‘Nobody told me about the dangers’
Navajo uranium miners like Phil Harrison never really knew what they were signing up for. The 73-year-old started mining with his dad as a high school senior. But his father, Phil Harrison Sr., made a lengthy career out of it. He spent 16 years mining all around northeastern Arizona and the Four Corners area.
“Nobody told me about the dangers. All they did was they gave me a shovel, a hard hat, light pack,” said Harrison. “My father got sick, still on that job. He had to leave. Unfortunately, he died from lung cancer in January of 1971, at age 43. We lost a lot of good people from Cove.”
That’s where uranium was first discovered on the Navajo Nation in 1942.
“I don’t know how many cups of water I used to drink,” added Harrison, who suffers from chronic renal failure, or kidney disease, and thinks it could be from drinking that flowing water. “Everybody else did, and they used to pack water on Friday and a canvas back and they said, ‘This is good mountain water.’”
Between 1944 and 1986, some 30 million tons of uranium ore was extracted on the Navajo Nation. This boom-and-bust industry on the Colorado Plateau stemmed from a sudden demand for uranium by the federal government during the Second World War.
Part of this history recently played out on the silver screen in “Oppenheimer,” an Academy Award-winning biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, better known as the man behind the Manhattan Project.
He thrust the world into the Atomic Age. The first nuclear bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range some 200 miles south of Los Alamos, N.M., on July 16, 1945.
Another 200 or so tests would follow between 1945 and 1962 amid a tense and heated arms race with the Soviet Union, ironically called the Cold War.
“We were the first responders to national security,” said Harrison, who has made dozens of trips with the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee to Capitol Hill to remind lawmakers. “I say, ‘You gave these uneducated men shovels to dig the elements, to create nuclear weapons, and we did that. Services have been rendered.’”
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission purchased ore from more than 4,200 mines, most of which were later abandoned.
Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona were home to about 90% of them, but more than 500 uranium mines remain on the Navajo Nation.
The federal government was the sole purchaser of uranium ore until 1971, but private companies operated the mines that extracted these radioactive rocks. They needed laborers to work in these mines and mills.
Indigenous peoples from across the Southwest flocked to them in search of jobs, but often at serious risk to their personal health since few, if any, occupational protocols were in place.
They were blasters, muckers, transporters, and millers. Their foremen bosses were mostly white and barely communicated with them.
At that time, Diné Bizaad, or the Navajo language, had no word for radiation and most Navajos couldn’t speak English proficiently. So, those hazards and risks weren’t easily communicated, if at all.
Poor ventilation was another problem, and the duration of radiation exposure wasn’t closely monitored either. Some workers spent between a few months to more than a decade inside uranium mines with access to little or no protective equipment.
“A lot of miners in the early days were Indigenous, many from the Navajo Nation. They weren’t told about the risks,” said Lily Adams, a senior outreach coordinator for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Uranium mining conditions were at their absolute worst in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s.”
Although the Occupational Safety and Health Act wasn’t established until 1971, universal safety standards didn’t exist until the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act, or MSHA, was enacted in 1977.
But even then, Adams believed “the companies were not enforcing them, and people were still working under really unsafe conditions, decades after those standards were technically supposed to be happening.”
She still has those concerns today.
“I would be very hesitant to think that, you know, suddenly the uranium industry has, like, learned its lesson, and now mines are completely safe,” added Adams. “I think I would still be very wary of the safety risks, and just what ways in which uranium mining companies would be looking to cut corners.”
The industry’s practices came with life-altering health consequences for its laborers. Lung cancer was a leading cause of death for miners. Some got sick from exposure to radiation, radon gas and tailing ponds.
“This is really a cost of our national security, and in some cases, people have lost their lives, because of our efforts to build nuclear weapons,” Adams elaborated. “This is just the human cost and that in many cases, has been left unpaid.”
‘This is really a cost of our national security’
That’s how the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, also known as RECA, essentially came to be. Congress enacted the legislation in 1990 to provide free screening services to those harmed by atomic testing in 12 states, as well as financial compensation.
More than $2.4 billion in benefits have been disbursed to over 38,000 RECA claimants. Members from 24 tribes account for some 5,300 claims, most of which originated from the Navajo Nation.
Miners, millers and ore transporters were entitled to $100,000 each. Those who lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site got restitution, too, at $50,000.
Meanwhile, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has awarded nearly $13 billion to more than 56,000 claimants since its reactivation by then-President Barack Obama in 2011.
More recently, however, President Joe Biden announced that over 1 million claims have been approved since the 2022 PACT Act, totalling close to $6 billion for veterans and their surviving families due to burn pits and other forms of toxic exposure overseas.
The clock was ticking. But after more than three decades, time has run out on RECA, which sunsetted earlier this month.
“Why are you ignoring us, is it because racism is involved,” wondered Harrison. “You put billions of dollars for 9/11 Families Act. We’ve been doing it since the ‘50s. Is it because of our skin color? Why are we getting pennies?”
Although RECA was a landmark bill, it had its limitations. Geography was one of them.
Downwinders in New Mexico, who lived in the same state where the first nuclear bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site, weren’t ever covered by RECA. Other states like Missouri, where the Manhattan Project was housed, were omitted as well.
Medical conditions were also ignored.
Several illnesses were exempt from RECA compensation due to insufficient scientific data linking them to radiation exposure. Conditions like renal cancer, which Harrison was diagnosed with, were excluded.
On top of that, certain types of laborers were left out; anyone who worked in uranium mining post-1971 was ineligible to file claims.
