http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7264690Navajos: Old uranium tailings leave land radioactive, people sick
By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 10/24/2007 06:52:39 AM MDT
WASHINGTON - The Navajo Nation representative waved an instrument over the small pile of dirt. Beep, beep, beep it went, in a radioactive crescendo.
The bit of soil - shipped from the Four Corners region to the Capitol - underscored Stephen Etsitty's point: This was only a minuscule sample of the tailings left behind from decades of uranium mining.
Much larger pieces, he said, can be found in the homes of American Indians, in watering holes for grazing animals, even pressed into a public highway.
"The sounds that you have heard come from an instrument called a Ludlum 19 and show that Navajo families are living within a few hundred yards of materials that we're told we shouldn't be exposed to for longer than an hour," said Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency.
Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee stared at the small tub of dirt, which was then sealed off and escorted out of the building by Capitol Police.
The demonstration on Tuesday came during testimony on the problems faced by those living in the Navajo Nation - 27,000 square miles across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico - where more than 500 former uranium mines were abandoned after the rush to find nuclear material during the 1940s to the 1970s.
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Because of the health and environmental problems that have plagued tribal members since the last boom, the Navajo Nation has passed a resolution prohibiting new uranium mining on the reservation.
In 2001, the EPA razed Mary Holiday's hogan in Monument Valley because of gamma radiation readings 25 times higher than the level considered safe and radon 44 times above the "safe" level. Exposure to high radiation sometimes causes lung cancer, the disease that killed Holiday's nephew, Leonard Begay, a non-smoker who had lived in the hogan for many years. He died in 2003 at age 38.
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