They Worked Underground in the Uranium Mines. They've Been Surrounded by Death Ever Since.

“I feel so lucky,” Begay says from across the booth. His wife, Nora Begay, sits next to him. He is the only person he knows who got a double lung transplant. When his friends, coworkers and family members got sick, they died.

Leslie Begay was a uranium miner at the Church Rock 1 mine, then owned by Kerr-McGee, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like so many Navajo miners, their family members and others who live by the mines, Begay has been surrounded by premature death ever since. The U.S. uranium mining industry was built disproportionately on or near Navajo lands, at the behest of a federal government eager to quickly get materials for nuclear weapons. When the uranium market switched to supply the nuclear energy industry, companies continued on the same trajectory, with Begay’s employer deliberately targeting Navajo workers to fill a labor shortage, as revealed by corporate documents. Navajo communities were not informed of how dangerous this work was, and it has left a trail of loss — for those who worked the mines and mills, and for those who drank poisoned water and breathed poisoned air.

When the uranium market dried up, companies simply abandoned the mines, a phenomenon so common there’s a term for it: AUM, or ​“abandoned uranium mine.” Now, the mines stand as toxic monuments to America’s nuclear weapons and energy programs. People are still dying, and the abandoned mines are still not remediated. Yet the United States is pushing ahead with a $1.7 trillion plan to expand and ​“modernize” nuclear weapons, and the Trump administration is trying to restart uranium mining in New Mexico — near Navajo territory.

“They moved heaven and earth to get what they wanted when they needed it,” Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, tells me. ​“But they will not move heaven and earth to clean up the mess they left behind.”

That uranium miners have suffered staggering rates of cancer and lung disease is not in dispute. One study, comparing Navajo men living in New Mexico and Arizona from 1969 to 1993, found that working in uranium mines made Navajo men 28.6 times more likely to develop cancer. Exposure to uranium causes a host of other issues, too, including kidney impairment and cardiovascular problems.

Cancer can take 10 or 20 years to develop, as can lung disease, a timeline that companies can use to undersell the perilous nature of the work or skimp on safety measures. Leslie Begay didn’t know that uranium mining can cause dire health problems until he was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease himself, in 2015. That was decades after his eight-year stint underground; his job was to dig holes in the earth, place dynamite inside and blow them up. He draws a picture on a napkin to show me how the ore was extracted, moved around on pulleys and placed on trains. While underground, he often wore a T-shirt and jeans and sometimes a rain coat, but no protective equipment of any kind, he recalls. He was covered in dust, breathed it in and wore it like a second skin during his workday.

“You blast all that dirt, debris, everything, and the air is all dust,” Begay says. ​“By the time you come out, you have dirt all over your body.”

The federal government knew the dangers of uranium mining. One study, published in 1879, documented the deadly long-term effects of uranium mining on the border of Germany and what is now the Czech Republic; researchers discovered that 75% of the miners died from lung cancer. Yet, the AEC did not inform workers of the risks, and it declined to push for any health and safety regulations on radon, the radioactive gas created when uranium decays. States failed to enforce sufficient regulations of their own.

At the same time, the AEC conducted epidemiological studies on the miners, without their fully informed consent. Starting in 1950, the Public Health Service (PHS) began following miners — white and Navajo — to monitor their uranium exposure levels and watch for cancer and other health problems. To gain access from mine owners, the researchers agreed that PHS would not inform miners of the hazardous conditions; they simply told the miners they were studying workers’ health and said little else.

A report produced in 1995 by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, established by President Bill Clinton, acknowledged the federal government committed an ethical breach. ​“Had miners been told the true purpose of the study then, even in advance of any warnings connected with the progress of the research, it is possible the miners could have used this information to advocate for their interests,” the report states.

Kerr-McGee profited from the push to mine uranium for nuclear weapons; by the late 1970s, its focus was on commercial sale for nuclear energy. Annual corporate reports to shareholders from the time show the company specifically targeted Navajos to do the dangerous work and to fill a labor shortage. One corporate report, from 1978, states: ​“The company’s school at Church Rock, which trains Navajo Indians to be miners, continues to supply Kerr-McGee operations with manpower to help overcome a shortage of experienced underground uranium miners.”

