MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tribal communities in the southwest are joining forces to fight an uptick in uranium mining and milling near their homelands. This comes as the U.S. wants to quadruple nuclear energy capacity and produce more of the uranium it needs domestically. That push is also reviving concerns, though, about the health effects of uranium mining. Melissa Bailey reports from our partner at KFF Health News.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE RUNNING)
MALCOLM LEHI: Yeah. That's a uranium truck.
MELISSA BAILEY: It's a hot day in April, and we're sitting in Malcolm Lehi's Jeep outside the White Mesa Mill in Utah. This is the nation's last remaining conventional uranium mill, and Lehi lives on a satellite reservation of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, just 5 miles away.
LEHI: I've been sitting outside of my house, and I watch. There's about, like, 15 to 20 of them coming back and forth.
BAILEY: The trucks are delivering uranium ore, which will be processed into yellowcake for nuclear power fuel. After a quiet 15 years, business at the mill is resurging because of a federal law that will ban imports of Russian uranium. And in White Mesa, the increased production is reviving concerns about the water, land and air.
LEHI: In our community, we don't drink the water because everything runs gravity downhill, and we're downhill from here. So people - a lot of people buy water and drink it.
BAILEY: The White Mesa Mill stores its radioactive waste in five lined pits. The tribe draws its drinking water from an aquifer deep below. But Adam Wingate with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality says the aquifer is protected by a thick rock barrier, and testing shows the water is safe to drink.
ADAM WINGATE: We're trying really hard to put environmental protections in place and to keep an eye on the groundwater and the soil and the air. And to the best of my ability to tell, your health is not at risk because of the mill.
CURTIS MOORE: You have to trust the science.
BAILEY: Curtis Moore is senior vice president at Energy Fuels, which owns the mill. He says he understands why tribes are skeptical of the uranium industry. When mining boomed in the 1940s, miners were not warned about radiation risks. Companies left behind thousands of toxic waste sites in Colorado and Utah alone. But Moore said the industry has changed a lot since that era, and his company's operations are safe.
MOORE: We just have to do the best we can every single day and try to regain that trust.
BAILEY: The mill is growing regardless. Energy Fuels received a $725 million conditional loan commitment from the Defense Department to scale up its processing of rare earth elements. The company broke ground in July on a new, rare earth plant at the mill.
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YOLANDA BADBACK: Please, you guys. Stand up and help me to protest against this and fight against this mill to shut it down.
BAILEY: Yolanda Badback is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, whose family has fought the mill for decades. She spoke at a No Kings rally in Moab this spring.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BADBACK: Thank you very much.
(CHEERING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
(APPLAUSE)
BAILEY: More people have joined her protests in recent years, including members of the Havasupai Tribe, who've been fighting a uranium mine near the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, the White Mesa Mill plans to more than double its production this year and build new storage cells for radioactive waste a quarter mile closer to the tribal community. For NPR News, I'm Melissa Bailey.
KELLY: And Melissa reports from our partner, KFF Health News.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHLOCALYST AND MR KAFER'S "CERVEJA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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