U.S. Backs Tribe, Rejects Gold Mine Proposal

SAN DIEGO--The federal government has sided with Native Americans trying to block a proposed 1,600-acre open-pit gold mine on public land in eastern Imperial County that the tribe considers sacred. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which controls the land, has tentatively rejected a Canadian mining company's bid, although the agency has given the firm 30 days in which to appeal.

The case is seen as a major test of a 1996 order by President Clinton that federal agencies show greater sensitivity to the "sacred geography" of Native Americans.

Before that order was issued, federal policy, governed by the Mining Act of 1872, leaned heavily toward granting permission for mining on public property whenever possible.

The Quechan Indian Nation asserts that the rocky, wind-swept area bounded by Picacho Peak, Pilots Knob and Muggins Peak contains the spirits of the Creator and two other mythological figures who passed through the region a thousand years ago. The area is mentioned prominently in Quechan songs.

Glamis Imperial Corp. General Manager Gary Boyle said the company expects the Bureau of Land Management and its parent agency, the Department of the Interior, to reject its bid and is prepared to file a federal lawsuit. An earlier lawsuit was thrown out of court in San Diego as premature.

"It's been obvious to the mining industry that the Department of the Interior has been trying to amend the Mining Act of 1872 without the benefit of legislation," Boyle said. "We have met all the rules for mining operations of this sort."

The site, 45 miles northeast of El Centro, is in the heart of a region that has seen gold mining for more than 100 years. Three of the state's most productive gold mines of the 20th century, the Picacho, Mesquite and American Girl mines, are nearby, all on federal land.

Courtney Coyle, a La Jolla attorney representing the Quechans, called the bureau's tentative ruling "an excellent step in the right direction. Contrary to the noises the mining company is making, BLM is on solid ground."

In its tentative decision, the bureau concluded that the mining operation "would result in significant adverse effects to prehistoric cultural resources, Native American traditional cultural uses and values, and visual resources."

Up to 130,000 tons of rock a day would be mined and deposited in piles. The gold would be coaxed from the ore by bathing mounds in sodium cyanide, a standard industry practice that federal regulators consider safe if done properly. Glamis Imperial, part of a British Columbia company, had promised to buy 1,600 acres elsewhere in the desert to swap for the right to use the public land. Glamis also volunteered to move one of the ore heaps away from an area called the Trail of Dreams, where Quechans believe that they can communicate with spirits and receive visions. The company has said there is scant evidence that the Quechans have used the site for religious observances in the last half-century. But Coyle branded that assertion "a very ethnocentric point of view" because it assumes that land must be visited or built upon to be spiritually important.

On its reservation, the tribe has a casino and an extensive farming operation. The mining pit would be about six miles from the populated part of the reservation.

Glamis Imperial has spent seven years and $14 million preparing to open the mine. The land bureau's current position, to be published today in the Federal Register, signals a shift for the agency, which more than two years ago appeared on the verge of approving the proposal. Under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the bureau has become much tougher on requests by private concerns to use public land for grazing or mining. Babbitt has said that "in the old days, BLM was basically a doormat."

The Imperial Valley case has been reviewed by Interior Department attorney John Leshy, who concluded that the agency has authority under the 1980 California Desert Conservation Area plan to reject the mining request. Leshy's opinion was reviewed and approved by Babbitt.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A huge pile of uranium processing waste leaking into the Colorado River in Utah would be moved to a safer area under a plan signed into law by President Clinton (news - web sites).

Local, state and federal officials have been squabbling for years over what to do about the 10.5 million tons of radioactive dirt, the legacy of a closed uranium processing plant near Moab, Utah.

The waste pile is only 750 feet from the Colorado River and is leaking radioactivity and other toxins into the river, killing fish and other water creatures. The river serves as the drinking water source for parts of Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, though that water is drawn far downstream, where the concentration of pollutants is much lower.

Cleaning up the former Atlas Corp. uranium mill waste is expected to take about a decade, said Bill Hedden of the Grand Canyon Trust, an expert on the issue. Officials have estimated the cost at about $300 million.

"It's a mess that took about 45 years to be created, so it's going to take a little while to clean it up," Hedden said.

The plan to clean up the waste, contained in a military authorization bill Clinton signed Monday night, does not include federal money for the cleanup. Congress will have to approve that later.

But there is a funding mechanism that could pay at least part of the cost.

