Churchrock disaster, 1979
By Leona Morgan
May 2019, in Bure, Western France
En français
On July 16th, 1979, the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the United States, took place in Churchrock, New Mexico. In Churchrock were two uranium mines and a processing mill. The mill had a tailings pond to hold the waste from the mill. Waste from a processing mill is much more radioactive than mine waste. That pond was closed by a dam made of clay. There was a crack in it, the company and the government knew it, but the company kept putting waste in the pond. In the morning of July 16th, 1979, the dam broke. 90 million gallons of radioactive waste spilled into a dry ravine, and further in a mostly dry river, the Puerco River.
It usually has no water, but after the spill occurred, it rained, so the river was full of water and flowed 100 miles away into Arizona. It happened only a few months after the Three-Miles-Island accident, in Harrisburg. Although the spill in Churchrock was the worst nuclear accident ever, it got almost no media coverage and no public attention. Harrisburg is in the east, in a densely populated area, mostly white people (there has been a movie about the accident, starring Meryl Streep). In Churchrock, there are not so many people, mostly Indigenous.
Today, it still has not been cleaned up. In July 2015, Tommy Rock, a Diné scholar from the Northern Arizona University, found that the drink water, in a Diné community in Sanders, Arizona, 40 miles downstream on the Puerco River, had two times the legal level of uranium. The children at the local school were given bottled water to drink. The community is still fighting for cleanup. They want the waste to go off the Navajo Nation, away from their homes. “But,” says Leona, “because of the checkerboard area, which is out of the Reservation, the government piled up waste quite close to their homes, and the wind brings it back.” 
She adds “Uranium mining was banned in 2005, but it is uranium mines from the 1980’s which are still affecting the animals and the community.” People want the mines to be cleaned up. The company is proposing to scrape the radioactive dirt, put it above the mill’s waste and cover it with clay, saying it would be safe for a thousand years. But their plan applies only inside the private land of the company and will not include the whole area of the spill, 100 miles west. People fear another spill. The Puerco is a dry river, but heavy rains can always occur.
Out of the 15 000 abandoned mines, this is the most affected place in the United States.
