Radioactive Neighbors
ON A WARM JULY EVENING, Yolanda Badback described the noxious fumes that haunt the air where she lives. Unlike the fragrance of sagebrush or the sweet scent of juniper and piñon, the odor is astringent and sulfuric, hard to breathe. Sometimes it forces Badback and her family of eight to stay indoors. At its worst, it causes nausea.
Badback lives in White Mesa, Utah, on part of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. The smell comes from her neighbor, the White Mesa Mill, the last conventional uranium mill in the United States. When the mill’s tall smokestacks begin to billow and the winds roll off the blue Abajo Mountains, the stench floats five miles south to White Mesa. Badback, like most residents, can smell it from her doorstep.
Badback sat on a gray couch, hugging a pillow to her chest, her long black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. A retired health representative for the tribe, she has devoted her life to closing the mill. Badback’s mother, Ute Mountain Ute elder Thelma Whiskers, sat next to her, switching between English and the Ute language whenever her great-grandchildren peered through the doorway or came into the room.
“A lot of people don’t understand what we go through here in our community,” Badback said. “We want the mill to close. We want them to clean it up.”
Badback sounds frustrated and fatigued; at 48, she barely remembers life without the mill. Over the past 40 years, the construction of the mill demolished archaeological and burial sites important to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and depleted the tribe’s traditional hunting grounds, destroying places where people once gathered plants for basketry and medicine. Radioactive waste has been spilled along the main highway from trucks hauling material from Wyoming to White Mesa for processing. The children can no longer play outside because of the stench and the fear of what might be causing it.
The mill sits in the heart of San Juan County, a few miles east of the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, with Canyonlands National Park to the north and Monument Valley to the southeast. It opened in 1980 to process uranium ore from the Colorado Plateau into yellowcake, a concentrated powder used in energy production and nuclear weapons. Most uranium mines closed in the last half-century. But White Mesa not only remains open, it has become a destination for radioactive material from around the world. Now, its owners want to accept waste
