Navajo Uranium Miners and the Cold War's Hidden Cost

The red rock walls you are driving through hold uranium. The Colorado Plateau is one of the richest uranium ore deposits on the continent, and in the early nineteen fifties the Atomic Energy Commission offered a guaranteed purchase price to anyone who could extract it. What followed was a uranium rush that rivaled anything in nineteenth-century gold country.

Moab became the boom town. Arches National Monument's neighbor Potash Road still runs past uranium tailings left from that era. But the ore did not come out of the ground by itself. A significant portion of the workforce that dug the uranium on the Colorado Plateau was Navajo, members of the Diné Nation whose ancestral territory overlaps with the canyon lands you see from this road.

Navajo miners worked without respirators in unventilated shafts. The mining companies and the federal government were not unaware of the risk: radon gas was known by the nineteen fifties to be a lung carcinogen. The Indian Health Service began documenting the health crisis among Navajo miners in the nineteen seventies, by which time lung cancer rates in the affected mining communities were epidemic.

Federal liability was contested for decades. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of nineteen ninety initially excluded many Navajo miners or provided inadequate compensation. Amendments in two thousand and extensions in two thousand twenty-two continued the advocacy that Navajo survivor families and tribal representatives have sustained for more than forty years. The exact number of miners who developed radiation-related cancer is not established in a single definitive public record; the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department documents the ongoing scope of the health legacy.

The ore that powered the weapons tested upwind of St. George came out of mines worked by men who bore the costs of both the extraction and the fallout.