Members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe along with the Navajo Nation are sick and tired of having to live on contaminated land. Saturday, the two nations joined together to protest against the uranium mill they say has poisoned their air and water for decades. 

The Canadian-owned White Mesa mill is the only uranium mill operating in the U.S. It’s located one mile from Bears Ears National Monument in San Juan County, Utah, home to Native peoples of the Colorado Plateau. It was built in the 1970s and is owned by Energy Fuels Incorporated.

Despite, the mill’s toxic legacy, Vice President of Energy Fuels Curtis Moore claims the mill presents no danger to the local Utah community. 

“And I can assure them that, that we’re not polluting the groundwater, we’re not, you know, we’re not polluting the air,” Moore said. “We’re very proud of our track record.”

The mill employs around 150 people and processes uranium ore for rare earth elements, which are used for everything from iPhones to electric vehicles and heat-seeking missiles.

The mill was only meant to operate for 15 years but around the 1990s, the mill’s owners began processing radioactive waste.

The mill takes raw material—which is usually a mix of metals—mills the materials into a concentrated substance, separates it out, then processes it into alloys. The Department of Environmental Quality says since it’s recovering uranium from the ore, it’s licensed to dispose of the final waste product in the tailing ponds at the mill. 

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe believes that one of the mill’s tailings ponds is leaking and polluting a shallow aquifer under the community with toxic chemicals. According to reporting by KUER 90.1, Energy Fuels doesn’t deny the presence of chemicals but alleges that they were there before the mill was built. The tribe additionally believes that the mill is emitting a carcinogenic gas called radon, and again, the company denies the levels of radon are unsafe. (Are there any safe levels of a carcinogenic gas?) Radon is the No. 1 cause of lung cancer among nonsmokers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

As reported by The Daily Utah Chronicle, in 2014 the Grand Canyon Trust filed a civil suit against Energy Fuels for violating the Clean Air Act of 1970, in which the EPA established a list of emission standards for “hazardous air pollutants,” including radon-222, a byproduct of radium which, in 1986, was concluded to pose “a significant enough health risk to warrant establishing emission standards for those releases under Section 112 of the Act.”

“The standards that apply to the facility, including standards for air emissions and radioactivity, are extraordinarily stringent, and the mill operates in compliance with every applicable law, rule and regulation, all of which are strictly enforced by those [regulatory] agencies,” Mark Chalmers, chief operating officer of Energy Fuels Resources, wrote in an op-ed published by The Salt Lake Tribune.

When asked about radon emission exceedances in 2012 and 2013, “That’s not a violation, Moore told the Chronicle. ‘The way it works, under the license, is that you have this very detailed monitoring system in place, and if one of your monitors shows an exceedance, you address it. And we’ve always addressed it.’”

In 2018, Energy Fuels began to lobby former President Donald Trump to subsidized the uranium industry—the same year that the mill’s owner submitted an application to build two new 40-acre waste pits at the mill site. The U.S. imports about 80% of its rare earth minerals from China, and Energy Fuels hopes to change that. 

Yolanda Badback, a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member and a lifelong resident of White Mesa, led the five-mile march through the desert to the mill Saturday. She says community members are so afraid of the water that no one dares to drink it. 

“The mill was built on top of burial grounds and contaminates the bones of my ancestors,” Badback wrote in an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2017.

Scott Clow, Ute Mountain Ute’s environmental programs director, says that in 2012 the mill had an accident that created a discolored cloud. Locals call it the Brown Cloud Incident.

A man who asked to be identified simply as “Howard” told the Chronicle in 2017 that he remembers smelling uranium in the 1980s when visiting a convenience store near the mill. The store has since closed as a toxic, radioactive site.

“There’s a big sign there and they say closed that store down,” Howard said. “And it’s funny, because why didn’t they close it down way back?” He describes the smell as “a stong metal odor, like cooper.” 

“You could smell it,” he said. “You were actually breathing it and inhaling it.”

The protest and spiritual walk this past Saturday have become an annual event. The White Mesa Concerned Community is fighting to keep the mill from becoming an international dumping ground for radioactive waste.

“They are bringing toxic waste, radioactive waste, from places all across the United States to the mill in White Mesa. In the past, some has spilled. I can smell the mill from my house when it’s running. We are the closest community. If there’s a spill, or an accident, it’s our children who ride the school bus on these roads with the trucks every morning. That’s why we’re standing up and saying: Enough. We want to keep our home and our children safe,” Badback says.