this week, lobbying members of Congress to support the tribal government's Dine Natural Resource Protection Act, passed last April, which prohibits new uranium mining on tribal lands.

The law is rooted in a long history of Navajos who worked in uranium mines and mills in the Four Corners area during the Cold War, and who were sickened and later died of radiation-caused cancers the U.S. government hid from the uranium workers.

"Uranium has killed too many of our people, and our elderly, who knew the sacred songs and sacred stories of life, are stricken with cancer on their death beds," Shirley told the Deseret Morning News. "Our culture is dying with them. Why should we have more uranium mining and afflict ourselves with more incurable cancers?"

The Navajo opposition to uranium mining and all things nuclear stands in stark contrast to the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, who see nuclear waste as an economic ticket out of poverty. They stand to become fabulously wealthy, even though terms of the lease with the consortium, Private Fuel Storage, have not been released.

Shirley, who won election on a campaign to stop the uranium mines, said the opposition is not negotiable, even with the lure of jobs. All things nuclear, from raw uranium to spent fuel rods, are foreign concepts to the Navajo — and they reject them in totality, he said.

"Even making money galore is a concept that is foreign to us," Shirley said. "We are not interested in the money. Life is sacred."