Editor’s Note: The video above says the Northeast Church Rock site is northwest of Gallup; it is northeast of Gallup.
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – The U.S. government has reached a historic $63 million settlement to clean up uranium mine waste in McKinley County.
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The Northeast Church Rock Mine site is where the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history occurred—17 miles northeast of Gallup. It’s has been abandoned for decades, and in 1983 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated it as a cleanup priority because of the high risk to humans and the environment. Nearly 43 years later, that cleanup is about to begin.
Abandoned uranium mines and mills are scattered throughout New Mexico—remnants of World War II–era weapons production and the Cold War that followed. The New Mexico Environmental Department has an interactive map with details about all 270.
Sunny Dooley explained, “Once you pass Laguna on the right-hand side of Route 66 going west, are all of the uranium mines, the mill tailings, and the remnants of this industry.“
The bulk of the abandoned sites is in the northwest part of the state. In some places, the remnants have left a damaging legacy. That’s especially clear in the area around the Northeast Church Rock Mine, where in 1979, a storage pond belonging to United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) broke—releasing 93 million gallons of toxic waste into the surrounding water supply, especially the Rio Puerco.
Now, UNC’s parent company, General Electric, is set to clean up the Northeast Church Rock Mine and foot the bill—about $63 million. Work is scheduled to begin this spring to remove roughly one million cubic yards of mine waste.
The waste containing high concentrations of disease-causing materials will be transported more than 200 miles away to White Mesa Mill disposal site in Utah. The rest will be stored at the UNC mill site, just a mile from the mine.
The Red Water Pond Road Community bore the heaviest toll after the historic spill. An EPA study last year found that 280 families living within a rive mile radius of the site rank in the state’s 97th percentile for heart disease and 99th percentile for asthma.
Dooley added, “It’s not just the Indigenous communities that are suffering the effects of the extraction industry.”
Dooley, a producer of a film shedding light on how Navajo communities affected by the nuclear industry are finding ways to heal, says everyone should understand the state’s nuclear history.
“It’s an 80-year legacy that is altering the DNA, so if you’re a young person living in this area, you really have to address where is the energy coming from, especially now because we all live in a digital world,“ she said.
The EPA said the U.S. Department of Justice must finalize the agreement in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico, and cleanup efforts are expected to take four years.
A General Electric spokesperson said in a statement:
We look forward to working together with the EPA and other stakeholders to begin remediation efforts associated with the historical use of the property.
