BLACK MESA DISASTER SERIES

The whole complex was owned by the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC), a Virginia-based firm with assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and influence in the New Mexico state government. Because of their high radioactivity the tailings and liquor both must be isolated from the environment–but nobody has yet demonstrated a method with any long-term success.Īt Church Rock several hundred million gallons of the liquor were being held in a large pond so the liquids could evaporate off and the solid tailings be stored. The acid milling liquids–called “liquor”–also dissolve dangerous traces of thorium 230, radium 222, lead 210, and other isotopes. NRC commissioner Victor Gilinsky and others consider them “the dominant contribution to radiation exposure” of the entire nuclear fuel cycle. There are now some 140 million tons of them scattered around the West. But the leftover waste sands–“tailings”–still contain 85 percent of the ore’s original radioactivity, and 99.9 percent of its original volume. The acid carries off the desired isotopes. Usable uranium is extracted from the sandstone in which it is usually found by grinding it fine and leaching it with sulfuric acid. The source of the catastrophe was uranium mill wastes. Ironically it occurred thirty-four years to the day after the first atomic test explosion at Trinity, New Mexico, not far away. And it raised the specter that uranium mining in the Colorado River Basin may be endangering Arizona’s Lake Mead, and with it the drinking water of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and much of Arizona.Įxcept for the bomb tests, Church Rock was probably the biggest single release of radioactive poisons on American soil. It carried toxic metals already detectable at least seventy miles downstream. The spill degraded the western Rio Puerco as a water source. But along the way it left residues of radioactive uranium, thorium, radium, and polonium, as well as traces of metals such as cadmium, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, sodium, vanadium, zinc, iron, lead and high concentrations of sulfates. “There were no clouds, but all of a sudden the water came,” remembered Herbert Morgan of Manuelito, New Mexico. The wall of water backed up sewers and lifted manhole covers in Gallup, twenty miles downstream, and caught people all along the river unawares. The dam at Church Rock burst sending eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid pouring toward Arizona. During the hot days of the desert summer local children would play in the stream as their parents tended the goats, sheep, and cattle.Ī Wall of Radioactive Water In the early morning hours of July 16, 1979–fourteen weeks after the accident at Three Mile Island–all of that changed. Many are members of the Dine–Navajo–Nation, with incomes in the range of two thousand dollars per year. The 350 families who water livestock in the Rio Puerco rely on their small herds to eke out a meager existence. And the pond hides a burden of contaminated waste. That water flowing from the mine is laced with radioactive isotopes. Now it is wet year round, bolstered by water pumped from the mine shafts to keep them from flooding. A deep gully leads from the mine site into the Rio Puerco, which once flowed only when fed by spring rains.

BLACK MESA DISASTER SERIES

Church Rock also hosts a series of underground uranium mine shafts, a mill, and a scattered community of Navajo families who survive by herding cattle, goats, and sheep. A dusty cluster of industrial machinery set in the arid mesas of the great Southwest, its most distinguishing feature might be considered a large pond of murky liquid, unusual in such dry terrain. Church Rock, New Mexico, would seem an improbable spot for a nuclear disaster.

Black mesa disaster