A school bus travels along State Route 191 in Bluff, Utah. The state road is part of the Pinyon Plain Mines approved uranium haul route to the White Mesa Uranium Mill in White Mesa, Utah. (Photo by Shondiin Silversmith/Arizona Mirror)
As a young boy, Anferny Cly said he would watch the semitrucks pass in front of his house along State Route 191 and never worry about what they were hauling. He often thought they were full of toys or other fun things.
But now, his thoughts are more cautious.
“Now, I sit out here and watch those trucks, and in the back of my mind, I’m wondering what they’re hauling,” Cly said. That’s because his family home is in White Mesa, Utah, about five miles south of one of the United States’ only fully operating uranium mills.
“It kind of gets nerve-wracking,” he added. He’ll sit and start thinking about where the trucks are headed, how dangerous the haul could be and if it is adequately secured.
The White Mesa Uranium Mill is located on the ancestral homelands of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, a federally recognized tribe with lands in southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and southeast Utah.
The tribe’s headquarters are located in Towaoc, Colorado. There are over 2,000 members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, with about 300 living in the White Mesa community.
Cly said it’s a busy highway from 6 a.m. to midnight because so many people travel for work or school, but sightseers also pass through to see the beauty of the land.
He said traffic comes from all over, but when he sees the large trucks passing through the community, he knows they may not be full of the toys or car parts he thought about as a child but potentially something much more dangerous.
“It’s scary,” Cly said because his community already faces the challenges of living a few miles south of the uranium mill.
Now, the White Mesa community has an additional concern: A mining company in Arizona will be hauling its uranium ore through their community to be processed at that mill.
Knowing that uranium ore is being hauled through his community to the mill right up the road from his home, Cly said he constantly worries about driving on the main highway because of the semi trucks that drive up and down the road at different hours of the day.
“It’s tough to identify them sometimes because the placards they have that have the radioactive symbol sometimes are small and put in areas where it’s hard to see,” he said. “It’s more of a guessing game now.”
For the first time since its establishment in the late 1980s, the Pinyon Plain Mine is mining uranium ore. Energy Fuels owns the mine, which pulled its first batch from the ground in January 2024 and hauled its first shipment to the White Mesa Uranium Mill in July 2024.
After uranium ore is mined, it is sent to a mill, where it is crushed and chemically treated to extract the uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association. The uranium solution is then dried to produce uranium powder, commonly known as yellowcake, one of the first steps in making nuclear fuel.
The White Mesa mill is the only fully licensed and operating conventional uranium mill in the United States, according to Energy Fuels.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has voiced its concerns about the mine on several occasions, including during public comment periods for licensing the mine. The tribe states that the ongoing contamination of air, surface water and groundwater could make tribal lands and the ancestral cultural landscape uninhabitable for future generations.
Now, uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon will be transported by 24-ton haul trucks and end dump trailers, according to Energy Fuels, and up to 10 trucks will make the trip daily.
Cly said he understands that not all trucks coming into the mill are from Pinyon Plain Mine, especially since transport has been on hold since last summer while the mining company negotiates with the Navajo Nation, though it will resume in February. However, the White Mesa Mill does not only accept uranium ore; it is also a disposal site for radioactive waste.
The mill serves as a disposal site for recycled radioactive waste, according to a report from the Grand Canyon Trust, and waste has been delivered to the mill from more than 15 different radioactive waste streams across the United States — and from as far away as Canada, Europe and Japan.
In June 2024, the Grand Canyon Trust reported that the mill accepted radioactive materials from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The materials included uranium ores, ore samples, cores, test-hole samples, spilled ore material, soil, rock, uranium-loaded resins and associated filter-bed sands used to treat water contaminated with uranium at their research sites.
They don’t care about us Indigenous people. They don’t have respect for us Indigenous people.
– Yolanda Badback
Cly said the trucks coming in and out of the mill look like regular “belly dump trucks” because he’s traveled behind a few driving back to his home in White Mesa.
He said seeing all the trucks coming and going from the mill often leaves him with an eerie feeling. He thinks about all the kids who live in the White Mesa community and rely on the bus route along the state highway to go to school in Blanding, Utah.
“The mill sits in between,” Cly said, which has him drawing up a lot of different what-if scenarios because the small Ute Mountain Ute tribal community sits directly downwind and downstream from the mill, raising many concerns about what could happen to White Mesa.
Many communities along the haul route, which passes through cities and towns in Arizona, the Hopi Nation, the Navajo Nation, Utah and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, oppose uranium hauling and condemned the first haul in July, citing fears of contamination and accidents along the route.
Yolanda Badback, Cly’s mother, expressed concern about the transportation of uranium ore through their community. If anything were to happen to the trucks, Badback said they would not know who would notify the White Mesa community about any incidents, much less who would be responsible for cleaning up any potential spill.
She said she had raised questions with state officials about potential incidents, but their response did not reassure her because she felt they were not familiar with what it would take to clean up the mess.
Cly said his family has had concerns about potential contamination risks since the mill started accepting radioactive waste. They have voiced their concerns to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality Board for Waste Management and Radiation Control.
