As I reported last weekend in The Times, a cattle rancher stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the summer of 2010 on his grazing land, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon on the Navajo reservation, and notified federal officials. They came in with Geiger counters and found levels of radioactivity that were alarmingly high.
A year and a half later, the former mine in Cameron, Ariz., is not fenced off to either humans or animals, and cattle continue to roam through the site and eat grass that might be tainted with uranium and other toxic substances.
“Those cattle go to auction in Sun Valley and are sold on the open market,” said Ronald Tohannie, a project manager with the Navajo advocacy group Forgotten People. “Then people eat the meat.”
The owner of Valley Livestock Auction in Sun Valley, Ariz., Derrek Wagoner, has confirmed that he buys cattle from the Navajo reservation and is aware that cattle graze near uranium mines there. He adds that cattle come to him from all over the Southwest, where there are plenty of former uranium mines.
There is no dispute that beef and milk from those cattle make their way into the food chain. What is not precisely known is how much radioactive material plants absorb through the soil, how much the cattle ingest by grazing on the plants and what the effect might be on humans.
Livestock grazing around the abandoned mines is common throughout the Southwest, according to many environmentalists, scientists, government officials and people in the cattle business. The Colorado Plateau is particularly rich in minerals and in the former mines, which for 40 years supplied crucial materials for the nation’s cold-war nuclear weapons program.
But the effect of the radioactivity on the food chain remains an open question. “There’s just not a lot of data,” said Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist with the Southwest Research and Information Center. “That’s because mining ended 25 years ago, and the studies ended then, too.”
Yet a resurgence in corporate interest in mining uranium has brought a new wave of studies. In a 2010 report, the Department of the Interior said proposals for uranium mining at sites adjacent to the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona had prompted the agency “to investigate physical, chemical and biological issues potentially affected by mining.”
