Navajos helped win Cold War – now they're left out in cold

• Clean up abandoned uranium mines all across Navajo country is to slow
• Generations of Navajos are suffering from high rates of organ diseases and cancer
• Don%27t take 100 years to fix the problem

For almost 40 years — from the dawn of the nuclear age at the end of World War II through the Cold War — the United States mined uranium on the Navajo Reservation.

The government and its private contractors' effort produced the greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet. And it left behind one of the most poisonous legacies in the history of mining in America.

Navajo uranium miners suffer from lung cancer at a rate 29 times greater than Navajo men who did not work the mines, according to a 2000 study in the journal Health Physics.

Entire families living near abandoned uranium mines suffer from kidney disease, pancreatic cancer and diabetes at rates far greater than among Navajos who live farther from the mines. By some estimates, as many as 54,000 Navajos — a quarter of all those living on reservation land — drink from unregulated wells at serious risk of having been contaminated by uranium.

With 521 abandoned uranium mines scattered across the 17.2 million acres of Navajo land and a half-hearted effort to clean up the fatal residue, it may take 100 years or more to make the Navajo Nation whole.

A recent court settlement with the current corporate owner of a mining company resulted in $1 billion to clean up that one company's part of the uranium mess. That makes the clean-up tally 49 abandoned mines down — and 472 to go.

Meanwhile, one of the "corporate" parties at the center of the nation's Cold War nuclear project recently completed a $110 million, five-year clean-up of the radioactive mess left over from a mine near Monument Valley.

That "corporate" entity is the U.S. government, the motivating sponsor of the nation's long project to create and maintain an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons.

To a far greater degree than any of the corporate heirs of long-departed private mining companies, the U.S. government owes it to the Navajos to clean up the radioactive mess the nuclear-arms race left behind.

As chronicled by The Republic's Brandon Loomis and photographed by David Wallace, the worst legacy of uranium mining for the Navajos is neglect. The companies mined the ore that fueled the nation's nuclear arsenal, and then ... they left. With much of the mining occurring before the Environmental Protection Agency and the like were created, post-mining mitigation was almost unheard of.

Now, those agencies along with the federal Justice Department are locked in an agonizingly slow pursuit of the heirs of the private contractors in order to hold them financially liable.

There are two great drawbacks to such a policy.

The first is time. Multiple generations of families are suffering horribly from diseases linked to radiation poisoning. Families like the Yazzies from near Cameron cannot survive another generation being exposed to the abandoned uranium dust blowing ceaselessly around their home.

The other drawback? How about dereliction of simple duty? No organization was more directly culpable for the policies that drove the uranium-mining industry than the federal government. Yes, companies like General Electric need to pay their share. But so does the U.S. government. And without federal "deep pockets," the cleanup will be agonizingly slow.

Congress and the nation's lawyers have a greater duty to the Navajos than merely tracking down the culpable.

The people bearing the lion's share of responsibility for the radiation poisoning now tormenting the Navajos are on Capitol Hill. They have at least 472 abandoned uranium mines waiting to be cleaned up. They need to get to work on them. Today, not a century from now.