Drive for Nuclear Power Boosts Uranium Industry — And Tribal Health Concerns in Southwest
WHITE MESA, Utah — On a hot April day, Malcolm Lehi maneuvered his Jeep Wrangler over a rough dirt road past junipers and sagebrush in search of Entrance Spring on land long connected to his tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute.
The cool, mossy spring lies just across the highway from White Mesa Mill, the nation’s only remaining conventional uranium mill, which produces yellowcake for nuclear power fuel.
For decades, the mill has sparked debate over whether radioactive contamination threatens human health by getting into the water and the air. Concerns run especially deep in the White Mesa Ute Community, where Lehi and about 200 members of his tribe live some 5 miles south of the facility.
State regulators and the company that owns the mill contend that any pollution associated with it is contained. That’s little consolation to nearby tribal members, who — aware of uranium’s deadly legacy across the Colorado Plateau — have raised questions about the potential spread of toxic waste. Many won’t drink the local water, relying on bottled water instead.
Now the tribe’s concerns have taken on new urgency as the U.S. pushes to revive domestic uranium production. A federal law, passed in 2024, bans imports of Russian uranium by 2028, increasing pressure to develop domestic fuel supplies. President Donald Trump set a goal to quadruple U.S. nuclear energy capacity by 2050. He issued orders to prioritize mining on federal lands and fast-track approval of mining projects. The Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah, for instance, zipped through federal environmental review in 11 days, to the dismay of local tribes who were given one week to offer input.
Trump’s goal of quadrupling nuclear power capacity will be hard to meet, because it would require constructing more reactors — which are difficult to build and often meet local opposition, said David Hart, a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. But data centers and rising electricity demand have intensified interest in nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source, he said. And more states are opening the door to it.
So the effort to obtain the key ingredient, uranium, is underway.
The White Mesa Mill, built in 1980 near what is now Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, is a focal point of this latest uranium boom — and the tensions between local tribal concerns and national economic interests. Increased demand draws a steady flow of trucks carrying uranium ore to the mill from regional mines, including one near the Grand Canyon where the Havasupai Tribe lives. That ore is trucked through the Navajo Nation. And the mill plans to expand its waste storage, as well.
A former tribal councilmember, Lehi is part of a growing opposition that includes members of the Havasupai and Navajo (Diné) tribes, who are now linked by the uranium trucking routes passing through their lands. The Havasupai and Ute Mountain Ute tribes share concerns that toxic wastewater from uranium mining and milling may move through the ground and poison drinking water for future generations.
A History of Distrust
One spring morning in White Mesa, Yolanda Badback gazed out an open door not far from the highway and watched three uranium trucks drive by.
“There goes another one,” Badback said with a tone of exhaustion. She is a Ute Mountain Ute member and leader of the White Mesa Concerned Community advocacy group that has been fighting the mill.
The mill receives 10 to 15 trucks each weekday, said Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development at Energy Fuels, which has owned the facility since 2012. The majority pass through White Mesa.
The mill’s business is picking up after a quiet 15 years, Moore said. The White Mesa Mill produced 1 million pounds of yellowcake last year; the company plans to more than double that this year, he said. The mill has also diversified into processing radioactive waste from as far away as Estonia and Japan, and received a $725 million conditional loan commitment from the Defense Department to scale up its domestic processing of rare earth elements.
The new rare earths business alone could create 100 permanent jobs, Moore said. About half of the mill’s 105 workers are Indigenous; Moore estimated that no more than two belong to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
“When it comes to tribes in the area, I do very much understand their skepticism of uranium,” Moore said. “They’ve been lied to before.”
A uranium boom driven by the U.S. government from the 1940s through the 1980s, much of it concentrated around the Four Corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, exposed miners to heightened rates of mortality from lung and other cancers. Federal reviews found that the miners, many of them Navajo (Diné), were not warned about radiation risks even after government scientists understood the dangers. Mining companies left behind thousands of abandoned waste sites that have leached contamination into surrounding soil and water, including over 500 spots on and near the Navajo Nation.
But Moore said things have changed a lot since the 1950s. He said workers today are exposed to 15% to 20% of allowable radiation limits, and outside the mill it’s “effectively zero.”
Government agencies and Energy Fuels officials have said there’s no evidence that the mill is affecting White Mesa’s drinking water supply, which comes from a deep aquifer protected by a thick rock barrier known as an aquitard.
“It really is the perfect site for a uranium mill,” Moore said.
Scott Clow, environmental programs director of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, said that deep aquifer does have quality issues — including arsenic, iron, and manganese — but the public drinking water is filtered and safe to drink.
Adam Wingate, uranium recovery manager at the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said he understands why some residents are concerned. White Mesa is downslope in terms of underground water flow from the uranium mill.
