NATIONAL ENERGY CORRIDORS MAY IMPACT NAVAJO REZ

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NATIONAL ENERGY CORRIDORS MAY IMPACT NAVAJO RESERVATION LAND

By Kathy Helms
WINDOW ROCK, Arizona, November 16, 2005 (ENS) - U.S. government plans to designate national energy corridors on federal lands in 11 western states surrounding the Navajo Nation, appear to be building toward a legal takeover of Indian land through rights-of-way agreements the tribe could be forced to accept. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 enacted in August directs federal agencies to designate federal land in 11 western states for oil, gas and hydrogen pipelines, and electricity transmission and distribution facilities, or energy corridors. >>Read Full Text

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www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2005/2005-11-16-03.asp

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Navajos Acting to Stop Uranium Rush in State

Navajos Acting to Stop Uranium Rush in State
By Mark Shaffer
The Arizona Republic

Monday 02 January 2005

Ore abundant in northern Arizona; price, demand rising.

Flagstaff - The price of uranium has tripled in the past two years, bringing with it the possibility of another uranium rush in Arizona, the state with the richest deposits of the ore and, along with New Mexico, the worst legacy associated with its mining.

Last year, 700 mining claims were filed and 100 test holes were bored into the wild, remote high desert in northern Arizona.

Scott Florence, director of the Bureau of Land Management's Arizona Strip district in St. George, Utah, said those numbers are significantly higher than any year since the frenzy of the 1980s.

"Finding the right mine site is a real art. But it seems like everyone and their mother is trying now," he said.

Secondary supplies of uranium on the world market have virtually dried up, and China, India and Japan are clamoring for uranium for their burgeoning domestic nuclear-power industries. Uranium now fetches $36 a pound on the spot market. Four years ago, it was going for just over $7 a pound.

But not everyone is happy about the search for new mine sites. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr., stirred to action by the memory of how dangerous uranium mining can be, issued an executive order in November banning negotiations with uranium companies or uranium exploration on the three-state Navajo Nation, which was engulfed by a public health tragedy after the first wave of uranium mining began on its reservation in the 1950s. Dozens of premature deaths of Navajo miners and passed-on genetic defects have been attributed to uranium exposure.

"You look around the reservation and see so many elderly people who are crippled and can barely breathe," said Robert Stewart Sr. of Tuba City, a Navajo who worked for five years in a mine in the mid- to late 1950s. "This pretty much devastated much of a generation."

The most easily accessible uranium deposits in open-pit mines beneath the Navajos' land were tapped out in the Cold War frenzy to find weapons-grade materials. Then the marketplace took care of the next wave of development during the late 1980s with a round of bankruptcies after the price of uranium fell to less than $10 a pound and stayed there.

Environmental Concerns

Before uranium prices crashed 20 years ago and stalled exploration, conservationists feared the environmental impacts of development of uranium mines surrounding the Grand Canyon on water and roadless areas.

Today, Shirley's order banning exploration and negotiation is expected to ratchet up the pressure on state, federal and private lands between Interstate 40 and the Utah border, where there are potentially dozens of uranium-ore bodies that would make financial sense to mine if market prices remain at their highest levels in 25 years.

And despite the creation in 2000 of two national monuments north of the Grand Canyon - Grand Canyon-Parashant and Vermilion Cliffs - many of the same fears remain about the possibility of having a number of uranium mines in the region.

"The richest area of uranium deposits is in a 50- to 75-mile area between the two monuments, and the exploration there won't be affected," Florence said. "The creation of the monuments restricts any future mining claims, but pre-existing claims have grandfathered rights."

George Billingsley, a senior geologist for the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, knows all about the deposits in those areas.

He has been mapping them for years, and his wall is filled with red lines showing uranium-ore bodies from the Grand Wash Cliffs in far northwestern Arizona south and paralleling the rim of the Grand Canyon to Kanab Canyon, where they line that canyon in its route toward Utah.

"So far, I have about 2,000 breccia pipes plotted," Billingsley said, referring to deep, cylindrical geologic formations, seldom more than 100 yards wide, in which a section of earth collapses into underground caves, then fills the opening with loose rock, known as breccia. As water seeps through the breccia formations over thousands of years, traces of uranium begin to appear.

Billingsley said that only about 1 percent of the rock deposits in the red-wall limestone canyon walls have been "sufficiently mineralized" with uranium and other minerals to attract mining interests. But Arizona's reserves are the best in this country. Many of the deposits on the Arizona Strip have been measured as producing from 14 to 16 pounds of yellowcake, the processed ore from which fuel is refined, per ton of ore. That compares with only 3 pounds of yellowcake per ton from older mines in New Mexico and Wyoming. One pound of yellowcake produces as much energy as 15 train cars of coal.

Billingsley acknowledged that he has mapped only a small part of northern Arizona for uranium deposits and has not yet begun to look at the vast Chinle Formation, where the Navajo mines were. That area is replete with petrified wood, which forms under conditions also conducive to uranium development.

Companies Are Eager

Those kinds of conditions leave uranium companies, such as International Uranium Corp. of Denver, salivating. It took over partly developed mines left behind when another Denver company, Energy Fuels Nuclear, declared bankruptcy in the 1990s. International Uranium hopes to have four mines operating soon between the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and the town of Fredonia. International Uranium also owns one of only two domestic uranium mills that have stayed open, the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah.

Harold Roberts, vice president of International Uranium, said the company is considering opening Canyon Mine, south of the Grand Canyon, a site that was partly developed before the uranium market crashed in the late 1980s.

"The mines are more developed north of the Grand Canyon, but we are very excited about the prospects south of the Canyon between Flagstaff and the national park," Roberts said. "But even though the market looks good now at $35 a pound, we still have a ways to go before this becomes an all-out rush like it did in 1979, when uranium got to $43 a pound. The wages and insurance are all considerably higher now."

Another big incentive may become reality soon, said Lyle Krahn, a spokesman for Cameco Corp. of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada's main uranium producer, which also has mines in Wyoming and Nebraska.

"The US has been inching ever closer to announcing 10 new nuclear-power generating sites, and this would have big ramifications for our industry," Krahn said.

A Deadly Legacy

All of which leaves members of the Navajo Nation with a bad taste as the pressures increase to mine uranium.

George Hardeen, a spokesman for Shirley, said the Navajo president spent two days in Washington meeting with members of Congress to re-emphasize tribal sovereignty and to try to keep uranium firms from "going in the back door" with the Interior Department and negotiating their own mining contracts.

"Uranium left a deadly legacy on the Navajo Nation, which (Shirley) has called genocide," Hardeen said. "The tribe is giving up millions of dollars in royalties to keep history from repeating itself."

One reminder of that era is Stewart, 74, who worked in processing mills near Monument Valley and Tuba City.

He is one of hundreds of former Navajo uranium miners who have filed claims with the US Justice Department to receive up to $150,000 in compensation for health problems under a special fund set up for miners and their families.

Stewart's breath is short as he recounts years of lung disease caused by 16-hour days of breaking large uranium ore rocks with a sledgehammer. Stewart said he later was working in a lab, trying to extract iron from yellowcake, when there was an explosion. He said he got some of the yellowcake on his hands.

Phil Harrison, a Shiprock, NM, community activist who has been aiding the miners in their claims, said that less than 10 percent have received any compensation from the federal government.

"The problems all start with proving they were in the area and, of course, my clients can't produce private property records because they live on the reservation," Harrison said. "This whole thing has just been a real travesty, and I hope people will remember the past in their decisions for the future."