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A long term impact on the health of the local population. We used to have the largest birthrate in the nation and now we find we have the highest birth defect. And now there are fears that the Trump Administration could end the moratorium on uranium mining near the grand canyon. Environmental activists here fear the worst once that contamination happened theres no way to take it back the. Cold war uranium mining also left a toxic legacy in germany communities in what was communist east germany still face the repercussions of contamination. Just. Just. This woman is praying to her ancestors for help. Diana you call is a member of the smallest native american tribe in the u. S. The have a surprise. For them red butte hiller clenched fist mountain near the grand canyon is a sacred site diana comes here regularly to collect sage brush a plant that said to ward off evil spirits and one that the medicine woman feels in acute need of just a few hundred meters away work is underway drilling the shaft for a uranium mine. Diana fears for the future of red butte and even the mighty grand canyon. To me its really important for the world the human people to see the grand canyon because it be little to you and you begin to know how humble you have even to score because youre not. All of it. Youre just a little piece apart from when you look at the grand canyon. For tourists up above the canyon appears devoid of human life but tucked away inside a deep valley is the village of supai one of the most remote settlements in the u. S. The only way to reach it is by helicopter or on foot the nearest road is thirteen kilometers away. Matthew put to so is one of surprise five hundred residents hes angry at the u. S. Government and its backing for a resumption of uranium mining in the area. They help us and support us but i. Just changed it like im not a chapter in. U. S. History. We were being. Desecrated and. Taken advantage of. Its all if you. Dont have a supplier dreading the prospect of the uranium mine contaminating their Drinking Water. Water is in every sense an essential element of their lives. Each year the waterfalls attract twenty thousand visitors the villagers are dependent on tourism. The guardians of the grand canyon are preparing for a special ritual the group was founded in protest against a new uranium mine back in the one nine hundred eighty s. When its construction began the mine never opened for operation but it could in the near future. People within the grand canyon. One of the most sacred. How to park. Where this. Represents our identity. In times past the havasupai used to live all across the grand canyon. In the Nineteenth Century they were forced to relocate to a narrow gorge. Everything. The river and. The grand canyon these trees reproof or no reprieve to be returned to are. Together with the Environmental Organization the sierra club the havasupai have taken legal action to stop the mine from operating. In germany to uranium mining has taken its toll a toxic environmental legacy of the communist era in east germany. For example some eighty thousand tonnes of uranium were extracted here during the cold war delivered to the soviet union for Nuclear Bombs and to supply Nuclear Power plants. The valley of death was one of several dozen mines operated by a uranium Exploration Company set up by the occupying soviet union. In the one nine hundred ninety s. Your anian mining was discontinued as a consequence of german reunification the Successor Company also called visit is owned by the german state its job now is to clean up and stabilize the former mines. Many of the mine tunnels are now flooded some are being expanded in order to enable the extraction of contaminated water or improve ventilation. The team here is still use the old drills from the east german era. Sits on top of an underground network comprising four thousand two hundred kilometers of tunnels some reaching depths of almost two thousand meters. Insufficent you know cops we have a total of eighteen locals its like having a high rise building with multiple stories. And on each story theres a huge network of theres all this like and thats. And theres a huge amount of work to be done the biggest danger comes from the radioactive gas raid on among the teams jobs is to extract the air from all tunnels still open. To low pressure from the ventilation of the entire mine means that the radon polluted air can only escape at one point around one kilometer from the village. The cleanup operation was originally planned to be over by two thousand and five and cost six point six billion euros that budget is now close to being exhausted well work is expected to continue for more than another decade. But the company in charge is content. To of gotten the steel from the operations projected budget was very accurate. The figures we have now are not too far off from those originally calculated. The amount spent in todays money totals around eight billion year olds through two thousand and forty five when the shoe fits with. The kind of budget that people in arizona can only dream of. The navajo reservation to the east of the grand canyon includes around five hundred fifty abandoned mines just nine have been cleaned up or stabilized. Environmental scientist tommy rock is investigating the impact today hes taking measurements at a mine youre Monument Valley located inside the reservation as you can see it looks like theres no one living here but theres there is theres one over there theres a couple how on the side so people. To come up here and they have their lives like grease up here as well like horses cattle and sheep as well so with that theres a different type of exposure being. Happening at that time as well and with the you can still pieces or playing around as well when it rains a lot of that will be transported down below. As well for your enemies pretty solid also be carried off by water pretty easily. With devastating consequences the Indigenous People suffer incident rates for many forms of cancer that are higher than the national average. So why doesnt the u. S. Government take action tommy suspects that if the mines were located close to White Communities they would have been cleaned up years ago. Especially when it comes through the business population of people of bernardi thats where a lot of Global Environmental justice use is happening in the United States where the canaries three sleeze their girls were. Soon but were expendable which were not. And the navajo are far from the only native people to face a similar situation an estimated seventy percent of the worlds uranium deposits are located on indigenous lands. Well. Vanessa brown is one of the many navajos to have lost family