The measure returns 84,000 acres of federal land in Utah to the Ute Indian tribe. In return, the tribe agrees to pay the Energy Department about 8 percent of the proceeds from oil or natural gas development to help pay for cleaning up the uranium waste. The tribe's contribution is estimated to be about $80 million to $100 million.

"It serves multiple purposes. The environment is just one of those. Safe water down the river is another," said Ute tribal chairman O. Roland McCook. "The land will also help us out in whatever way we deem necessary. We're glad to be a part of that."

The Ute tribe, whose 1.2 million-acre reservation is the second-largest in the United States, needs the jobs that drilling would provide, McCook said.

The Atlas uranium mill was one of many in the Four Corners area of the Southwest that processed uranium ore from mines in the area. Most of the uranium handled by the plant during its operations from 1956 to 1984 went into nuclear weapons.

Denver-based Atlas posted a $6.5 million cleanup bond for the site but went bankrupt before it could be forced to pay any more.

The new law gives the Energy Department a year to study the best way to move the waste and the best place to put it. Local officials have suggested a site on a plateau 18 miles away.

Subject: EPA Mining exemptions

Small Claims, Big Problems

Miners who disturb five acres or less at a time are exempt from the Montana Environmental Policy Act. According to the Department of Environmental Quality, this means that out of 580 active mining claims, 462 are operating virtually unrestricted.

From Bill McGinnis’ land at the top of the pass just east of Virginia City, you can see far into both the Madison and Ruby river valleys, just 40-odd miles south of the Missouri River headwaters. Here, in southwestern Montana, the land looks much as it has for tens of thousands of years: steep buffalo jumps line the Madison, giving way to glacial benches that rise like steps to the surrounding mountain ranges. Take away the fences and phone lines, the few roads that connect a scattering of buildings, and apart from the absence of glaciers, you’d be hard-pressed to date the scene.

Keep heading west a few miles, however, and that illusion is shattered. Virginia City, thanks to a rich vein of gold, was once the capital of Montana and the economic center of the state as well. While the town’s Old West flavor has been officially canonized by the state legislature, its architecture restored and significance proclaimed on placards, there’s no need for such reminders on the land itself: Every creek, every stream, every trickle of water in and around the town has been dug up, the gravel bars of old placer mines humped along the streambanks, the leavings of 140 years of gold mining.

But unlike Virginia City’s faded glory days, the legacy of placer mining, the process whereby gold is physically separated from the surrounding rock and shaken out, is still alive in Montana. According to McGinnis, small-time miners are wreaking as much havoc as ever on his land—the Cal Creek Ranch, where the mineral rights and surface rights were separated long ago—and elsewhere. A conservation-minded rancher who splits his time between Arizona and Montana, McGinnis runs 28,000 head of cattle on 18,000 acres. He’s careful about how he uses his land, and for the last 15 years has paid Chris Koonce, a former Coloradan with a background in wildlife biology, to manage the ranch.

Koonce talks about the operation he runs with pride. “It’s a lot of tough, rocky dry country. We run yearlings, it’s not a cow-calf operation. It’s a good place to do that,” he says. “The ranch, some parts of it are really spectacular and beautiful, then you drive by this mess.”

“This mess” is a football field-size pit, deep as a two-story house, surrounded by knapweed and abandoned equipment, with puddles in the bottom where the creek that runs through Brown’s Gulch used to be. “Downstream” a ways, the “creek” disappears entirely where a now defunct mining company dumped backfill from the pit in the 1980s. A culvert funnels water under the backfill, past other, older mining scars, down to a marsh where red-winged blackbirds have staked out territory.

In Montana, regulations on small miners are minimal. Those who disturb five acres or less at a time are exempt from the Montana Environmental Policy Act. They have to post little in the way of a reclamation bond—it was raised from $5,000 to $10,000 in the mid-1990s—and there are no reclamation requirements at all for most small timers (excepting only placers who filed their claim after 1989). This is the law which allowed the Stansbury Corporation to operate its vermiculite mine in Dillon. According to Pete Strazdas, who oversees small miners for the Department of Environmental Quality, this means that out of 580 active mining claims, 462 are operating virtually unrestricted.

“The thing to bear in mind is most small miners operate on previously disturbed ground because that’s where the mineralization occurs,” Strazdas says. “It’s not a situation where these 600 guys are disturbing five acres that’s not been disturbed.”