The company’s two Church Rock mines would go on to be the third-biggest producers on the Navajo Nation, accounting for 1.3 million tons of ore before they closed in 1986.

Hood will never know for sure whether it was her years underground, or her environmental exposure, that led to her lymphoma diagnosis in 2006, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis about two years ago. ​“The thing is, we grew up there in the neighborhood where these mines were, and never did anyone approach us,” she says. Her family raised goats and herded sheep on the land. She remembers, as a child, industrial-sized trucks ​“going back and forth right [over] there.”

The abandoned Kerr-McGee mine where Hood once worked is now a pile of waste rock covered in an ostensibly protective coating of dirt. The mound — a pale, speckled gray — has not been fully remediated, though the Environmental Protection Agency says it has a plan for that, with help from the 2014 Tronox settlement. (Tronox, a chemical company spun off from Kerr-McGee, agreed to fund environmental cleanup as part of a bankruptcy reorganization.) That plan is still years away: The waste is to be moved from the mine (later owned by Kerr-McGee subsidiary Quivira Mining, whose oil and gas assets were then acquired by Anadarko Petroleum) to the Red Rocks Landfill in nearby Thoreau. That plan hinges on various permits from the state of New Mexico.

There are 523 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land, and not a single one has been fully remediated, according to the EPA’s own count. According to Chris Shuey — a senior program director and environmental health scientist at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque — there are fewer than 10 sites where the EPA is inching closer to a full cleanup.

About 100 yards away from the mound, the Red Water Pond Road Community Association is hosting its annual gathering inside a large tent, reinforced with wooden pillars. A banner stretches across, reading, ​“Protect Mother Earth and Our Communities.” The organization is made up of Navajo people who live in, or recently lived in, this area, and every year, for 46 years, its members have gathered to demand a cleanup. The convening starts at about 75 people but grows throughout the day, a mix of former uranium miners, families, environmental justice and anti-nuclear advocates and community members. The children draw on coloring books that instruct them on how to avoid playing in toxic mine sites.

Inside the tent, I meet Peterson Bell, 69, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank. He points at the Kerr-McGee mound behind us and says he can’t remember exactly which dates, but he worked there in the 1970s and 1980s, laboring under- ground: ​“At the beginning, it seemed like things would be alright. But it’s not good for you.”

Among this crowd, Hood stands out as a clear leader. It seems that nearly everyone pays their respects to her with an embrace or a closely huddled conversation. Her second bout of cancer, she says, ​“drew me to where I’m working harder on” demanding a cleanup. To do that, she must contend with a little-known disaster that took place about a half-mile away: the largest accidental release of radioactive waste in U.S. history.

About 70 people crowd around King as he speaks, some holding banners that say ​“Keep uranium in the ground” and ​“Uranium legacy remembrance and action day.”

On that July day in 1979, a disposal pond from the United Nuclear mill site, which sits right next to the Navajo reservation, had a dam failure. The spill released three times as much radiation as the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island three-and-a-half months earlier but received far less media attention. At least 93 million gallons of radioactive liquid and 1,100 tons of radioactive sludge went into the Puerco River and traveled downstream, cutting through the Navajo Nation grazing lands, close to the city of Gallup, and reaching all the way to Sanders, Ariz. By the time the waste was done traveling, it had left ​“contaminated residue over a distance of close to 100 miles,” then-Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.) said at an Oct. 22, 1979, hearing in the U.S. House.

That the dam was compromised was no secret. United Nuclear was aware of cracks as early as 1977, but it did not report these to state regulatory agencies, which the Army Corps of Engineers determined shortly after the spill. King tells the crowd he personally saw the cracks before the catastrophic failure.

King still speaks with anger about being sent to this site without a full understanding of the dangerous, long-term risks. ​“We were not told about how it can affect workers, the human body, if you are not protected,” he says, as listeners squint into the bright sun. ​“I started when I was 18.”

United Nuclear’s Northeast Church Rock mine, where King worked, was developed under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission for military purposes. By the time the spill happened, the uranium was used for commercial purposes. From 1967 until it closed in 1982, the mine was the second-highest-producing mine in the Navajo Nation, accounting for 3.5 million tons of ore.

