Semi-truck transporting uranium involved in accident on Navajo Nation
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/semi-truck-transporting-uranium-involved-in-accident-on-navajo-nation/ar-AA22C9BYSemi-truck transporting uranium involved in accident on Navajo Nation
Story by Arlyssa D. Becenti, Arizona Republic
A semi-truck hauling uranium material to the White Mesa Mill was involved in a crash on May 6 about a half-mile east of the intersection of U.S. Highway 160 and Route 98 in Shonto, Ariz., according to Navajo Nation Police.
According to the preliminary investigation, the semi-truck was traveling from Tuba City, Arizona, to the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah. Investigators determined the crash occurred when an SUV attempted to pass another semi-truck and collided with the front passenger-side tire and bumper of the uranium transport truck while trying to pass both vehicles.
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"While initial reports indicate that the ore truck itself was not damaged and that no injuries have been reported, the photos and situation we are seeing remain unacceptable," said Navajo President Buu Nygren on his Facebook account. "Uranium has harmed our people, our land, and our water for generations, and many Navajo families continue to live with those impacts today. That is why incidents like this create serious concern in our communities."
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"The Diné" are the People of the Navajo Nation -- our brothers, sisters, grandparents, children, folks and a critical part of We the People.
Return of the Yellow Monster of the Diné:
Uranium Mining on the Big Rez
by Bill Hatch
CounterPunch, April 27, 2026
A dark storm cloud of ignorant financial speculation hovers above the Navajo Nation, the largest Indigenous reservation in the country, rich in mineral resources, livestock, farms and sacred landmarks. It stretches across parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico, and southern Utah. Some young billionaires and wannabes, with minds full of fungible narratives about new riches in data centers and small modular (nuclear) reactors, have begun to speculate on resuming uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau. Mountain-state members of Congress authored a successful bill to make buying Russian uranium ready processed for power-plant use illegal (except when no other source is available – which is most of the time), the moribund uranium-futures market has begun to rise, and the mining press has begun to write about a uranium boom. A mine near the rim of the Grand Canyon started up in December 2023, despite local protests, particularly by the Havasupai tribe living directly below the mine. It had already contaminated one aquifer in an earlier incarnation. Four more mines on the Colorado Plateau are in various stages of permitting. Diné activists have begun protests against these mines. A mill that processes uranium to power-plant specifications is operating in southern Utah and faces continual opposition from one of the Ute tribes living nearby, protesting against air and water pollution.
A battle is shaping up on the Colorado Plateau between its Native inhabitants and capitalist natural resource plunderers. The government and the speculators will pose the question in terms of property rights. But Diné activists, with more than adequate data, pose the issue in terms of their health, the health of miners who died of cancers and lung disease, and even of unborn children exposed to radioactive waste around abandoned uranium-mine tailings.
During World War II, the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed the atomic bomb, using uranium in part from the tailings of vanadium mines on the Navajo Reservation. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during the Cold War, the federal government played an unusually filthy role in the affairs of Native tribes living on the Plateau, mainly Diné. It used its property rights to tribal land “held in trust” to facilitate the opening of hundreds of practically unregulated mines on the reservations, its National Security authority to be the sole buyer of uranium, and even invoked National Security to prevent the Surgeon General from notifying miners, mainly Diné and Hopi, of the health risks from working in uranium mines. When rates of lung and kidney diseases and cancer began to soar among retired miners, the federal government, with few exceptions, ignored the growing health crisis among the miners, many of whom had been code talkers during WWII. “National Security” became a vehicle for the federal government to open the reservation for the plundering of as much uranium as it desired.
Stewart Udall, JFK’s Secretary of the Interior, was an exception, however, who spent years after he left government representing victims of atomic bomb tests downwind and ailing miners and working on legislation which at long length became the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, providing (with some serious flaws) compensation to miners and downwind victims of radiation exposure from nuclear bomb tests.
Udall commented on the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission in his book, The Myths of August:
When AEC officials embraced the idea that their efforts would be discredited and disrupted if they admitted that radiation might cause cancers or that their activities were exposing innocent bystanders to excessive doses of radiation, they were entering a moral wasteland. All subsequent decision-making was perverted by that twisted reasoning. It fostered a conviction that it was more important to protect the tests than to protect civilians. And it spawned a policy that the impact of radiation on human health and all ‘harmful’ facts about radiation ‘accents’ had to be concealed from the American people.
Continues...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/27/return-of-the-yellow-monster-of-the-dine-uranium-mining-on-the-big-rez/