members to cancer. For decades shes been fighting for change for. Our nation the Navajo Nation used to have the largest birthrate. In the nation and now we find we have the highest defect and a lot of it is due to. The strip mining of these these elements that are dangerous. To our people the land the animals and the water effects everything. Lunesta grew up on the doorstep of a uranium processing. Back then a lot of houses were built using stones laced with your rainy im from the mines people had no idea how dangerous this was. So there was really strange things that happened i had to treat them and i always water them and the little birds would fall out of the tree. And i couldnt understand. I find a little but its at the bottom of my trees and. Just certain things that light flashes of light in the night and scaring my dogs and it was like it was like. A Science Fiction movie sometimes up to. The nightmare that could soon return. Ellison get one works for the sierra club. Its the largest Environmental Organization in the us. Ellison accuses the authorities of automatically renewing the canyon mine operators old license without requiring a new Environmental Impact assessment. The mine Operator Energy fuels insists that there is no danger and that uranium mining is now conducted far more responsibly than during the cold war. I think thats ridiculous if youre in your mining today its so significantly different than it was in the past and why wont they revise their plan of operations their plan of operations as from one thousand nine hundred four theres nothing new happening at king in mind it is a Hard Rock Mine there extracting the or to the surface and trucking at to a mill exactly the way they did in one nine hundred eighty s. Theres nothing new here. The u. S. Government is eager to reduce the countrys dependency on your rainy and imports currently its Nuclear Power plants run on supplies sourced from abroad. In two thousand and seventeen Global Uranium production totaled almost sixty thousand tonnes the biggest supplier was kazakhstan with over twenty three thousand tonnes. Next is canada with just over thirteen thousand tonnes and australia with close to six thousand. The us is in one spot the country currently produces just one and a half percent. Global annual total but its number one in terms of consumption using eighteen thousand two hundred tonnes of uranium in two thousand and sixteen. Domestic production covers only a fraction of the u. S. Is demand which is why washington is determined to expand uranium exploitation. Canyon mine is said to be reopened in twenty nineteen. Energy fuels expects the price of uranium to increase to over one hundred dollars a kilo by then making mining profitable here. Alison meets up with fred tillman from the United States Geological Survey and agency that reports to the department of the interior. He wants to show her how canyon mine is being monitored. This site is out of bounds to humans at least. You can see clearly here the wildlife is moving through to get to the pile accessing that contaminated water. The Geological Agency has installed a number of measuring stations so this is our perched Groundwater Monitoring well and it monitors the quality and the amount of groundwater in the first level system so it goes down to eleven hundred feet or so about four hundred meters its still not deep enough to catch whether water whether the original groundwater is absolute and we figured if there was going to be an impact to groundwater we would probably see it in the perch but i want to first. But he admits that precious little is known about the labyrinth and groundwater network under the grand canyon we dont know if water from this area would float towards the grand canyon which is just a few miles from here or if it goes in exactly the opposite direction toward supervillains without more information well be able to predict if there were an impact or groundwater what direction that would go and how long it would take to get there but the operator doesnt want to wait for the results of any further studies. In the Mining Companies ais we dont have proof that were going to contaminate the groundwater so. Lets move forward because theres no proof that were going to do harm. In my eyes the stakes are too high weve got cranking in here weve got. Here weve got the Navajo Nation here and all of these affected people affected wildlife and its just this is too important its graeme king and this is too important. The section the region of the old east germany had a number of uranium mines. In this month in the operator injected thousands of tons of self euro cast it into mined tunnels to leach the uranium from the ore deposits. That acid is still underground and continues to extract uranium from the door. To prevent the groundwater being contaminated the bismo team has to pump the water out of the tunnels day and night. These tanks are then used to filter the uranium out of the mine water. Instead of being disposed of through Radioactive Material is sold. In the mid one nine hundred ninety s. That still amounted to six hundred tons a year by two thousand and seventeen the figure was just thirty four tons. Of what i do see in mobile unfortunately the war perhaps fortunately the quantities of uranium we are now producing each year or extremely low thats due to the decreasing concentration of the modern water so the revenues are no longer high enough to refinance the separate step of the process basically that no longer makes economic sense instead an alternative has to be strong. For the time being however the uranium produced here in germany is being sold to just one customer. The us based Nuclear Fuels corporation supplies Nuclear Power plants around the world. Where exactly the uranium from germany ends up has not been revealed. The formerly radioactive mine drainage water is cleaned in treatment plants. Rendering it safe even to be discharged into the river elbe it. In the desert lens of Arizona Water is a rare and precious commodity. One that dustin where oh does not have on tap at home which is why he has to pick up his own supplies in his car. That means a forty five kilometer trip three times a week. Around forty percent of the Navajo Nation has no running water. Destin uses one of the officially sanctioned wells where the Water Quality is subject to regular inspections but many of his people acquire their water from other nonapproved sources which have been found to contain concentrations of uranium that exceed the maximum contaminant levels for Drinking Water and the majority of the windmills are closed off or put a padlock on it so we can get the water from there. Because some of the windmills there the water the water table and the need is poison or. Contaminated