This dwelling remains in one of hundreds of Navajo communities where long-term cleanup of abandoned uranium mines is taking place after studies verified related levels of radioactivity and toxics are hazardous to health. Photo by Talli Nauman / Native Sun News Today
SAN FRANCISCO -- Funds procured in a court settlement over radioactive and toxic uranium mining waste abandoned in the Cave Hills of Custer National Forest will go to help the Navajo Nation with a new health study on harmful air pollution from similar sites, the Environmental Protection Agency announced April 24.
The agency’s San Francisco office said it awarded the Navajo Nation $89,260 to study how abandoned uranium mines are affecting air quality in the Cove Chapter, located on the Arizona portion of the largest U.S. Indian reservation.
“Navajo community members have raised concerns about winds potentially transporting dust with radionuclides during the long-term cleanup efforts by EPA and Navajo Nation EPA,” the agency said in a media release.
The study will sample airborne dust for a variety of unhealthy particles including uranium, arsenic and lead. It also will look for airborne radionuclides, among them isotopes of thorium and radium.
“By working with the community, we can address these concerns and help ensure people in the Cove area have important information about the air they breathe,” EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Mike Stoker said in the release.
EPA: Uranium-Contaminated Structures in the Navajo Nation
Oliver Whaley, executive director for the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, said the monitoring will reveal how much of the cancer-inducive materials are being carried in the dust from the abandoned uranium mines in the Cove area. “It is important for us to learn the vulnerabilities to people and the environment,” he noted.
The money is part of a $15.5-billion bankruptcy settlement a federal court approved in a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over the hazardous uranium mines abandoned by Kerr-McGee, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Tronox Corp. on the Custer National Forest in the Riley Pass area of South Dakota’s extreme northwestern Harding County.
The Department of Justice announced the settlement in 2014 as the largest payment ever for the cleanup of environmental contamination. The department stipulated that approximately $4.4 billion of the payment would go to environmental claims across the nation.
The Forest Service said it would take $63 million of the settlement to finish slated cleanup of arsenic, molybdenum, thorium, radium and uranium at the Riley Pass waste isolation and reclamation project, which began in 2006.
The Sioux Ranger District, headquartered at Camp Crook, is in charge of the work covering 12 bluffs at the headwaters of the Missouri River. The tributaries draining out of the abandoned mines carry runoff to the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule and Yankton Sioux Indian reservations.
The Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations obtain drinking water from the Missouri River through pipelines in the Mni Wiconi Rural Water Project.
The Navajo Nation, which helped litigate the bankruptcy case, netted approximately $1 billion in the settlement, enough to clean up more than 50 abandoned uranium mines where radioactive waste remains from former mining operations. About half of these mines are in the Cove area.
For more information on EPA’s efforts to address abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, visit
