By: Shondiin Silversmith - Monday January 27, 2025 2:21 pm

The following text is from the original article found HERE.

From semi-trucks and school buses to recreational vehicles and compact cars, heavy traffic along Highway 89 through Cameron, Arizona, is not uncommon for the community as many travelers pass through to get to the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff or further north to Page.

But the smooth four-lane highway quickly turns into a narrower two-lane road, and drivers are met with a rougher ride that includes potholes, patched road cracks and bumpy sections. That section of the highway is so notorious locally for regular, and often deadly, accidents that it has spawned a morbid nickname.

“We call the road ‘Killer 89,’” said Candis Yazzie, the former vice president of the Cameron Chapter House.

Now, a mining company near the Grand Canyon has permission to haul as many as 10 truckloads a day of uranium ore along “Killer 89.”

“It’s definitely unsettling and alarming,” Yazzie said of the haul route passing through her community.

The entire uranium haul route is about 320 miles, and it passes through several communities in Arizona — many of which are within the Navajo Nation — before crossing the Utah border for the final stretch to reach its destination, the White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah.

Some hazards along the haul route include narrow lanes, flash floods and icy road conditions. Other areas have poor visibility and blind spots, and much of the approved route’s landscape is open to wandering horses, cows, sheep and wild animals.

Cameron is one of the first Navajo communities the trucks pass through when they enter the Navajo Nation.

“Safety is definitely a concern,” Yazzie said. “Particularly the safety of our people.”

The community has roadside tables, housing arts and crafts vendors or food stands, which many tourists and locals visit. A trading post and motel in the community draw people from all over.

Like many other communities on the Navajo Nation, Yazzie said she did not learn about the approved uranium haul route passing through her community or how Energy Fuels, Inc., sent two trucks hauling uranium ore through tribal land until after it happened.

Uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon will be transported by over-the-road 24-ton haul trucks and end dump trailers, according to Energy Fuels, Inc., and up to 10 trucks will make the trip each day.

Energy Fuels, Inc. owns and operates the Pinyon Plain uranium mine on U.S. Forest Service land in the Kaibab National Forest near the Grand Canyon. Numerous tribes, including the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Havasupai Tribe, have ancestral lands there.

As part of the mining company’s transportation policy, trailers hauling uranium ore must be kept closed at all times, both when containing uranium ore and when empty.

The trailers are kept closed using a tarp, which can be removed only when loading and unloading “so that there may not be any leakage of radioactive material from the trailer.”

The route starts from Pinyon Plain Mine on a forest service road before entering the main highway, State Route 64. It then travels south toward Interstate 40 to enter Flagstaff, proceeding east to head north on U.S. Highway 89 until heading east on U.S. Highway 160. In the final stretch sees the trucks take U.S. Highway 191 north into Utah.

Many communities along the haul route, which passes through towns in Arizona, the Hopi Nation, the Navajo Nation, Utah, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, oppose uranium hauling and condemned the first haul in July. They cite fears of contamination and accidents along the route.

“Cameron and many communities along the route have a really tainted history with uranium mining and uranium health effects,” Yazzie said. “They’re ignoring that aspect of it, and they’re choosing to profit.”

Haul route through Navajo riskiest

A recent analysis of fatal vehicle accidents along the Arizona haul route has revealed that uranium trucks traveling from the Pinyon Plain Mine to the White Mesa uranium mill in Utah face a higher risk of accidents over long distances, especially on the Navajo Nation.

“The most risky segments of the route are between 240% and 700% more dangerous than an average stretch of road in the United States in terms of vehicle accident fatalities per mile driven,” according to the Grand Canyon Trust, an opponent of the mine, which analyzed fatal accident data along the route.

Josh O’Brien, a senior GIS analyst at Grand Canyon Trust, said the team looked at fatal accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System from 2014 to 2022.

Then, the data was cross-referenced with data showcasing the average daily traffic counts collected by the Arizona and Utah state departments of transportation.

“An average road in the U.S., you’d expect about four and half fatal accidents along it,” O’Brien said in an interview with the Arizona Mirror. But, in the team’s route analysis, he said they identified a stretch of road east of Tuba City, along Highway 160, where 14 fatal accidents occurred.

“That’s over triple the number you’d expect,” he said, adding that, after running the statistics on the route, it’s “very unlikely this happened by chance” and is due to the roads being more hazardous.

That isn’t news to people who live in the region and are familiar with the roads — and the dangers they pose — but the Grand Canyon Trust analysis backs up the local knowledge with statistics.

For instance, the Navajo Nation Police Department reported a fatal head-on collision involving a pickup truck and a semitruck that occurred on State Route 89 near milepost 479, between Tuba City and Cameron, on Jan. 24. The state road shut down in both directions for multiple hours.