Alan Septoff, of the Washington, D.C.-based Mineral Policy Center, says no one knows what kind of cumulative effects small miners are having in the U.S. “There’s not a whole lot of information out there because the BLM doesn’t really keep track,” he says. But Strazdas says he knows his home turf pretty well, and the answer in Montana is not pretty.

“How much of an unreclaimed mess do they leave? Quite a bit,” he says. “Underground miners of course leave an underground opening and a waste rock pile. Open pit miners leave an open pit and a waste rock pile. If there’s a mill associated with the facility, then of course there’s the mill with typically a tailings impoundment.”

The worst of the damage at the McGinnis ranch was caused by a larger placer operation, the Brown’s Gulch Mining Company, the proprietors of which fled Montana in the middle of the night in 1989 after being confronted belatedly by understaffed state regulators. Strazdas says the company reportedly smuggled out “Seven-Up bottles full of gold,” but left behind a $30,000 reclamation bond, which paid for a drain to safeguard the ranch’s irrigation system.

“What we’ve ended up with is this big hole,” Koonce says. “The estimates for reclamation, which includes bringing all that overburden back up here, and getting an acceptable grade the way the valley would be naturally, is into the multiple millions of dollars and there’s no money available to do it, because the miners, they’ve gone broke or sold the mineral rights to someone else, and they’re not responsible for what’s been done in the past.

“Unfortunately as private land owners, the only thing we can do is take ‘em to court. We have judgements totaling $700,000, $800,000 dollars against the miners, but you never get it. It’s just on paper. It’s very frustrating. There are these situations all over the state.”

The whole situation has destroyed Koonce’s and McGinnis’ trust in the state’s ability to regulate mining, and has made relations with the miners who operate on their land difficult at best.

Their concerns are not entirely unfounded, according to 30-year mining veteran Bob Decker, who is managing the current mining operation in Brown’s Gulch for a company called Great Rocky Mountain Gold, owned by Utah businessman Ken Hamilton. “Most small miners have good intentions,” he says. “But when the economic viability of a project does not pan out, that’s where they get in trouble, because they don’t have deep enough pockets if something goes haywire.”

Decker says he intends to minimize problems in Brown’s Gulch by doing his homework on the ore body, putting up an $80,000 reclamation bond, and cleaning up as he goes along. In two or three years, if all goes well, his company will walk away with between $6 million and $12 million in gold, while the land will be in better shape than it is now.

“I hate to say it because it’s going to kill probably half the small miners, but bonding is going to have to be taken into consideration,” he says. “In other words you’re going to have to collect enough bond so that if the guy walks, then you can hire a contractor or somebody to come in and do the reclamation and not let the people in Montana or New York, their taxes pay for it.”

Miners should be required to clean things up as they work, he adds. “If the property is not profitable enough for them to reclaim the ground as they’re mining, then they shouldn’t be mining it. It’s that simple.”

Uranium Miners, Families Bring Tales of Pain to Washington

WASHINGTON - Just like his father, Earl Saltwater Jr. got his first job 30 years ago in one of the uranium mines that dotted the arid mesas and canyons in and around the Navajo reservation.

Now Saltwater is worried the effects of radioactivity from those mines will kill him one day. Just like his father.

"They did experiment on us like guinea pigs. It makes me angry," Saltwater said as he sat on the steps outside the U.S. House of Representatives. "I would have lived longer, but they gave me a shorter life on this earth."

Saltwater was one of nine Navajo uranium miners and miners' dependents in Washington last week to lobby for changes to a 1990 law compensating some of the Cold War's domestic casualties. A bill passed by the Senate and pending in the House would make it easier for uranium miners and victims of fallout from open-air nuclear tests to get federal payments of up to $100,000.

The miners worked in shafts with few safety measures to dig out the uranium used in nuclear weapons and atomic power plants. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he wrote the Senate-passed bill because "we should not add a bureaucratic nightmare to the burden of disease and ill health that these citizens are carrying."

The proposal would expand the list of diseases and slash the amount of time a miner had to have spent working with uranium to be eligible for the compensation program. It would open the program to those who worked in open-pit uranium mines and uranium milling plants, as well as underground mines.

The bill also would streamline the application process and eliminate some of the barriers for American Indian miners, such as disqualification for smoking during religious ceremonies or refusal to recognize undocumented marriages to compensate miners' widows.

Saltwater said he had to fight that bureaucracy for five years before his father got compensation in 1996, before he died. Saltwater carries a fading, black-and-white photo of his father standing outside a uranium mine, holding a shovel and dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a miner's helmet. That helmet was all the safety equipment he got, Saltwater said.