by uranium arsenic order ph levels too high. So. Drinkable. Dustin is a photographer and an activist. He is also involved in the fight to stop canyon mine from reopening. Frustrated with the authorities dustin and his fellow campaigners interrupt the mine operators transportation or hauling routes. Call no is an indigenous Led Volunteer group in addition to spreading awareness of the issues they want to prevent iranian from canyon mine being transported through the middle of the reservation to a Processing Plant. Dustins grandmother cecilia jo is proud of his commitment she is the head of their family. The navajo are traditionally a matriarchal society. Cecilia jo worked in the uranium mine while still a young girl she was just eleven the first time she loaded the radioactive or on to horses with her bare hands her sole payment was food. Years later in adulthood she was diagnosed with bowel cancer she was given a one time compensation payment but no long term support. If your grandsons Campaign Fails to bring progress a dozen trucks a day hauling high grade uranium ore from canyon mine might soon be permitted to pass by cecilias settlement. And. Its a building the wind will blow the contaminated dust over to us people will breathe it in and become sick just as i did from working in the mine. I had cancer my tumour was the size of a grapefruit i dont want others to suffer the same fate. Dear amy a mining has claimed thousands of victims around the world. Including in germany. But her much in skills spent thirty seven years working for abysmal hes since been diagnosed with lung cancer. Once a year he gets a visit from stefan shepherd who works for an Occupational Health and safety association. First they check whether his oxygen apparatus is in full working order as voters sickness is an officially recognized occupational disease he qualifies for support from the association when he started working as a miner he had no idea of the hazardous nature of his work few. People outside the mine talked about the risk of getting lung cancer but you never heard a word about it from the company you couldnt see it. It could only be detected on a Geiger Counter. When it made a lot of noise you knew there was a lot of or there. Around nine and a half thousand former employees developed lung cancer as a result of working in the mines and thats all he gets are you doing with your first. Breathing compromised how far can you go when youre outside indoors to even when youre not doing anything when youre rainy im exploitation began here in the late one nine hundred forty s. The miners work was especially Hazardous Health and safety stipulations were later improved while the radiation the men were exposed to decreased. The higher the quality of your more intense the radiation. Thats the crux of the matter. So you dont need to have work in the mines for long to get sick. So. Considering that there will be hardly any miners from the one nine hundred seventy s. Onwards who suffered the same kind of harm as those who started in one nine hundred forty seven times human thoughts are. Dead likewise in the former communist east germany this much is cleaning up settling basins this served iranian Processing Plant across an area covering Thirteen Hundred hectares of land. On. The ground underneath these men is unstable under the surface is a lake of mud replete with residue from uranium processing. The team carefully dries out the land to one section at a time. They use what are called weak drains to remove the water from the underground lake so far theyve laid around seven and a half thousand kilometers of the artificial textile casing. To ensure the water flows off along the wick terrains the mud is squeezed in similar style to a sponge. Layer upon layer of sand gravel and mineral soil are then piled on top of the mud. The work here wont be finished for another ten years germany seems to have a plan for dealing with this toxic legacy the u. S. Less so. In the german approach shows one essential difference to the us the clean up operations there are primarily focused on the Processing Plants. Meanwhile little or nothing is done with the mining facility. So as a business to close with this. On the Navajo Nation reservation dustin meets around a riggs who is also a member of hall no theyre examining him now deserted settlement that had been located right next to where youre running Processing Plant. For serrano its an emotional visit. Shes reminded of her grandfather who used to live and work here. A few years ago he died of cancer alone in his kitchen. Nobody had been aware that he was sick because he said im going to have to for now i really think about it i reflect on it really brings me a lot closer to why im working. Really. Is one of the litany of tragic stories all too familiar to everyone in the Navajo Nation. Culture is really based around stories and you know prayers and songs their language and this day and age all of thats disappearing rhenium really took a lot of the elders away from us and now the stories that were going to be passing along as adults you know on to our children are stories of hurt and pain because of your opinion because of things that happened in. A few days later theres a march near the town of blending in the neighboring state of utah. The group is protesting against white mesa mill a facility that process is your rainy and Nuclear Waste from across the country and. The uranium from canyon mine is also scheduled to wind up here at some point. Here to the operator insists everything is completely safe. But the Geiger Counter suggests otherwise the radiation here is far higher than normal. And again the people in danger are native americans the ute tribe lives less than five kilometers away. Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh and the fact that its primarily Indigenous People suffering the consequences of your mania mining says dust and is not a coincidence but racism. Is in a way a cultural genocide genocide on its own terms because theyre not listening to us but are seen that were still here first of all life with. You know what i know as im disabled musically even though your answer is kill us were going to stand tall and go against it. And bring us once again. Digitally quality for more. Detail technology to help make our oldest plates and received a little inequality. Not nothing out of the jam just sometimes out but i stand up and whip it up and we should have an thinks deep into the german culture of looking at stereotypes classics but if you think this piece of country that i dont. Yes you can see peoples drama yeah. Its all out ok. You know im rachel joins me from the german sunday w. Post. Led. To. Shift hashtags. 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