A former Interior Department Secretary and now candidate for Governor in New Mexico says the state should adopt a moratorium on renewed uranium mining.
Deb Haaland, the former Democratic U.S. Representative who was appointed Secretary of the Interior in the Biden administration, is now running for Governor.
“New Mexico has given enough,” the former U.S. Interior secretary in the Biden administration said. “We had an atom bomb tested in our state. We have had mining and drilling and, you name it, we have given it, and it’s happened a lot in some of the most vulnerable communities in the state.”
In an interview with New Mexico In Depth, she said she has seen the harms of the last era of uranium mining firsthand. She is an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, the site of what was once the largest open-pit uranium mine in the world . The Jackpile-Paguate Mine in west-central New Mexico operated from 1953 to 1982 and was operated by the Anaconda Minerals Company. It produced nearly 24 million tons of ore and more than 80 million pounds of uranium oxide, fueling a major share of the U.S. Cold War nuclear weapons.
“We need to study this,” Haaland said, and anywhere a company is proposing a uranium mine, residents “should have a voice on whether they want those mines in their communities.”
Uranium mining in the mid-to-late 1900s in northwest New Mexico left widespread contamination of water and soil and hundreds of mines yet to be cleaned up. Exposure to uranium and other heavy metals released by uranium mining, along with mining waste, is associated with chronic diseases including cancer and kidney disease. And research has shown Navajo men who worked in the mines have an excess risk of lung cancer.
The industry ceased mining in New Mexico about three decades ago. But with the market price for the heavy metal climbing in recent years, there’s been renewed interest from companies seeking permits to operate in the Grants mineral belt, which Laguna Pueblo sits on the eastern edge of.
Source: OkEnergyToday