‘They’re sticking these shafts in her body’
Three miles from the Pinyon Plain Mine is Red Butte. The Havasupai Tribe consider this geographical feature Wii’l Gdwiisa or “Clenched Fist Mountain,” also the abdomen of Mother Earth and their place of emergence.
Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva is a meadow roughly three miles north of Red Butte. They have seen it as Mother Earth’s navel, not far from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim.
Havasupais, like other tribes, were forcibly displaced from those lands, to create Grand Canyon National Park in 1919. They were restricted to 518 acres inside Havasu Canyon, before Congress returned 185,000 acres of homelands in 1975.
Despite that, neither Red Butte nor Mat Taav Tiivjunmdva reside on Havasupai trust lands; both of these sacred sites are located within the Kaibab National Forest. So the U.S. Forest Service controls how its public land resources are used, by whom and for what purposes.
Mining uranium at the Pinyon Plain Mine by the company Energy Fuels is one of them. But Dianna Uqualla believes Mother Earth is hurting now.
“Our people have been birthed into this area,” said Uqualla of the Havasupai Tribe. “She gives us everything we need, and yet we’re so cruel to her, to rape her. Rape her, meaning that they’re sticking these shafts in her body.”
She’s talking about the mining company, which inserted a nearly 1,500-foot-deep shaft to extract uranium ore at the Pinyon Plain Mine. This sacred spot is where Havasupais used to hunt, forage and pray, but now, they’re afraid to.
“We all agree that we don’t go out there anymore,” Uqualla said. “We are hunters and now we have to be careful of the wildlife. It's not a place where we can go collect medicines. It’s hard for us, because once they bring down that fence, it doesn’t just disappear.”
Damage to plants, animals and the soil aren’t their only concerns.
Known as the ‘People of the Blue-Green Water,’ the Havasupai’s village of Supai is nestled at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It relies on the Colorado River and groundwater, mainly from the Redwall-Muav Aquifer, which flows 2,870 feet beneath the surface, beginning at the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff.
They’ve warned for decades that mining endangers their main water supply, Havasu Creek, and natural wonders, like Havasu Falls, that turned Supai into a thriving tourism destination. The tribe has been fearful of contamination since the Forest Service approved the Pinyon Plain Mine — then known as the Canyon Mine — in 1986.
The Havasupai Tribe and local conservation groups have opposed this mine for decades. They were even involved in a lengthy legal battle that sought to close it, but a federal judge ruled in the mine’s favor in 2020.
The Pinyon Plaine Mine has been operational since early January.
‘We are an endangered species’
Carletta Tilousi is a former Havasupai tribal council member and now sits on President Joe Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She has been battling against the uranium industry around the Grand Canyon.
“I only have 776 tribal members left in my community. We are an endangered species,” said Tilousi. “It’s very important to protect natural resources here in the U.S., and I believe as Native Americans, we’re a natural resource as well.”
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, or ADEQ, has expressed minimal concern over water contamination from uranium after issuing Pinyon Plain Mine an aquifer protection permit in 2022. The permit means the facility is supposed to meet the state’s water quality standards for discharging pollutants into the groundwater that may seep into aquifers, like Redwall-Muav.
“We are just very appalled at the state and federal agencies for not paying close attention to the fine details,” Tilousi insisted. “Any type of mining is dangerous to the water, to the air and to the people, and we see that here in the Southwest. We have an awful uranium legacy that’s been left behind, and we’re going back into that legacy.”
Energy Fuels has stated that it has welcomed state and federal oversight in an attempt to push against the nuclear industry’s checkered reputation, particularly on the Navajo Nation, where hundreds of uranium mines were abandoned by private companies and still remain buried to this day.
On the other hand, Tilousi is convinced that history might repeat itself, only this time with Energy Fuels, contaminating land near sites of cultural and sacred significance to Havasupais.
“No one was held accountable. I don’t think that Pinyon Plain Mine will be properly cleaned up, and it’s going to end up as another Superfund site. I don’t think my tribe will ever be able to be held whole after what they’ve done there at the mining site,” Tilousi said. “I’m not provided any guarantee with the history of uranium development in the Southwest that it’s going to be cleaned up. Their bond is very low. Their cleanup budget is very low. I mean, it’s going to take a lot of money just to recap the place and leave. That’s not cleanup.”
Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels, told KJZZ News in a statement that Pinyon Plain Mine has two reclamation bonds that total more than $1.5 million.
He shared that the company received “clean closure approval” from the state of Arizona after reclaiming the Kanab North and Pinenut uranium mines near the Grand Canyon within the last five years.
