GRANTS, NM – It's been more than a decade since Ron Curry, then-Region 6 administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, visited the home of Milan residents Milton and Jonnie Head after a day of touring legacy uranium mine sites on the Navajo Nation and in the Grants area.
Curry sank down in a comfortable chair with a direct view of the Homestake uranium mill site and listened attentively while members of the Bluewater Valley Downstream Alliance and the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment recounted the history of contamination and deaths in their community and shared their remedy for ending the “nightmare”.
“In 1975, we were told to quit drinking our well water. About 1983, we were told the contamination would never move past the alluvial aquifer … that it would take 10 years or less to clean that contamination,” Curry was told. Ten years came and went, and contamination spread to the Upper Chinle, Middle Chinle and Lower Chinle aquifers.
A Draft Human Health Risk Assessment initiated by EPA, Region 6, released two months before Curry's June 2013 visit, found that people in the community near Homestake faced excess cancer risks 18 times higher than EPA's “generally acceptable risk” range for radionuclides in outdoor air.
Calculating the risks
Residents living in the five subdivisions south of the Homestake site were exposed to 2.4 times the highest generally acceptable risk for radionuclides in soil, primarily radium-226 and its decay products; 22 times the highest acceptable risk for radionuclides in water beneath the subdivisions, if used, primarily from radon-222; and 5.6 times the highest acceptable risk for “residential maximum exposure,” in other word, combined exposures to soil, air and produce grown in the area, the draft showed.
After nearly 40 years of writing letters to elected leaders, state and federal regulators, and “doing everything we were taught that good citizens are supposed to do in a democracy, to no avail,” the residents had come up with a remedy, which Jonnie Head, then-president of BVDA, shared with Curry: “Homestake-Barrick Gold needs to move the tailings pile or move us.”
Art Gebeau, a mining engineer who worked 36 years at Ambrosia Lake, agreed that moving the pile would be the best solution. “I think if we leave the pile where it is, my grandchildren or their children will be here facing some of your great grandchildren, talking about this issue, and the water then will be down perhaps knocking on the door of Laguna Pueblo.”
Legacy déja vu
Fast forward 13 years to September 2026. Homestake Mining Company of California/Barrick Gold now has purchased 489 out of 530 parcels, including the Heads' home. The groundwater will not be returned to background levels because it is “technically infeasible.” But the question of moving the Large Tailings Pile lives on.
“So the bottom line is you can't clean up the groundwater, and the source is primarily along the Large Tailings Pile and the Small Tailings Pile. Why doesn't Barrick Gold move the tailings pile?” Ann McCartney, an attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, asked at Homestake's Sept. 9 meeting with the community to discuss the company's application to the NRC for Alternate Concentration Limits for groundwater.
“That was done in Moab, Utah, with the Atlas Mill, and it's underway right now to put that material into an engineered and safe storage area. Wouldn't that be the best outcome for this community, to get rid of the source?” McCartney asked.
Eric Burch, program manager for Homestake/Barrick Gold's Grants Reclamation Project, said that was a good question and one that has been studied extensively. The NRC first evaluated relocating the tailings pile in the early '90s. “The ultimate conclusion was that moving the pile created more risks than benefits,” he said. “And then, you may ask, why would it be more risks than benefits. It's because this pile currently is reclaimed, so from an emanation of radon and the public dose, it's not measurable at the boundary.” Moving the pile would create radon hazards for workers and the community, he said.
“The other factor is the groundwater. The pile has been reclaimed since the '90s and so when you're talking about tailings that have moisture in them, we talk about drain-down. Drain-down actually means how much water is coming out of the bottom of the pile.”
Burch explained that at one point, the drain-down was a few hundred gallons a minute. Now, it's five gallons a minute. Adam Arguello, senior hydrologist, coined a term for it: “The cow has left the barn.”
“Most of the water with the contaminants in it has already come out of the pile. Moving the pile doesn't remove the contaminants from the groundwater”, Burch said. He cited studies from the NRC, EPA and TetraTech that evaluated relocation of the pile. They came to the same conclusion. “The benefits didn't outweigh the risks to move the pile.”
Alternatives not studied
Candace Head-Dylla alleged that Homestake/Barrick Gold's intent was to “get rid of the last dregs of people so you can walk away from this mess.”
“But back to the point about moving the tailings pile. The one thing that you never have studied in all those studies – and I've read all of them – is slurrying those tailings. That hasn't been studied. You've never put an expert at the level needed to really make a competent feasibility study. You put the lowerlevel experts on it but no one with the expertise to really figure it out because it probably would be expensive, and Homestake/Barrick Gold's goal is to spend the least amount of money they possibly can and walk away from this mess,” Head-Dylla said.
In response to that and other questions about moving the tailings pile, recycling the tailings to recover critical minerals and using contaminated groundwater for other purposes, Arguello said, “There have been questions asked like this in the past: Can we recycle the tailings? And it comes back to the same answer as relocating the tailings. Is there potentially valuable minerals in those tailings? The answer is probably yes. But looking at the benefit of accessing those, weighed against the risk, in our perspective the risk is too high.
“Frankly, we are not in the business of critical minerals. We’re not in the business of uranium. Barrick Gold Corp., which is the parent company of Homestake, acquired Homestake in 2001 and that was for gold assets. Barrick has not been and will never be a uranium miner, so we’re not interested in that. We are the cleanup crew. We’re here to clean up, and ultimately this site is transferred to the Department of Energy for long-term stewardship, so all of those 11(e) 2 byproduct materials will be decommissioned, reclaimed and the site will be transferred to the DOE.”
From waste to cancer treatment?
On Sept. 21, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Isotope R&D and Production announced it is launching a new effort to support industry in accessing radium-226, such as is found in Homestake's tailings piles and wastes from abandoned mines throughout the Navajo Nation and New Mexico.
The Office of Isotope R&D and Production has established specialized capabilities to process and purify radium-226 recovered from legacy material, generating high-quality feedstock for the production of radioisotopes used in medical applications, DOE stated.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in January that three countries had recently transferred disused radium sources to be recycled for use in cancer treatment through the IAEA's Global Radium-226 Management Initiative. Radium-226 was widely used in medicine and industry throughout the 20th century, but safer and more effective alternatives have since replaced it, IAEA stated.
The legacy radium-226 material is to be transformed into actinium-225, a rare isotope used to treat cancers including breast and prostate cancers, using cyclotrons that bombard the material with charged particles and change their composition in the process. The initiative links countries holding legacy radium- 226 sources with organizations equipped to produced radiopharmaceuticals using the material as feedstock.
Energy Fuels, located near Blanding, Utah, is advancing its efforts to produce medical isotopes from the company’s existing uranium and rare earth process streams to support emerging cancer treatments called “Targeted Alpha Therapy.” The therapy takes aim directly at cancerous cells while minimizing damage to healthy cells, representing a potential breakthrough in the treatment of cancer. At the current time, radium is extremely expensive and difficult to procure, according to the company.
Energy Fuels owns the Roca Honda Mine site near Milan and the only uranium mill currently operating in the United States.