For some Navajos, the uranium contamination is all of a piece with their fraught relationship with the federal government.“They’re making excuses, and they’ve always made excuses,” Ms. Knorr said. “The government should have had a law in place that told these mining companies: you clean up your mess when you leave.”
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A Navajo friend was once telling me about Monument Valley, about those famous structures that you see in northern Arizona made famous by old western films.
Little did I know that those famous landmarks are radioactive, and some contain old uranium mines at the top of them. Some 8.7 million pounds of uranium oxide were taken from these sacred lands by Monument Valley.
Arizona is the land of everything.
We have deserts and we have snow. We have tall mountains and deep canyons. We have the newest urban areas and old Native American domains, from dug up villages that pre-date the birth of Jesus to the largest area of reservations in the country.
We have a large elder and retired population from out of state, immigrants if you will, and we have more than 50% of the babies born today being minority, and its no wonder the older people with the money don’t want to share it by paying for public education.
Arizona also has the largest nuclear power plant in the nation, one that you can see as you head west of Phoenix on I-10 towards LA. It is also the only one not near a source of water, but instead uses 20,000,000,000 gallons of sewage water a year for cooling.
The Navajo Nation, sacred land near the Grand Canyon and Four Corners area, is also home to lots of uranium and coal. This is were Arizona gets a lot of its energy from, and Tucson is not exempt, exploiting this finite resource in the land that extends from Northeastern Arizona and into New Mexico, home of the dirtiest coal plants in the nation. Read More