Moore wrote these two reclamation projects cost Energy Fuels “in the neighborhood of $500,000,” justifying that “a $1.5 million bond for Pinyon Plain is considered highly conservative by regulators.”
“However, if you’re an anti-nuclear activist, and you don’t believe the science, you probably think the bond is woefully inadequate,” Moore wrote. “They’ll say the bond needs to be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in case the mine contaminates groundwater, which again, has no reasonable chance of occurring.”
‘Our mining activities don’t disturb that’
KJZZ News sought further clarification on the aquifer protection permit and uranium mining around the Grand Canyon. Former ADEQ director Misael Cabrera, who headed the state’s regulatory agency at that time, agreed to an interview.
Cabrera is now the inaugural director for the School of Mining and Mineral Resources at the University of Arizona. He later declined the interview, writing in an email: “I haven’t tracked the issues associated with uranium mining in northern Arizona for some time and am, frankly, not up to speed.”
Similarly, Steve Trussell, executive director for the Arizona Mining Association and Arizona Rock Products Association, also agreed to an interview but later canceled, citing a scheduling conflict. Attempts to reschedule went unanswered.
Energy Fuels is also a client of the Arizona Mining Association.
The company has been extracting uranium from one of an estimated 1,300 breccia pipes scattered across the Colorado Plateau and around the Grand Canyon.
Breccia pipes are unique to northern Arizona. Broken up rocks formed as vertical pipes and often contain rich deposits of minerals, like copper, silver and uranium. This geological phenomenon around the Grand Canyon first attracted miners in the 1870s.
Pinyon Plain’s assistant mine superintendent, Matt Germansen, explained that the bottom of their breccia pipe has more than 500 feet of nearly impermeable rock, right above the Redwall-Muav Aquifer.
That rock layer is supposed to act as a natural buffer.
“You don’t have any mixing between water sources,” added Germansen. “Our mining activities don’t disturb that. They’re still isolated from the waters above and below us.”
Fred Tillman is a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Arizona Water Science Center in Tucson. He has extensively researched the potential effects of uranium mining on water resources in the Grand Canyon area.
“We felt that there was never going to be a study that was going to prove, particularly to the Havasupai people, that there would never be any effects from this mine on water resources,” Tillman said. “It’s impossible to do that.”
If uranium lies dormant inside an undisturbed breccia pipe, Tillman believes it would “probably have very little or no effect on groundwater.” He also mentioned that miners blasting open a breccia pipe to make way for a mineshaft could be the catalyst for contamination.
But the Redwall-Muav Aquifer is not Tillman’s top concern. He’s more worried about another aquifer, less than 1,000 feet beneath the ground.
“That level is more in line with where the ore body is. We think that the water from the Coconino Sandstone Aquifer would be the first to contact any of that ore material,” Tillman said. “If there was going to be some movement of contamination away from that mine, we would likely see it in that shallower perched aquifer first.”
So the USGS assembled a perched monitoring well, just outside the fence line at Pinyon Plain Mine, in 2017. It’s meant to monitor water levels for the Coconino Sandstone Aquifer, which spreads across 27,000 square miles.
Tillman noted that Energy Fuels has installed three perched groundwater wells on its 14-acre property in compliance with the ADEQ aquifer protection permit. He also shared that groundwater monitoring will occur for three decades once mining has stopped.
“They’ve been required to then collect water quality samples and report those annually,” said Tillman. “They’re developing these baseline water quality standards, essentially, so that’s fantastic. If we had more money, we would have done the same thing.”
Water research is underfunded and expensive.
Installing a regional well that can reach the Redwall-Muav Aquifer would cost more than $1 million, Tillman explained, so monitoring the Coconino Sandstone Aquifer is the best course of action to detect heightened uranium levels in groundwater.
“But again, none of that is going to matter to the Havasupai. There’s no amount of science that I think would ever make it OK that this mine is in that location,” Tillman emphasized. “That is valid, and they depend entirely on groundwater at Supai village, so you try to put yourself in their position.”
The Forest Service also conducts monthly site visits and remains in “regular contact” with Energy Fuels on a biweekly basis, according to Kaibab National Forest Supervisor Nicole Branton.
“Regular topics of discussion include the status of mine site infrastructure and equipment, ore extraction,” reads a statement from Branton to KJZZ News, “plans for ore hauling, observations from the Forest Service’s site visits, monitoring, and coordination with other agencies.”
The Forest Service also holds bimonthly meetings with “interested tribes,” wrote Branton, adding that the agency “has been and will continue to be in regular communication with Tribes to provide ongoing updates on mine activities.”
