Word: milling
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...second big company to move into the area was Kerr McGee. In the mid-1950s, Kerr McGee discovered the uranium reserves of the Navajo Nation. Within a few years, the company had developed a series of underground uranium mines and a uranium mill at Shiprock, the major population center of the Navajo reservation. According to provisions of the BIA-negotiated lease, Kerr McGee held rights to the land "for as long as the ore is producing in payable quantities." The BIA viewed the mines as a welcome boost to the Navajo economy, providing jobs for a people plagued with unemployment...
...Kerr McGee began to move out of Shiprock, abandoning uranium mine shafts and the uranium mill in favor of awaiting ore bodies found elsewhere on the reservation. In the early 1970s, the long-term effects of low-level radiation began to take their toll among the Navajo miner workforce. By 1974, 18 Navajo uranium miners had died from radiation-induced lung cancer, with many more near the hospitalization stage. Kerr McGee refused to take any responsibility or to pay medical expenses. As Kerr McGee spokesman Bill Phillips told one reporter in Washington, "I couldn't tell you what happened...
...uranium miner deaths are not enough, Kerr McGee's abandoned uranium mine amounts to something more than an eyesore for the Navajo people. The uranium mill at one time processed raw uranium ore into "yellowcake," discarding tons of low-grade uranium ore called tailings in the process. For every ton of uranium mined, only 2.24 ounces of processed ore results. Although the company is long gone, the 71 acres of uranium mill tailings remain, untreated and exposed in the city of Shiprock. The U.S. Department of Energy now estimates that those persons residing within a half-mile radius of uranium...
Last year, the TVA, Mobil Oil, and United Nuclear Corporation submitted an environmental impact statement for a proposed uranium mine and mill complex in the eastern portion of the Navajo reservation. The BIA made arrangements for the lease in 1970, although Navajos living in the area never heard anything about the proposal until 1978. Mary C. Largo, a Navajo woman of the Dalton Pass Chapter (an area under lease), signed up as a plaintiff in the December 1978 lawsuit after drilling began on her land allotment without her permission. "I never saw any contract papers, I never put my thumbprint...
...untended leg sores from "night bugs" and the cold ground he sleeps on. Around him throbs the busy black life of Salisbury's Harari Township depot, with its battered public buses straining under loads of passengers, suitcases, food crates and chicken baskets. Hawkers, vendors and shoppers mill about, and an outdoor loudspeaker, as shrill as an air raid siren, blares steel-drum music from a nearby record shop. Far from his country home 120 miles away near the Mozambique border and with no place else to go, the refugee scarcely notices...