Uranium Fever Collides With Industry’s Dark Past in Navajo Country – by Jacob Lorinc (Financial Post/Bloomberg – January 14, 2025)

https://financialpost.com/

The world’s re-embrace of nuclear power creates tensions in the US Southwest

(Bloomberg) — A few miles south of the Grand Canyon, thousands of tons of uranium ore, reddish-gray, blue and radioactive, are piled up high in a clearing in the forest. They’ve been there for months, stranded by a standoff between the mining company that dug them deep out of the ground, Energy Fuels Inc., and the leader of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren.

Back in the summer, Energy Fuels had triggered an uproar when it loaded some of the ore onto a truck, slapped a “radioactive” sign over the taillights and drove it through the heart of Navajo territory.

Radioactive is an alarming word anywhere, but here in Navajo country, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that powered America’s nuclear arms race with the USSR and spewed toxic waste into the land, it causes terror. Those fears have only grown the past couple years as nuclear power came back in vogue and sparked a uranium rush in mining camps all across the Southwest.

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