But Tilousi has downplayed those dialogues.
“When we ask specific questions, our questions are not answered,” she said. “And they say, ‘Oh, we have to ask the mining company. Or would it be helpful if the mining company was here?’”
“They also inform the tribe that they are not a regulatory agency. So what is the Forest Service there to do,” Tilousi added. “To me, I think that they’ve provided just a lot of lip service, which has made not only my tribe frustrated, but all the other tribes in northern Arizona very frustrated with the federal agencies involved in this.”
The Havasupai Tribe has even considered petitioning the United Nations in the hopes that the international organization can intervene on its behalf.
“I am very, very disappointed in [Energy Fuels], because you’re not thinking of the future in this area. You’re hauling it somewhere else to become something more dangerous than it was in the ground,” Uqualla said. “And when these things happen, I hope your people feel guilty, because you did it to us. You did it to the world.”
“Everyone deserves to live and pray in a safe place, and have a right to free, clean water. That’s all we’re asking for, and we’re not guaranteed that right now,” added Tilousi. “We want to see what the U.N. can do for us tribes here in the Southwest, you know, putting pressure on the U.S. that uranium is bad.”
‘It’s complicated, there are nuances’
This month, the USGS released a summary of over two dozen peer-reviewed reports on uranium and the Grand Canyon, part of its Environmental Health Program, which studies contaminants and pathogens and how they affect human and animal health.
This illustrative fact sheet is called “Balancing Natural Resource Use and Extraction of Uranium and Other Elements in the Grand Canyon Region,” a collaboration between the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. It’s meant to help condense and visually convey the main takeaway.
“Um, the message is that it’s, it’s complicated. There are nuances,” said lead author Katie Walton-Day, a research hydrologist at the USGS Colorado Water Science Center. “In general, scientists are frustrated that there’s been an erosion in confidence, and I think that nuances are complicated for all, even for scientists.”
Walton-Day cited research showing concentrations of radiation accumulated in the soil around mines, while another report couldn’t determine that uranium ore and mine waste caused any “indisputable effects” on wildlife at the North Rim.
These findings over the course of a decade, among many others, have created public confusion, hence why USGS spent several years developing a more digestible science-based resource in the hopes of enhancing public trust on this emotional and sensitive subject, especially for Indigenous communities, like the Havasupai Tribe.
“We kind of went to the drawing board and started to think about ways that we could try and take the jargon out of our science and just get down to brass tacks,” admitted Walton-Day. “I think this fact sheet was an attempt to recraft our message in our own words, and to try and make it understandable to a broader audience.”
For example, uranium is naturally occurring in the environment, and radiation is, too. Research by the Arizona Geological Survey estimates that more than 60 tons of dissolved uranium seep into the Colorado River annually.
The Arizona Geological Survey’s findings also show that the amount of uranium in the river water is roughly 4 parts per billion — which is well below the 30 ppb benchmark for drinking consumption set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
But at the same time, researchers from the University of New Mexico recently released a review article titled “Hydrotectonics of Grand Canyon Groundwater.” They consider it “a timely summary of the science in which the authors favor abundant caution and no mining in this sensitive region due to the considerable risk of contamination of portions of the regional aquifer system, including the very susceptible Havasupai springs that supply Havasupai Village.”
Environmental advocacy groups, like the Center for Biological Diversity, have pointed to this research paper, declaring it refutes Energy Fuels’ claims that it’s virtually impossible for Pinyon Plain Mine to pollute aquifers beneath it due to impermeable rock layers.
“Anything they publish, I would definitely take with the most seriousness,” said Tillman, citing UNM geology professor Karl Karlstrom and lead author Laura Crossey with UNM’s Center for Water and the Environment.
Tillman also mentioned that the paper has already been read, circulated and discussed among USGS researchers. When asked to weigh in on this research, he started by saying “there’s often different ways of interpreting the same kinds of data.”
“From our USGS perspective, you know, as neutral scientists, we tend to look at things, perhaps, in the simplest possible way, without trying to extrapolate beyond that. Other folks are not constrained by that,” Tillman said. “They can certainly extrapolate beyond where we would feel comfortable going. It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but it’s something that we wouldn't do.”
Walton-Day stressed these muddled explanations make it more difficult, for the public and researchers alike, to fully understand the environmental and ecological impacts of uranium, and particularly mining, in and around the Grand Canyon.
“I think people want it to be one way or the other. They want it to either be, ‘The effects of this mining are so bad that we need to stop it,’” said Walton-Day. “Or, you know, ‘If there are no effects, we should keep mining.’ And it’s in the middle.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct Carletta Tilousi's title.