“Five sections of the whole route have this significantly elevated risk,” O’Brien said.

The most dangerous sections of the uranium truck haul route include the road driving east of the Mexican Water Trading Post on Highway 160, near the Highway 191 junction; east of Flagstaff near Doney Park along Highway 89; east of Tuba City and Dennehotso along Highway 160; and going through Tsegi Canyon along Highway 160, west of Kayenta.

Four of the five most dangerous sections of the route are on the Navajo Nation, according to the Grand Canyon Trust’s analysis.

“Across the nation, the fatal accident rate for passenger vehicles was about 1.2 per 100 million miles traveled in 2022,” O’Brien said in the analysis. “Along some segments of the haul route, actual fatal accident rates were 2.4 to 7 times that.”

The analysis is limited. The team examined only fatal accidents, not all accident data, and primarily examined the Arizona portion of the haul route.

“There were 113 fatal accidents along the haul route between 2014 and 2022,” according to Grand Canyon Trust’s analysis.

“The statistical analysis is very clear,” O’Brien said in the analysis. “Segments of the haul route are dangerous compared to the average for roads in the United States.”

Uranium hauling still on hold

Uranium ore hauling from Pinyon Plain Mine is currently on hold as negotiations continue between the Navajo Nation government and Energy Fuels following the company’s surprise haul in July. In response, the Navajo Nation implemented emergency measures to bar any further transportation of the ore through its land.

“We believe that talks between Energy Fuels and the Navajo Nation have progressed extremely well, and it is clear to us that all parties are working in good faith to reach a mutually beneficial agreement,” Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels, said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror.

“Energy Fuels is committing to voluntarily go far above and beyond the already protective federal laws and regulations on ore transport to build a bridge with the Navajo Nation,” he said.

Moore added that the resurgence in nuclear energy, which doesn’t produce any atmospheric carbon, requires uranium, and the company has a responsibility to “demonstrate to people that modern uranium mining and transport is performed much more responsibly than it was during the 1940s to 1960s,” when many issues occurred on Navajo land.

The Arizona Mirror contacted officials from the Navajo Nation multiple times for interviews and an update on negotiations, but they did not respond.

Navajo Nation officials have made their stance on the transportation of uranium over the past few months, more recently with amending the Radioactive and Related Substances, Equipment, Vehicles, Persons and Materials Transportation Act of 2012 to strengthen the Navajo Nation’s regulatory authority over the transportation of uranium and other radioactive materials across their tribal lands.

In an interview with the Arizona Mirror, Gov. Katie Hobbs said the biggest concerns for the lack of notification of transportation between the Navajo Nation and Energy Fuels occurred due to miscommunication.

“As far as I know, they resolved those issues,” she said, but no further details were given on how.

Even as negotiations continue, other requests have been made, including calls from the Havasupai Tribe, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Gov. Katie Hobbs for the U.S. Forest Service to conduct a new environmental impact study for the Pinyon Plain Mine.

Mayes submitted a letter in August stating that the EIS was completed in 1986, nearly four decades years ago, and is based on “an outdated, inaccurate understanding of the risks posed by the Mine to groundwater supplies across the Grand Canyon region.”

Hobbs submitted a letter in September asking for a new environmental review of mine, a request the Havasupai Tribe has made for years.

“As Governor of Arizona, I take seriously the concerns of Indigenous community members who feel the safety of their communities and the integrity of their sacred sites are threatened by this mine,” Hobbs wrote in a letter to the Forest Service. “Members of these communities continue to endure significant, heart-breaking harm from uranium mining in our recent past.”

The final Environmental Impact Statement for the project was issued in 1986, two years after the Plan of Operations was issued. No updated impact statement or plan of operations has been issued since.

Hobb said the EIS is still ongoing, and her office is asking for an updated EIS because it’s the assurance needed of the mine.

“This mine is probably the most heavily regulated operation in the country,” she said, and the EIS will add extra regulations.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.

Plutonium hotspots appear along tribal lands, hiking trails, city streets and the Rio Grande River, a watchdog group finds 

by Alicia Inez Guzmán April 25, 2024

For years, the public had no clear picture of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium footprint. Had the ubiquitous plutonium at LANL infiltrated the soil? The water? Had it migrated outside the boundary of the laboratory itself?

A series of maps published by Nuclear Watch New Mexico are beginning to answer these questions and chart the troubling extent of plutonium on the hill. One map is included below, while an interactive version appears on Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s website. The raw data for both comes from Intellus New Mexico, a publicly accessible clearinghouse of some 16 million environmental monitoring records offered in recent decades by LANL, the New Mexico Environment Department and the Department of Energy.

