Thorium and Other Damage
Soon after the spill UNC sent small crews downstream with shovels and fifty-five-gallon drums to begin cleaning up. Bitter complaints from local residents and the state soon forced UNC to expand its crews to thirty to thirty-five workers. "We have removed more than 3500 tons of potentially affected sediment from the streambed to a distance of more than 10 miles from the mill," Hann told the Udall hearings. "The combination of these clean-up efforts, and natural effects, such as rain, have largely restored normal conditions in the area."14
But an Arizona water-quality official complained in an interview with us that the rains had merely transported the pollutants into his state.15 And Robinson pointed out that UNC had in fact removed just 1 percent of the tailings and liquid known to have spilled from the dam. More than eighteen months after the accident indications were strong that radiation and other pollutants had penetrated thirty feet into the earth. A report by a Cincinnati-based firm brought in as a consultant by the EPA warned that at least two nearby aquifers had been put "at risk."16 Furthermore when the spill overflowed the banks of the Rio Puerco, it left behind a series of pools. When ordered by the state to monitor them, UNC chose to look for their uranium content.
But uranium was precisely what the company had been working to remove in the milling process. "It was a subterfuge on the company’s part," said Dr. Jorge Winterer, an M.D. working with the Indian Health Service in Gallup at the time of the spill. "There were children up and down the river playing in those stagnant pools, and they were deadly poisonous. But UNC chose to monitor them for the element they knew was least likely to be there."17 In fact the NRC’s William Dircks told the Udall hearing that those pools showed levels of radiation one hundred to five hundred times natural background. What UNC might have missed were substantial quantities of thorium 230 and radium 226. Both are alpha-emitters and are extremely dangerous if ingested or inhaled.
Thorium 230, for example, has a half-life of eighty thousand years and is believed by some to be as toxic as plutonium. A silver-white metal, thorium tends to deposit in the liver, bone marrow, and lymphatic tissue, where even minute quantities can cause cancer and leukemia. If inhaled as dust it can cause lung cancer. According to a study by Winterer, under some circumstances thorium can become "trapped" in the body, making it "a permanent source of radiation" there, and thus doing untold damage to the human organism.18
Winterer soon came under personal attack in the wake of his candid comments. UNC was a power in state politics. It had twenty-three hundred employees and an annual budget within New Mexico of $140 million.19 When Winterer contradicted assertions from his superiors that there were no health effects from the spill, he was threatened with legal action. And when he began holding seminars in the local library on the dangers of radiation, Winterer was told by a former friend that he and his family "would be a lot better off if we got out of New Mexico right away."20
Jorge Winterer was not the only one concerned about UNC’s assessment of the spill. Dr. Thomas Gesell, a health physics professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health, and a staff member of the Presidential Kemeny Commission on the effects of the accident at Three Mile Island, also testified at the Udall hearings. Gesell said UNC’s monitoring data were self-contradictory and out-of-phase with the state’s. One UNC report had listed background levels as being lower after the spill than before it. Some company reports on downstream radiation levels claimed findings 150 times lower than the state’s.21
Meanwhile contamination had apparently spread to local animals. One veterinarian told a documentary crew from Eleventh Hour Films that abnormal radiation levels had been found in the tissues of goats and sheep that were drinking Rio Puerco water.22 A study of eleven animals by the Center for Disease Control confirmed the problem. The CDC warned that kidneys and livers of local livestock might concentrate high doses and should not be eaten. The CDC also warned locals not to drink water from the river, and to avoid its banks during windstorms, when radioactive particles might be more easily inhaled. The CDC emphasized that radiation levels in local animals did not exceed New Mexico standards. But it was important to exercise caution because "the health risks of low doses of radiation" were "not completely understood."23
A year after the spill Cubia Clayton of the state’s Environmental Improvement Division confirmed that the Rio Puerco was still too dangerous for human or animal consumption. Clayton stated that it was "obvious" that "there has been some buildup of radiation" in some of the animals tested.24 Ironically some of those animals had drunk upstream of the spill, indicating the stream—fed by water pumped out of the uranium mines—may well have been contaminated even before the accident.
Soon after the dam break, two West German radiation biologists, Bernd Franke and Barbara Steinhilber-Schwab, sharply criticized the CDC report for downplaying the potential dangers of the accident and for sampling too few of the local livestock. They urged chromosome checks on area residents and called for the establishment of cancer and birth registries as well as intense ongoing radiation monitoring in the area. They also warned that thorium and other isotopes from the spill could enter the human body not only through eating contaminated animals, but also when radioactive dust settled on vegetables.25
Dr. Carl Johnson, director of Colorado’s Jefferson County Health Department, further warned that detectable radiation levels in the tissues of children might only surface "over a period of many years." Dangerous levels of thorium, radium, and other isotopes could build up through the ingestion of contaminated food, air, and water. Thus he too urged careful monitoring of local children, plus a shutdown of the mines and mills until the public had determined that "a satisfactory method for preventing a subsequent incident" had been found.26 But the UNC mine and mill were back in operation in less than five months. The same pond was in use. Some changes were made in the dam, but constant seepage—up to eighty thousand gallons of contaminated liquid per day—had become a mainstay.27
UNC had promised to provide local residents and their animals with clean drinking water. But an Arizona newspaper confirmed that the company was delivering just half the promised amounts.28 A request by some of the downstream residents for emergency food stamps to replace their lost livestock was denied by the government. And at least one family was forced to eat a sheep known to have ingested radioactive residues. "If you come to Lupton, you will see a lot of shepherds running along the side of the wash trying to keep the sheep out," said Navajo shepherd Tom Charlie.
The UNC had put up signs saying "contaminated wash, keep out. But our cows, sheep and horses can’t read that. Most of us can’t read, write or speak English. The signs do no good. If [neighbors] know we are from the Rio Puerco wash, they won’t shake our hands," he added. "They think we have a high level of radiation. They ran from me. They are afraid of us. That’s why people look at us, that’s why no one comes to help us. It is wet now, but on days when it dries up, the wind will come along. The dust settles on the grass. The sheep eat it. We eat the sheep. We wonder what that does to our lives."29
14. Ibid., pp. 120-121.
15. Swanson interview.
16. Paul Robinson, interview, February 1981; and Shuey, "Calamity," Part 2, February 21, 1981, p. 5.
17. Jorge Winterer, interview, October 1980.18. Jorge Winterer, Potential Health Impact of United Nuclear-Church Rock Spill (Gallup, N.M.: Physicians for Social Responsibility: fall 1979).
19. Church Rock Hearings, pp. 9-11.
20. Winterer interview.
21. Church Rock Hearings, pp. 9-11.
22. Allan Shauffler, interviewed for In Our Own Back Yard.
23. Albuquerque Journal, July 17, 1980.
24. Gallup Independent, June 16, 1980.
25. Bernd Franke and Barbara Steinhilber-Schwab, press statement, Albuquerque International Airport, Albuquerque, N.M., July 24, 1980. The question of contamination in local humans did come up when seven local residents were sent to Los Alamos for testing. Seven months later reports indicated no contamination. But it was soon discovered that the equipment used to measure the radiation levels was not capable of recording small doses—doses that were nonetheless large enough to do harm. See Shuey, "Calamity," Part 2, pp. 5-6.
26. Carl Johnson, letter to Lynda Taylor, July 14, 1980.
27. Robinson interview.
28. Shuey, "Calamity," Part 2, p. 6.
29. Saltzstein, "Navajos." In a July 1981 letter to authors, Edwin Swanson said the state of Arizona asked UNC to post signs along the river as far as Navajo, Arizona, but that the company did not do it.