"The Navajo Nation took the unusual step of using its police force to try to impede uranium shipments across its land last week—a preview of legal environmental battles to come if other uranium mines open in the southwest.

Energy Fuels Resources Inc., on July 30 began transporting its first shipments of uranium ore from its new Pinyon Plain mine near the Grand Canyon in Arizona to the company’s White Mesa Mill in southeast Utah, the first of possibly many such shipments to the only uranium ore processing site in the US. Transporting uranium ore is banned on the Navajo Nation, but Navajo Police were unable to stop the shipment.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) announced Aug. 2 that she negotiated a pause on the shipments across the Navajo Nation while tribal officials and Energy Fuels discuss a solution.

The clash between the Navajo Nation and uranium miners is happening as climate change is sparking new interest in nuclear energy and high uranium prices have motivated mining companies to begin exploring for uranium around the edges of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.

But failure of the federal government to clean up hundreds of abandoned mines in the United States’ most uranium-rich region has undermined trust that it can be extracted without harming public health across the “nuclear West,” said Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School."

Bobby Magill reports for Bloomberg Environment August 6, 2024. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"‘Haul No!’: Tribes Protest Uranium Mine Trucking Ore Through Navajo Nation" (Guardian) [3]

"Tribes Condemn Transportation Of Uranium Ore On Tribal Land" (Arizona Mirror) [4]