They did receive some response when his mother attended a meeting with the board and asked them which community they would call first if an emergency were to occur due to one of their trucks getting into an accident.
But the response wasn’t what Badback and other White Mesa residents wanted to hear: They told her no notification would be given to the tribal town. Instead, the first community they would warn is Blanding, which is about six miles north of the mine, and the second community would be Bluff, which is about 20 miles south.
Notifying the White Mesa residents would fall to either Blanding or Bluff.
“We’re the closest,” he said, yet they’ve been told their community would not be notified if an accident occurs.
A family fight against uranium
Raising awareness about the White Mesa Uranium Mill has been part of Cly’s family for generations, and their advocacy efforts started with his great-grandfather, who went to the mill looking for work but quickly learned what they did there and disagreed with it.
“Once he found out how bad it was, he immediately switched over and said, ‘This isn’t for our people,’” Cly said, and their family has been resisting the mill’s efforts ever since. He said his grandmother and mother pushed and motivated him to start helping their efforts when he turned 18.
Cly, now 25, said his family is the one the community points to when discussing the uranium mill and advocating for its closure.
Badback said that her family continues to fight against the uranium mill because she hopes people will understand that the Ute Mountain Ute people are not going anywhere and the mill’s operation directly impacts the White Mesa community, where her family and others have lived for generations.
“We’re not gonna migrate anywhere,” Badback said.
Her family works to educate their community about what the White Mesa Mill is and how uranium ore will be transported through their community. Badback said they provide updates on the mill and are now starting to include information about uranium ore due to the transportation.
They raise awareness through spiritual walks and rallies, most recently in October. Ute Mountain Ute tribal members held a spiritual walk in White Mesa, which started in the community and ended at the mill’s entrance. They also hosted a rally in Salt Lake City, at the steps of the state capitol building.
“We’re putting the word out there to let people know how we feel,” Badback said. “We’re not going to stop. We’re going to fight until we reach our goal.”
She said the goal is to close and clean up the White Mesa Mill so that it is not near any Indigenous communities, ensuring that future generations will not be harmed by the hazardous material coming from and being transported to the mill.
“We love our community, and we love our people,” Badback said, adding that the tribe’s sacred grounds have been destroyed due to the mill. She said in the terrain surrounding the mill, the tribe had sacred sites in the area, but they were destroyed when the mill was first established.
Badback said the traditional herbs their community gathered in the area before winter to prepare for sickness are no longer found there since the mill opened. She said that elders in their community used to be able to gather sumac from nearby canyons, but the plant is also no longer found in the area.
The community of White Mesa’s primary water resource is groundwater from the Navajo aquifer. Badback said they live downstream from the mill, so their community will be affected if anything happens to the water.
“We need to put a stop to this,” she said.
Cly said he’s visited other communities across the U.S. impacted by uranium mining and radioactive waste. One community that stood out to him is Red River Pond, a small community on the Navajo Nation where many residents had to be relocated due to the uranium.
Cly said hearing stories from Red River Pond residents about wanting to return to their homelands “hit a nerve” because he never wants to have to do that.
“I get to live in an area surrounded by mountains, and I wake up every day looking at the beauty of it,” he said. “But I know how bad it can get.”
Cly said he doesn’t want to move or relocate, but it is something that his family often worries about because of their proximity to the mill.
He said part of his job is helping his community, and he worries about how the mill will harm the people of White Mesa because they will never fully understand what is happening there.
Cly said the mining company’s communication with and reassuring the communities along the uranium haul route is the least they could do for the people who live along the route because they have the most to lose if anything goes wrong with the haul.
Several members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe rallied in Salt Lake City in October, calling for the mill’s shutdown and voicing their concerns about contamination and potential health-related issues associated with it.
“There is no evidence that points to the Mill causing any adverse health or environmental impacts,” Energy Fuels said in a statement to the Utah News Dispatch, a sister publication of the Arizona Mirror, in October.
“It is disheartening to see opposition to the Mill and our recycling programs that is based on myths, outdated beliefs and outright falsehoods, which activist organizations use to create unfounded fear in the community,” the mining company stated.
The company cited a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023, which stated that children and adults living in White Mesa who breathe the air and drink water from the tribe’s public water system are unlikely to be harmed by radiological contaminants.
In October, Curtis Moore, a spokesman for Energy Fuels, told the News Dispatch that the mining company has around 100 monitors for air, radon and groundwater around the site.
Energy Fuels stated that the White Mesa mill operates “to the highest standards in the world” while producing uranium, rare earth elements and other critical minerals “crucial to the transition to clean, carbon-free energy.”
But the residents of White Mesa have yet to hear directly from Energy Fuels, Badback said. There has been no communication about the transportation of uranium ore from their mine near the Grand Canyon.
“The trucks might leak,” she said, and there has been no guarantee or reassurance from the mining company that it would not happen.
“They don’t care about us Indigenous people,” Badback said of the mining company. “They don’t have respect for us Indigenous people.”
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