Approximately 58,100 red dots populate each map at 12,730 locations, marking a constellation of points where plutonium — a radioactive element used in nuclear weapons — was found in the groundwater, surface water or soil. What’s alarming is just how far that contamination extends, from Bandelier National Monument to the east and the Santa Fe National Forest to the north, to San Ildefonso tribal lands in the west and the Rio Grande River and Santa Fe County, to the south.

The points, altogether, tell a story about the porous boundary between LANL and its surrounds. So pervasive is the lab’s footprint that plutonium can be found in both trace and notable amounts along hiking trails, near a nursing home, in parks, along major thoroughfares and in the Rio Grande.

Gauging whether or not the levels of plutonium are a health risk is challenging: Many physicians and advocates say no dose of radiation is safe. But when questions about risk arise, one of the few points of reference is the standard used at Rocky Flats in Colorado, where the maximum allowable amount of plutonium in remediated soil was 50 picocuries per gram. Many sites on the Nuclear Watch map have readings below this amount. Colorado’s construction standard, by contrast, is 0.9 picocuries per gram. 

Nuclear Watch’s driving question, according to Scott Kovac, its operations and research director, concerned a specific pattern of contamination: Had plutonium migrated from LANL dump sites into regional groundwater? The answer, Kovac believes, is yes. 

That conclusion began to form when Nuclear Watch compiled data from between 1992 and 2023 for plutonium contamination below the soil, and plotted each point into the organization’s now-sprawling map. Red dots coalesce at LANL dump sites. They also appear in the finger-like canyons surrounding the Pajarito Plateau, namely in Los Alamos Canyon, “the main contaminant pathway to the Rio Grande,” a Nuclear Watch summary says.

Much of the contamination likely occurred from the 1940s to the 1960s, during the lab’s “Wild West,” in Kovac’s words — a time of little environmental oversight when the surrounding plateaus, canyons and the entire ancestral Pueblo of Tsirege doubled as a dumping ground, laboratory and wasteland.

The map doesn’t make conclusions about what, exactly, caused contamination at any given site. The sites themselves are chosen for sampling based on “legacy LANL operations” — areas where contamination occurred in the past — a Department of Energy spokesperson told Searchlight New Mexico in an email.

A 1999 environmental impact statement and other documents reveal the extent of that contamination and the many places where LANL buried radioactive waste or dumped effluent, including landfills, canyons, drain lines, firing sites and spill locations.
“Plutonium and uranium have been released into canyons…since the Manhattan Project,” according to another 1999 report, this one focused on the lab’s contribution to radioactive contamination in Cochiti Lake. “In Los Alamos Canyon, these contaminants have been carried by flood flows several tens of kilometers” — more than 12 miles — “downstream into the Rio Grande.”

To read more, find the full article HERE

April 26, 2024 Nuclear Weapons

NukeWatch has recently published a project on plutonium sampling at Los Alamos National Laboratory showing plutonium migration and contamination into the groundwater at and around the lab. See more: 

https://nukewatch.org/2024/04/26/recent-project-plutonium-sampling-at-the-los-alamos-national-lab/

Article by: by Scott Yundt and Marylia Kelley | Mar 20, 2024 | Blog, New Bomb Plants, Nuclear Weapons

(Link to original post, https://trivalleycares.org/2024/dancing-with-death-the-fiscal-year-2025-nuclear-weapons-budget)

Last week President Biden sent his Fiscal Year 2025 budget request to Congress. While this general fact made the news; many media outlets failed to highlight that the U.S. military defense budget for the coming fiscal year is approaching a trillion dollars. The President’s FY25 request stands at $895 billion for the Defense Department and the nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Congress will debate the budget in committee and on the floor in the coming weeks and months. If the past is prologue, while many social programs will be on Congress’s chopping block, a plethora of weapons systems including new nuclear warheads will be increased well over the President’s already obscene request.

Tri-Valley CAREs is committed to ensuring this madness does not happen on the quiet, without public outcry and opposition. To help inform your activism, this alert summarizes key information from the President’s request for the National Nuclear Security Administration, with a focus on its nuclear weapons activities.

Between now and October 1, 2024 (which begins fiscal 2025) we will offer a series of action alerts and opportunities for your voice to be heard alongside other Tri-Valley CAREs members, colleagues, and allies from like-minded organizations. We invite your participation!

The White House statement touts its FY25 request for “$19.8 billion for Weapons Activities, $4.5 billion above the 2021 enacted level.” This is the lion’s share of the total NNSA request, which stands at $24.9 billion for FY25. (See, for example, NNSA Vol. 1)

While the missiles and submarines over at the Pentagon cost more to build, it’s the NNSA nuclear Weapons Activities budget line that funds the warheads and bombs that arm them, making them weapons of nuclear mass destruction.

