The White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah is where uranium ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine in Arizona will soon be trucked through the Navajo Nation. Meanwhile, that same facility has also recently received waste materials from a much farther location, one that is frustrating another tribe.
Energy Fuels, the mill’s owner, is welcoming lots of waste all the way from Japan.
Despite no domestic production, Japan has relied on uranium imports from countries, like Australia, Canada and Kazakhstan.
Hajime Matsukubo is secretary general of the Tokyo-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear public interest organization. His country is the world’s third-largest consumer of uranium, only behind the U.S. and China.
“But in Japan, there is no final repository for uranium waste,” Matsukubo said. “So they are finding some ways to solve this issue.”
The solution: Send it somewhere else.
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency, or JAEA, paid 189 million Japanese yen, or roughly $1.2 million, to send 136 tons of mixed materials in at least 10 half-sized shipping containers to a port in Everett, Washington.
Japanese trading company Sojitz had been hired to deliver it. Then, metal barrels traveled more than 1,100 miles from the Pacific Coast to the White Mesa Mill. It has also accepted waste from Estonia and Canada.
When KJZZ News asked how many tons of material is expected to be sent to White Mesa Mill, the company answered with truckloads. When asked again, a spokesperson for Energy Fuels stated they cannot provide any estimate for the amount in tonnage.
Matsukubo mentioned these “highly contaminated” materials came from Ningyo-Toge Environmental Technology Center and Tono Mine, which has been undergoing closure activities.
“[JAEA] says uranium waste is a resource and, ‘In the name of recycling, we export that,’” said Matsukubo. “Yes, [Energy Fuels] can recover this waste, very tiny amount; only one ton.”
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s community of White Mesa, near the mill, is upset. It’s located five miles away and home to some 350 residents, nearly a fifth of the tribe’s enrolled population. It’s also near Bears Ears National Monument, a sacred site to five tribes scattered across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
“It was important enough for them to take it out of their backyard, so then that burden is shifted to folks in southeast Utah, folks in White Mesa,” said Tim Peterson, cultural landscapes director at Grand Canyon Trust. “We think that’s an environmental justice problem.”
These materials arrived almost four years after Energy Fuels notified the Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control that it intended to accept and process these materials originating from the Land of the Rising Sun.
“And the way that this happens, legally, is they take minute amounts of uranium, extract it and then dispose of the remainder,” Grand Canyon Trust staff attorney Chaitna Sinha said. “They’re able to say that they’re processing rather than waste disposal, and under those parameters, they are allowed to do it with their current license.”
They’re also allowed to truck in the waste without letting local residents know.
“One of the biggest issues, on the Japanese end and on the American end, is just a lack of transparency,” Peterson said. “The only way that we found out about it was actually looking at lading for cargo ships.”
“I didn’t know anything about the Japan waste [that] was already brought to the mill,” said Yolanda Badback, founder of White Mesa Concerned Community. “And I was like, ‘How did that happen?’ It was just right underneath our nose.”
This grassroots group has been opposed to the mill for decades. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council also passed a 2021 resolution calling for the mill to cease operations.
“I don’t think there’s anything that the mill can do besides just load up and go somewhere,” Badback said, “because I want future generations to live on the reservation.”
But it’s been business as usual, with Energy Fuels even netting nearly $100 million for a record year in 2023.
Grand Canyon Trust estimates Energy Fuels has received more than 700 million pounds of low-level radioactive materials at the mill. More than 6 million pounds of uranium has been recycled from its alternate feed program, according to Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels.
“We have the ability to recover the uranium, to recycle it,” Energy Fuels President and CEO Mark Chalmers told KJZZ News. “Over the course of the past couple decades, we’ve recovered around 6 million pounds of uranium that would have been lost to disposal.”
But Moore insistently pushes against this “radioactive waste” characterization.
“Contrary to the image activists try to portray, this material is not very radioactive – no more radioactive than anything else we process at the mill,” Moore wrote in a statement to KJZZ News. “They dishonestly call the material ‘radioactive waste’ in order to conjure images of spent nuclear fuel, melted down nuclear cores, things that glow.”
Instead, Moore named these materials: Uranium ore, core samples from natural uranium deposits, resins and charcoal, soil that contains natural uranium. He stated they’re “all natural, unenriched uranium, and relatively benign material.”
This international shipment marks the second time in nearly two decades that JAEA has shipped radioactive materials to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah. The agency paid $5.8 million to unload 500 tons of uranium-contaminated soil in 2005.
When asked whether a deal between JAEA and Energy Fuels amounted to 189 million Japanese yen, or $1.2 million, Moore told KJZZ News: “That sounds about right.”
It’s a business, after all.
“Whether the recycling involves plastic, glass, electronics, paper, or uranium, the products that result from the recycling don’t always economically support the activity on their own,” he wrote. “However, just because a company gets paid, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recycle things, or that something nefarious is going on.”
“The alternative is to just throw everything away and go mine and extract more resources,” Moore added, “which most people would not consider to be environmentally or socially responsible, even for uranium.”
For mill engineer Steve Snyder, he sees this as an economic opportunity: “Why not process it, take the uranium, and we’ll produce a usable product out of it, and we’re not just burying it?
“This is a good news story,” said Chalmers. “We’re proud of it for all the right reasons, and in a world where we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions, this is something that should be celebrated.”
As far as transparency, Chalmers believed: “To notify the public of every shipment that is being made in and out, would take a lot of work and I think people get bored.”
Clearly, activists like Grand Canyon Trust and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe aren’t getting bored. In fact, they’re keeping a watchful eye on just what goes in and out of the White Mesa Mill, and where it’s coming from around the globe.
