Graduate Abstract
April VanCamp Gil
Spring 2005
Strategic minerals or angry rocks: an evaluation of U.S. Government Policy on Uranium Miners
Associate of Arts
New Mexico State University
1982
B.S., Geology
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technolog
1984
M.S.,Geology
New Mexico Institute of Minining and Technology
1987
A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy Degree
Department of Environmental Studies
Greenspun College of Urban Affairs
Spring 2005
Thesis Adviser: Dr. Constandina Titus
Examination Committee Chair
Professor of Political Science
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
ABSTRACT
In this dissertation, I examine the question: ‘Why were U.S. uranium miners treated differently than workers in federal atomic plants producing and processing ‘strategic minerals,’ who were protected from occupational exposures to hazardous or radioactive materials?’ Specifically, this evaluation will test the overall hypothesis that the U.S. uranium program operated for twenty years without occupational radiation standards for the uranium miners due to a set of cultural, legal/regulatory, economic/technical, political, epistemic, and organizational factors that impacted policy.
In response to the Federal government’s program to search for a reliable domestic source of fuel for the nation’s Cold War atomic arsenal and “Atoms for Peace” program, over 5,000 miners, one quarter of whom were Navajo, worked in uranium mines located on the Colorado Plateau in the western United States between 1946 and 1967 without a standard to protect them from exposure to hazardous levels of radiation, including exposure to radon gas, a known carcinogen. Although mine ventilation could easily have lowered the radon to safe levels, no government agency had clear authority to set and enforce permissible radon levels in the uranium mines. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had been given sole authority over the use of nuclear technology and source material (uranium ore) by the Atomic Energy Act. However, the legislation was interpreted to give the agency legal control over ore only after it had been removed from its place in nature. As a result of this interpretation, radiation levels in the uranium mines were unregulated because, although the AEC was the sole legal purchaser of the uranium ore, the agency did not accept jurisdiction or responsibility until ore was delivered to its production facilities. Although many federal and state agencies had a role in governing the mines, Congress held numerous hearings on the issue, and although the U.S. Public Health Service began an epidemiological study of the miners in 1950, no agency had clear regulatory or enforcement authority to protect the miners from exposures to radiation. In 1967, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz unilaterally set a standard for radon in uranium mines and developed an enforcement program using his authority based on the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936).
The AEC viewed uranium as a ‘strategic mineral’ needed to fuel weapons to fight the Cold War; but for the Navajo, whose language does not contain a word for radioactive, uranium is simply the ‘angry rock,’ so named for its propensity to wreak havoc with the miners’ health. As a group, uranium miners were exposed to higher amounts of internal radiation than any other workers in the nuclear industry (Holaday, 1963: 51) and are dying from radiogenic lung cancer at rates from four to forty times the expected incidence rate. Due to Cold War production pressures, lack of clear legislative authority, and an organizational culture of moral inversion (Adams and Balfour, 2004) at the AEC, the uranium miners were left unprotected from occupational exposures to radon for over twenty years.