"It's hard for anyone to be qualified" for compensation, Saltwater said. "That's where it really hurts me a lot. My people are dying. My father died. My mother died ... Every single miner should be compensated for the injustice that has been done to us, regardless of our condition."

Saltwater blames his current hearing loss, kidney disease, diabetes and breathing problems on his work in the uranium mine, though he only worked for about six months in 1968 and 1969. He said he was fired because he was sickened and started vomiting in the mine.

The mine had no bathroom facilities, so miners drank radioactive water and cleaned themselves with soft, doughy chunks of uranium ore after relieving themselves, he said.

"I worked almost like a slave" for $1.70 an hour, Saltwater said.

The Navajo group supports further changes to the law, including increasing the maximum payments to $200,000 and directly compensating miners' families exposed to radiation themselves.

Gilbert Badoni of Shiprock, N.M., said he and his siblings played in uranium mine tailings and drank radioactive water during the decades his father worked in uranium mines in Colorado in the 1950s and '60s. Badoni said his father would come home covered in yellow uranium dust, which covered everything in their small home when their mother brushed it off the clothes.

He blames his lung problems and his siblings' cancers on that exposure. "The U.S. government has abused innocent women and children. They have abused my family," Badoni said, choking back tears. "They have abused my Navajo people. That's not right."

As of last month, the government had paid more than $244 million in compensation to 3,302 people, including 1,523 uranium miners, according to the Justice Department office which oversees the payments. The program covers miners who worked in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Washington state.

The bill pending in the House would extend the program to cover miners in North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon and Texas.

The Navajo group sold 2,500 traditional Navajo meals of coffee, frybread and mutton stew to pay for their trip to Washington, said member Sarah Benally of Delores, Colo. Benally, whose uranium miner father died of a lung ailment but could not be compensated under the current law, has been lobbying Congress on the issue since the 1970s.

People have to listen to us. If they don't, we'll come back again. We'll keep coming back until something is done," she said.

• http://www.epa.gov/ceis
• http://www.scorecard.org
  The 1998 TRI reports will be available later this month.
  

Estimates of annual National Mercury Air Emission Rates by Category:
• Area Sources (dental preparations, broken mercury lamps, landfills, etc.) - 3.4 tons.
• Combustion sources (coal utility boilers, hazardous waste combustors, crematories, etc.) 137.9 tons.
• Manufacturing sources (chlorine plants, Portland cement, pulp and paper manufacturing, etc.) - 15.8 tons.
• Miscellaneous Sources - 1.3 tons.
• Total: 158 tons a year.

Subject: Uranium Mining

Richardson Drives Health Shift

The education of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson began at the knee of uranium widows, telling the former congressman in the lilting Navajo tongue of miners who died.

Two weeks ago, Richardson's schooling in the Navajo lands played out as the U.S. government broke decades of denial to report evidence that radiation and dangerous substances boosted the risk of illness among 600,000 nuclear-weapons workers.

It was an admission Richardson put in motion months ago, through hirings, behind-the-scenes lobbying at the White House and a new worker-health survey that, all told, have set the nation on a path to compensate ailing cold warriors.

"The entrenched bureaucracy said we won't acknowledge the problem," Richardson said in an interview last week. "I say we won the Cold War, and we shouldn't turn our back on those workers who helped us win it."

"It's time," he said last July, "to stop spending money litigating against these workers and focus our efforts on getting them the help they need."

The government's move to shoulder potentially tens of millions of dollars in health costs from nuclear weapons production marks a turning point for the Atomic Age, engineered by a politician elected from its birthplace.

"He's driven about this, he's very passionate about it. He wants to get something done before he leaves office," said Richard Miller, a Washington, D.C.-based policy analyst for the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Union.

Richardson's move, Miller is convinced, "is not based on optics" -- D.C. beltway-speak for political acts richer in image enhancement than substance. "He's sincere. This particular crusade was not poll-tested and focus-grouped."

Physicians warned U.S. weapons executives from the late 1940s that workers were being exposed to health-threatening doses of radiation, toxic metals and chemicals. The Atomic Energy Commission sealed those warnings in classified documents. Later, its successor agencies relied on the inherent uncertainties of epidemiology to reject evidence that some weapons workers were dying early because of exposures on the job.