More than a year after the spill, in 1980, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known as the federal Superfund program. The program is supposed to bring ​“potentially responsible parties” together for environmental cleanup, and United Nuclear, now a wholly owned subsidiary of GE, has contributed funds. In this case, the EPA plan would move about 1.4 million tons of ​“contaminated soil to the nearby UNC [United Nuclear] Mill Site.”

But the people I spoke with don’t like the idea of storing waste at a site already tied to a catastrophe. They want the waste off their land.

Regardless, even an imperfect cleanup plan hasn’t been implemented. I didn’t see any bulldozers or signs of imminent movement. The site looks like a place where a child could easily wander and play, or a tourist could unwittingly climb. About four miles away, on the drive out, I see someone who looks high-school-aged long-distance running on the shoulder of the road. Their route could have gone right past the site.

“Most of my family in this area — my uncles and my aunties — they all worked in the mine,” Nez says. ​“A lot of people that have lived here or worked in the mines have come down with respiratory issues. It’s affected their health. A lot of them have had heart conditions or cardiovascular issues. A lot of people came down with cancer. My auntie that used to work there, she came down with breast cancer.”

Available evidence indicates that proximity to unremediated waste — especially over the long term — poses manifold dangers to public health. One environmental health study, known as the Diné Network for Environmental Health Project, conducted from 2002 to 2012, found that proximity to uranium mine waste significantly increases incidence of kidney and cardiovascular disease. Another Navajo Birth Cohort Study, conducted from 2010 to the present, found that pregnant Navajo women have an alarming level of uranium exposure, with 26% showing levels that exceed the highest 5% of the population in the United States.

In 2003, the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo Nation started the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project, or CRUMP. Its 2007 report, in collaboration with several institutions (including the Southwest Research and Information Center), found drinking water unfit for human consumption and cooking, with elevated gamma radiation rates along public highways, on Navajo grazing lands and near homes. Davidson Kee James, a traditional Navajo practitioner who lives 10 miles away from the event tent, tells me he stores his own water.

This legacy stems from a mixture of federal weapons development and private industry. There are about 20 abandoned uranium mines in the Church Rock area; of those, 13 produced uranium before 1971, meaning the ore was used for nuclear weapons, explains Chris Shuey, from the Southwest Research and Information Center. Nez shows me a map of mines and reservation land; it’s a complex checkerboard, and it seems absurd to differentiate between pollution that’s on Navajo territory and just immediately adjacent to it.

Teracita Keyanna serves on the executive committee of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association, and she spends much of the day leading art projects and education activities about the dangers of uranium mining in the kids’ tent. She tells me she is against all uranium mining and nuclear weapons, a conviction that was driven home when she traveled to Hiroshima, in 2024, as part of a delegation from this community.

“Where I’m living has always impacted how I thought about nuclear weapons,” Keyanna says. ​“And it really doesn’t matter where they’re from; the impact is not just in that one area. The impact is everywhere, wherever transport is happening, wherever mining is happening.”

But Begay says his own medical emergency due to lung disease was the first time he clearly made the connection.

He first went to Fort Defiance Indian Hospital in 2015, at the urging of one of his granddaughters, then a teenager: ​“She looked at me and said, ​‘Papa, are you OK? Is there something wrong with you?’ I said, ​‘No, I’m OK.’ And she said, ​‘No, you’re not,’ and she dragged me to the bathroom.” He was alarmed by what he saw, and he checked himself in.

At 1 a.m. that morning, he was flown to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, the beginning of a harrowing medical journey. At one point, Begay was told he had a month to live. He faced frustrations at every turn, trying to figure out how he would pay for treatment. At one point, he was told he had to lose weight to become eligible for a lung transplant.

It was after his diagnosis that Nora Begay, his wife, began reading about the link to uranium mining. She tears up recalling the feelings of helplessness and certainty that he was going to die. He lost his job as a boiler operator at a hospital, and then the family lost their house and cattle because of the medical expenses. (They now live in Coyote Canyon, about 20 miles north of Gallup.)

