The Navajo Nation on Tuesday vowed to deploy tribal police and take legal action to stop trucks full of uranium ore from traversing hundreds of miles of reservation land in Arizona — a direct result of a controversial uranium mine ramping up in recent months within the footprint of a national monument near the Grand Canyon.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren in a statement posted on X revealed that he had been given a mere 30-minute notice Tuesday that trucks carrying uranium ore were crossing reservation land. The trucks are traveling from the Pinyon Plain uranium mine in Arizona hundreds of miles northeast through the Navajo reservation to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah, near the White Mesa Ute community.
“I am very disappointed that uranium is being hauled across our Navajo Nation right now,” Nygren wrote. “I was notified 30 minutes ago, and I have ordered the Navajo Nation Police to escort the transport vehicles off our land.”
Nygren said the lack of notification from Energy Fuels, one of the nation’s largest uranium producers, which owns and operates the mine, is a “blatant disregard for our tribal sovereignty and exposes our Diné people to toxic uranium, a substance that has devastated our community for decades.”