If locals hear about the plume of contamination in a different, shallower aquifer beneath the mill — even if it’s not the source of their drinking water — and their own water tastes funny, “that’s a scary spot to be in,” he said. But based on available evidence, Wingate said, locals’ “health is not at risk because of the mill.”
Even so, Lehi and Badback said that the tap water smells of sulfur and has a milky color, and that people in White Mesa typically don’t drink it.
“I don’t trust it,” said Badback, whose family has been fighting the mill for decades. “My main goal is to shut the mill down.”
An annual spiritual walk and protest sponsored by Badback’s group has grown over the past decade amid deep distrust rooted in uranium mining’s history. Much of the opposition centers on the mill’s toxic waste, which is stored in five lined pits called tailings cells occupying 284 acres of land.
Badback vows to fight expansion plans that include new tailings cells located about a quarter-mile closer to the White Mesa community than the current ones. Moore said the cells will be triple-lined per modern standards.
“They want to expand south towards my reservation,” Badback said. “That’s the reason why I am standing up and doing whatever I can to stop that from happening.”
Concerns About Air Quality
At a No Kings rally in March in Moab, about 80 miles north of White Mesa, Badback gave a speech and staffed a table offering T-shirts and information.
“No Uranium,” the T-shirts read. “Protect White Mesa Ute Community.”
In 2021, her tribe passed a resolution stating that the White Mesa Mill “has had severe health impacts on the residents of White Mesa and should cease entirely.”
While their psychological stress is palpable, other health effects have been hard to prove.
A 2023 federal health assessment concluded that radiation levels measured at the tribe’s air monitor in the center of White Mesa from 2013 to 2019 were unlikely to harm human health. But the authors said they could not evaluate whether the mill’s radon emissions could affect bordering properties or residents. They recommended that the tribe collect air samples closer to the mill, during times of heightened mill activity.
In December 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency found the mill was violating the Clean Air Act by failing to cover one of its tailings cells with liquid to limit emissions of radon, a known cause of lung cancer. The EPA called the violation “egregious in nature and duration” and temporarily barred the mill from receiving waste from Superfund cleanup sites.
The mill corrected the problem, according to state regulators, and passed its latest air quality review in 2025.
Still, some White Mesa residents remain uneasy. Badback and Lehi complained of odors, which they attribute to the mill, that smell like chemicals or rotten eggs. She has raised concerns about air quality and rates of cancer and asthma, which are being explored by a University of Utah health survey.
Moore denied that any odors from the mill could be smelled beyond the mill parking lot.
Utah air quality officials said the state does not conduct ambient air monitoring in White Mesa and does not regulate odors.
Watching the Water
That spring day, Lehi continued to look for Entrance Spring. On the horizon lay the silhouette of Sleeping Ute Mountain, a landmark of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, said to be the body of a great warrior god.
Along the way, Lehi pointed out a circle of stones that he thought looked like an ancestral burial site. After parking the Jeep, he walked down a faint trail through a lush grove of willows and found his way into a streambed that he reckoned would lead to the spring.
The tribe doesn’t rely on the spring for drinking water. But it’s one of the seeps and springs that the tribe, the state, and the company monitor, because they offer clues to whether the mill’s waste ponds are leaking into a less protected aquifer.
In the late 2000s, an EPA report found elevated contamination by radionuclides — atoms that emit radiation as they decay — at Entrance Spring. EPA water samples found that uranium concentrations at times exceeded the federal drinking water standard. EPA and U.S. Geological Survey fieldwork suggested the uranium at Entrance Spring came not from leaking waste ponds but from dust that blew off the mill’s ore storage pads.
The latest tests from 2025 showed Entrance Spring had uranium levels at 22.5 micrograms per liter (µg/L) — within the federal drinking standard of 30 µg/L but still elevated.
Clow said the tribe continues to keep a close eye on the seeps and springs.
“We’re concerned about the pollution of those springs,” he said. “We are looking towards many generations in the future here.”
Clow is also closely watching the Burro Canyon Aquifer, which lies beneath the mill’s toxic waste cells and feeds the local springs. A plume of chloroform and another of nitrates already pollute the aquifer, said Wingate, with the state. He said Energy Fuels is pumping out the contamination.
When contaminants increase, it’s hard to prove whether they stemmed from natural causes or mill activity, since substances such as sulfate and manganese occur naturally in the local bedrock. So Clow, the company, and state officials continually debate whether the tailings ponds are leaking. What’s not in dispute is that the mill produces radioactive waste — and once that exists, it can linger for tens of thousands of years.
Lehi followed the stream to where it ends in a curved grotto — the site of Entrance Spring. Water oozed from a rock face into a pool, offering cool relief from the desert. Lehi looked around with wonder at the dripping green moss. A descendant of medicine men, Lehi said he feels a duty to protect the landscape as his ancestors did, even if the tribe doesn’t currently use this spring for drinking water.
“Water is life,” Lehi said, “because that’s where we all began.”
This article was supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.