Navajo Uranium Miners: Radiation Without Warning

The federal government needed uranium. After the Manhattan Project, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Atomic Energy Commission was tasked with building a permanent stockpile of nuclear weapons, and that meant a permanent supply of ore. The ore was in the Colorado Plateau, and a large portion of it was under Navajo Nation land. Beginning in nineteen forty-four, mining companies opened hundreds of shafts on Navajo territory. The men who worked those shafts were predominantly Navajo.

The federal government and the mining companies knew by the early nineteen fifties that unventilated uranium mines produced radon gas at lethal concentrations. Studies of European uranium miners had established the lung cancer link clearly enough. The knowledge existed. The choice was made not to act on it. Navajo miners went underground in shafts with radiation levels that federal monitoring had already flagged. Many of the miners did not speak English. Safety information, when it was provided at all, came through translation that was often unreliable. Respirators were not standard equipment. The mines were not ventilated to the standard that the government's own scientists were recommending.

Thousands of Navajo miners developed lung cancer and other radiation-related illnesses. The cancers came years later, as they do, and by the time they came the connection between the mines and the disease was not acknowledged by the companies or the federal government. Families buried men who did not know why they were dying.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in nineteen ninety. It acknowledged the government's responsibility and provided payments to uranium miners. But the eligibility criteria were narrow, the documentation requirements were difficult for communities that kept limited records, and many miners had died before the act passed. Hundreds of abandoned mine sites remain on Navajo land today, contaminating soil and water. The Environmental Protection Agency has documented more than five hundred abandoned uranium mines on Navajo territory. The cleanup has been slow and incomplete.

The Cold War is over. The mines are not cleaned up.