Here are some of the important NNSA details for the coming fiscal year:

First, the good news. The President’s FY25 budget request, once again, does not request any funding for a new nuclear version of the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (W80-4Alt-SLCM). Biden’s nuclear posture review did not include it, and neither has any of his budget requests. Still, Congress has added money the last two budget cycles for this new warhead, which Livermore Lab is designing. So, we are calling on Congress to fund the new SLCM warhead in FY25 at the President’s request – zero dollars.

Unfortunately, the good news ends there. The President FY25 request funds six nuclear weapons systems overall, including

• the W80-4 warhead that Livermore is designing for a new air-lauched cruise missile, called the Long-Range Stand Off Weapon because pilots will be able to launch a precision-guided nuclear strike on an unsuspecting population from more than a thousand miles away;
• the W87-1 warhead, also being designed at Livermore Lab, which will be the first wholly new warhead developed since the end of full-scale nuclear testing in Nevada in 1992, and will require new plutonium pits (cores);
• the W93 warhead, which is in an early stage of development but is touted as a totally new design being done in cooperation with the United Kingdom to upgrade its nuclear fleet; and
• the B61-13 nuclear bomb, slated to begin its initial design in FY25.

The numbers tell the story. The FY25 request for the W80-4 is $1.2 billion, up 4% from 2023. The W87-1 request is $1.1 billion for FY95, up 61% from 2023. The W93 request is $456 million, up 90% from 2023. And, the B61-13 request in its first year is $16 million. Typically, as you can see from the list, initial requests start low and go up, up, up as the design work progresses.

(Related, Tri-Valley CAREs recently published its analysis of the design issues at Livermore Lab that are causing delays to the W80-4 and the W87-1, which we believe may increase costs in the coming years. CLICK here for that information.)

The NNSA FY25 request also contains a budget line for nuclear weapons dismantlement, which funds the work at the Pantex Plant to take apart nuclear weapons that have been retired previously and have been waiting in the dismantlement queue. This is a budget line that illuminates the relative priority being given to disarmament vs. armament. The request for the coming fiscal year stands at a paltry $54 million. Further, Congress does not tend to plus up this budget line one penny.

It’s up to us to make our voices – and our priorities – heard. While we hold the President accountable for his FY25 request, it is just that, a request. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Congress authorizes spending levels and appropriates funds for them. Further, we do have congressional champions who are trying to change U.S. nuclear policy and cut the budget.  Congress needs to know that there is a public that cares about nuclear weapons issues.

Call or write your Senators and Representative today. The capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Use one or two salient facts from this alert. Let them know you want less – not more – spending on nuclear weapons. Be sure to say you are a constituent and that you wish to be kept informed of the Senator or Representative’s actions on nuclear weapons throughout the budget cycle.

Further, when you call your Representative, ask that they co-sponsor H.Res.77, titled, “Embracing the Goals of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” This House Resolution currently has 42 cosponsors. Check here for the latest co-sponsors, and if your Rep. is already on the list, please thank them.

Together we can act to uphold Dr. King’s legacy and defy the “spiritual death” he decried, make “good trouble” to honor John Lewis, carry the torch forward as Daniel Ellsberg asked of us, and make a truly positive difference in our collective future.

Additionally, Please Stay Tuned to Our Electronic Newsletters and Website!

Analyses and action alerts on the FY25 request for NNSA plutonium and uranium bomb plants and the FY25 request for the Livermore Lab will follow shortly. So, too, will information about this spring’s Alliance for Nuclear Accountability DC Days and your Tri-Valley CAREs team that will travel to Washington to carry these recommendations into scores of meetings with members of Congress and administration officials. And, yes, there will be specific, creative actions you can take to amplify the message.

Divided 9th Circuit rejects Apache religious challenge to copper mine on sacred land

“Yesterday a divided federal court (6-5) today refused to protect an ancient Native American sacred site from destruction by a multinational mining giant, putting the case on a fast track to the Supreme Court.

The decision was by a bare majority, with five judges vigorously disagreeing and writing that the majority “tragically erred” in allowing the government to “obliterate Oak Flat” and prevent the “Western Apaches from ever again” engaging in their religious exercise.

With the help of Becket, Apache Stronghold has vowed to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since time immemorial, Western Apaches and other native peoples have gathered at Oak Flat for sacred religious ceremonies that cannot take place anywhere else.

“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us-our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families, and our land,” said Dr. Wendsler Nosie of Apache Stronghold. “Today’s ruling targets the spiritual lifeblood of my people, but it will not stop our struggle to save Oak Flat. We vow to appeal to the Supreme Court.” -NM Climate Justice

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-03-02/divided-9th-circuit-rejects-apache-religious-challenge-to-copper-mine-on-sacred-land