“So all in, I’ve filed about 1,800 claims or so, a very, very small percent have been for Native Americans,” said Prescott-based RECA lawyer Laura Taylor. “For very interesting reasons, I think.”
“There may be language barriers, there may be documentation challenges, the process itself is onerous,” explained Taylor. “You have to prove that you had a medical condition; you have to prove that you were present, or that you were employed at a mine or that you transported ore, you milled the uranium ore.”
Attempts to reauthorize and even expand RECA were thwarted this month when U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson allowed the program to lapse by not calling for a vote on an already-passed Senate bill co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico.
It would’ve fully covered the states of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and expanded RECA eligibility to Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Guam. Uranium workers and their descendants from the Navajo Nation and Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, who worked after 1971, could’ve received lump-sum health care payments.
Opponents of this expansion, let alone a two-year extension, point to the price tag.
Last October, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that expanding RECA through the annual defense bill would raise the spending deficit by nearly $150 billion over a decade and result in “significant long-term costs.”
Despite that, the Navajo Nation Washington Office is trying to reintroduce it into the next National Defense Authorization Act. That same approach failed last December when amendment language got removed from the annual defense bill’s final markup.
“How [CBO] came up with that number is beyond me,” said Navajo Nation Washington Office executive director Justin Ahasteen. “Because if we look at what has been paid out in terms of benefits over the last 20 years, we’re looking at about $2.4 billion.”
Lawmakers initially wanted to expand RECA benefits for another two decades, but that provision was deemed too expensive. So, they reduced that timeframe to only six years and removed some radiation-linked diseases.
This trimmed-down version would eventually become the bipartisan Hawley-Luján standalone bill.
“That brought down the CBO score from a preliminary $150 billion to $50 billion,” added Ahasteen. “Still, we highly disagree with that.”
In March, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in a statement that although victims of harmful government nuclear activities “may rightfully merit compensation, the cost of the legislation under consideration is not offset.”
The D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organization believed: “If something is worth doing, it is worth paying for, so lawmakers should find offsets rather than burden future generations with the bill.”
Yet Congress authorized more than $870 billion for last year’s defense bill.
“We have no problem spending billions, trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and our military,” said Adams, “so we shouldn’t have an issue with spending money just to help people who are sacrificed for their own country without their knowledge.”
‘There is a shared responsibility here’
Just days ahead of the eminent RECA expiration in June, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren authored an op-ed, urging the U.S. House to pass an expansion “rather than an empty extension.”
He considered RECA “woefully incomplete,” from the health conditions that the law overlooked to the exclusion of uranium workers employed after 1971, “despite the unchanged nature of their work and the dangers they faced.”
Nygren also expressed that “justice remains elusive for Navajo families who continue to suffer from the devastating health and environmental effects.”
“They drank the mine’s cool spring water, washed yellowed work clothes, built homes with contaminated rocks and sediment, and let their children play on uranium byproducts and mine debris,” Nygren wrote. “The consequences were dire: cancers, miscarriages and mysterious illnesses have plagued our community for decades. This is a direct result of America’s race for nuclear hegemony.”
“They never asked for this,” added Ahasteen. “They just wanted to be good Americans, work good jobs, provide for their families. People took advantage of that.”
On a nearly two-hour Zoom call days before RECA expired, members from the Sawmill Chapter near Fort Defiance met inside the chapter house.
“It’s hard for everybody to talk about it, you know, I’m suffering,” said Maggie Billiman, “and it worries me, I got so much going on in my body.”
She’s the daughter of Navajo Code Talker Howard Billiman Jr., who died from stomach cancer in 2001. Billiman organized this call within a week after she got hospitalized and diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD.
They prayed and hoped for a RECA extension that would never come.
“I think it’s tough, because right now, my understanding is COPD is covered if you were a uranium worker, but not if you were a downwinder,” said Adams, who attempted to answer all of the community’s complicated questions. “People often feel like they have to be basically at death’s door before they can apply, and we think that’s really unjust.”
Dozens of Navajos, like Dan Cowboy, who was originally from southeastern Utah, shared their tolling emotional struggles. His father was a uranium miner.
“We used to play with the light that he had on his head, and all the stuff that he used in the mine,” said Cowboy. “It’s kind of difficult right now, so we just pray and hope that they’re going to extend [RECA] and then we can go to the hospital, get examined.”
“I used to sit way on top of the mine where the air comes out. Summertime herding sheep,” added Cowboy. “I’ll be sitting on top of that thinking it was an air conditioner. So I did that a lot, so I know I should have something that put in my body.”
“Fifty-thousand, it’s just nothing, like one can a pop. That’s it. It’s not going to support us. I didn’t have time to spend with my mom and my dad,” added his wife, Jane Cowboy. “When the death comes, you buy the casket and everything, it’s worth like $10,000. Some of them, they’re more than that, so it’s not worth it.”
Billiman had a final message to Johnson.
“Help, my community, and not only here, but Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona. It’s such a heartbreak,” said Billiman, tearing up. “I see my aunties and the suffering, that’s where I'm heading, and I hurt. My heart’s hurting for all of them.”
Back in the nation's capital, Ahasteen stressed that mining uranium on the 27,000 square miles of Diné Bikéyah across New Mexico, Utah and Arizona “was really pushed down our throats,” adding that the U.S. kept “pushing the Navajo Nation Council to approve uranium leases through the Department of the Interior.”
“There is a shared responsibility here, and that’s been our position,” added Ahasteen, “caused by the negligence of the federal government, and the actions of a few bad actors in the uranium mining industry.”
The Environmental Protection Agency told KJZZ News that none of the abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation has been cleaned up – except for the Cove Transfer Station – now in its final steps of remediation.