"The government had a policy that basically said no one's been hurt and therefore we have no reason to look for the evidence," said Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser in the Energy Department.

Rejecting clues to work-related disease was in some ways easy: Many health studies found U.S. weapons workers were often much healthier than the rest of the United States, despite daily work exposure to radiation and a host of toxins.

One of the largest such studies came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1994. Lab epidemiologist Laurie Wiggs and colleagues tracked 15,727 white males who had worked at the lab since the start of the Manhattan Project in 1943. Roughly a fifth had died by the end of 1990. No fatal disease or other cause of death was higher for those workers than for white males in the overall U.S. population, the study found. In fact, LANL's workers showed a pronounced "mortality deficit."

But here's the rub: LANL employees tend to be better paid, more educated and better insured, with greater access to health care -- plus, they're working. The larger U.S. white male population includes the ailing, the elderly and unemployed. The two populations are so different as to make comparisons valuable only for detecting the most obvious spikes in fatal disease.

"The lab always likes to cite the fact that, in their work force, no cause of death is higher than in the general population," said Ken Silver, a public-health researcher and Los Alamos worker-compensation advocate. "Well, of course ... But comparison to white males in the general population really isn't of interest."

Yet Wiggs and colleagues also found something else in their study -- a statistical tie between rising radiation exposures and rising death rates for five types of cancer: chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's disease and cancers of the kidney, brain and esophagus. An earlier unpublished study of LANL subcontract workers found three cases of a rare bone cancer that can be associated with radiation.

Radiation has not been implicated as a cause of chronic lymphocytic leukemia or Hodgkin's disease, Wiggs said, and its linkage to the other three cancers is not well proven. However, radiation exposure is widely accepted as increasing human risk for brain cancer.

Even so, Wiggs said, "there's by no means a clear link to causality." In epidemiology, she said, "it's very difficult to establish clearcut causality. At the very best, you're talking about a probability."

That would take a more finely tuned study that the U.S. Department of Energy never did. The National Institutes of Health took over studies of DOE weapons workers in the early 1990s.

That switch was fueled in part by "Dead Reckoning: A Critical Review of the Department of Energy's Epidemiologic Research," a study published in 1992 by Physicians for Social Responsibility, a national nuclear-disarmament and environmental group.

The authors charged the DOE with a massive conflict of interest and indicted its health studies as "full of attempts to deny and manipulate," said study co-author H. Jack Geiger, a professor of community health at the City University of New York.

"There was such a consistent pattern of an unusual way of looking at things that you have to ask the question: What was there to hide? Why would somebody do it this way?" Geiger said. "You could infer that these studies were done in this way with deniability in mind."

A leading contributor to "Dead Reckoning" was David Michaels, an epidemiologist and Geiger colleague at CUNY. He took a leave of absence a year ago to become Richardson's assistant secretary for environment, safety and health.

The stage was set for a culture change, political and technical, inside the Energy Department. Dozens of health studies would be scrutinized with an eye to detecting health risks, rather than dismissing them.

"I think his work is outstanding," Richardson said of Michaels last week.

"I said, 'David, I want to be sure we can prove this.' And he went after this like a gorilla."

Richardson himself had pushed legislation to compensate uranium miners in 1990 after hearing Navajos describe illness and death among their miners.

"I found that there probably was a causal link," he said. "I felt if I could ever do something about radiation exposure I would."

By early 1999, Richardson had toured DOE's weapons sites and everywhere run into small, largely unorganized groups of workers who believed their jobs had made them ill. Newspaper stories about their illnesses cropped up in Tennessee, Colorado, Washington and, most notably, Paducah, Ky., where the Washington Post found that weapons executives intentionally hid from Paducah's workers the fact that they were handling plutonium-contaminated uranium. And the DOE acknowledged conclusive evidence that hundreds of its workers had contracted an incurable lung disease from exposure to beryllium, a gray, light metal used in nuclear weapons.

As the White House and Congress agreed on legislation to compensate beryllium workers, Richardson persuaded President Clinton to order a sweeping study of job-related illness in the weapons complex and possible ways to compensate other ailing workers.

The study is due out in March. Early drafts report that workers are at increased risk of illness from radiation and chemical exposures at work. Congress may demand harder evidence, but Richardson already is convinced.

"I expect this process will show that our (liability) should go beyond beryllium and go to radiation-based cancer," Richardson said. "I was persuaded just by my experiences with the Navajos and by people at our sites who said all they wanted was their day in court."