As it did for Hood, Leslie Begay’s diagnosis became a call to action. He joined an effort to win restitution through the renewal and expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, known as RECA. Enacted in 1990, RECA issued one-time payments to individuals who got sick because of uranium mining or testing, reminiscent of the rare payments the U.S. military made to the families of people it deemed it had wrongfully killed in Afghanistan. However, under the original statute, miners, millers and ore transporters were only eligible if they had worked between 1942 and 1971 and had specific illnesses, such as lung cancer, lung disease, renal cancer and pulmonary fibrosis. Miners like Begay were left out.

Begay became part of a team that lobbied Congress for years. Back in 2018, before his double lung transplant, he was on oxygen and couldn’t fly. ​“So me, my son, my grandson and my granddaughter — we did a rental car,” Nora Begay recalls. They drove all the way to Washington, D.C., where Leslie Begay grew accustomed to being talked down to and ignored.

But this July, Begay and his colleagues had a shock. After years of advocacy, the federal government renewed and reformed RECA (it expired in June 2024) as part of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Now, RECA has expanded to include uranium workers who worked in 12 states, including New Mexico, through 1990. It also expanded the list of qualifying illnesses. The change means that Begay has a chance at a one-time payment, though he hasn’t received anything yet. He’s working through the application process.

Begay told me about six times he is grateful to President Donald Trump for signing the bill, even as I asked about the bill’s other measures, such as sweeping Medicaid cuts. As Feleecia Guillen, from the Institute for Policy Studies, recently noted, the RECA win ​“comes with a gut punch.” The same GOP budget bill that renews and expands RECA will take health insurance away from more than 3.9 million people in the 16 RECA-eligible states alone, after cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. That includes 103,719 people in New Mexico. Guillen estimates that 240 rural hospitals in RECA states could close.

Unlike her husband, Nora Begay says she finds it hard to celebrate Trump’s budget bill. The Navajo miners had to pass reform however they could, she says, but she works as a janitor at a clinic, and she is intimately aware of how cuts to Medicaid are going to hurt the communities she serves.

She also worries about how immigrants will be affected by a bill that allocates $170 billion toward an immigration crackdown. ​“They’re working out there in the field,” she says. ​“That’s where we get our vegetables and fruits, and they’re hard working people out there. They have family, too.”

Yet, the federal government appears to be doing the opposite. On March 20, the Trump administration signed an executive order that invoked wartime authority to increase production of ​“critical minerals,” including uranium. The administration has identified several mines in New Mexico as priorities under the FAST-41 designation, which refers to a federal initiative established 10 years ago to fast-track certain permitting. Among them are sites in or near Navajo territory. They would be the first active uranium mines in the state in more than 50 years.

The United States is expanding its funding of nuclear weapons — with successive presidential administrations backing a massive investment over the next three decades — which translates to huge annual budget increases. From 2023 to 2024, the United States saw the world’s greatest increase in spending on nuclear weapons, putting more money toward nuclear weapons than all of the other nuclear-armed countries combined, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The same GOP budget bill that expands RECA also earmarks $15 billion for nuclear ​“modernization.”

The United States is barreling ahead, even before the abandoned uranium mines have been cleaned or even the one-time payments for post-1971 miners, like Leslie Begay, have been doled out. Leona Morgan, an indigenous community organizer based in Albuquerque, tells me, ​“Across the board, folks are saying, ​‘No new mines, no new weapons, until everything has been cleaned up’ — to the community standards, not these poor Band-Aid clean-ups, but actually cleaning the soil and water and putting everything you can in permanent storage with permanent monitoring.”

Leslie Begay’s energy can be low, which often keeps him homebound. But he goes to his grandchildren’s baseball games when he can, and he breaks into a laugh when he recounts how his 3-year-old granddaughter always asks him for money by rubbing her thumb over the tip of her index finger. He wears leather, engraved suspenders and a baseball hat that says ​“Semper Fi,” the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps, which he served in during the Vietnam War. Nora Begay has long, dark hair, dons cat-eye glasses and has the habit of touching her husband on the arm when talking about him.

Leslie Begay still thinks of the people he knows who died young. ​“Lots and lots,” he says. ​“I mean many, many people, good friends. It was always sad news to hear.”

For his part, he says over and over he is thrilled to be alive: ​“It was so wonderful to breathe again. I couldn’t believe that I was saved.”

This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.