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Trucks will once again carry uranium ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine near Grand Canyon to the White Mesa Mill in southern Utah after the Navajo Nation announced a new agreement with Energy Fuels establishing conditions for hauling across the Navajo reservation.

Energy Fuels began mining operations at Pinyon Plain in January 2024 against the opposition of local tribes and conservation advocates. When the company began transporting ore across the reservation in late July 2024 without advance notice, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren issued an temporarily prohibiting any further ore shipments without an agreement between the tribe and the company. (Under the federal doctrine of preemption, the tribe cannot completely ban the transport of radioactive or hazardous materials over the highways.)

Now, after six months of negotiations, an agreement is in place. Uranium ore hauling will resume before the end of February, according to Curtis Moore, Energy Fuel's senior vice president for marketing and development. Around three to five truckloads of ore will cross the Navajo Nation daily at first, and the volume is expected to rise to about 12 shipments per day for the remaining life of the mine -- estimated to be anywhere between two and six years.

The agreement limits hauling to a preestablished route that includes Highways 89, 190 and 191, or designated alternatives. It allows uranium haul trucks to cross Navajo Nation lands only between 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, and prohibits hauling during holidays, fairs or other Navajo celebrations. Energy Fuels is required to provide a transportation schedule at least two weeks in advance.

Building bridges

“We were looking, No. 1, for the establishment of good communication. That’s going to be key to this,� said Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency (NNEPA).

The agreement also includes a $1.2 million one-time payment from Energy Fuels and ongoing payments at a rate of 50 cents per pound of processed uranium produced at White Mesa, According to Etsitty, the payments support the tribe’s inspection and monitoring of hauling activities as well as public outreach.

“Now that we have this agreement in place, we’re going to go out and talk directly to the 10 chapters along the haul route and make sure they have an understanding of what we’re going to be doing under this agreement,� he said.

Preparations and training for resumed hauling activity will extend to Navajo police, fire and emergency medical services, Etsitty noted.

“We’re just going to continue to try to answer everyone’s questions and seek to use the resource base we now have in this agreement to continue to improve capacity for emergency preparedness and emergency response at the local levels,� he said.

Moore said the agreement reflected the mining company's desire to build a strong relationship with the Navajo Nation.

“There’s already very, very strict federal regulations on ore haulage -- which we comply with,� Moore said. “But in recognition of the historic trauma and the historic damage that Navajo people endured from back in the '40s, the '50s, the '60s related to uranium, we’re agreeing to do even more.�

“We are willing to go not only above and beyond federal law, but we’re actually going above and beyond Navajo law to just try to build this relationship and try to build this trust among the Navajo people that we’re actually their partners, versus the adversary that some activists have tried to make us out to be,� he added.

Under one provision of the new agreement, Energy Fuels will remove 10,000 tons of uranium-bearing mine waste from abandoned mines within the reservation and transport that waste material to the White Mesa Mill.

“This is going to allow some of these cleanups to proceed much quicker than they otherwise would have,� Moore said.

He added: “It’s a gesture of good faith. It’s going to cost us a couple million dollars just to do that. We’re hopeful that we can be involved in some of the additional cleanups that are ongoing and be compensated for our services.�

There are hundreds of abandoned mine sites on Navajo land dating back to the Cold War uranium boom, and some of the largest have as much as 1,000,000 tons of waste material each, Etsitty said. Still, he called the 10,000-ton removal commitment from Energy Fuels “a very welcome opportunity.�

NNEPA has not yet decided where to direct that removal but is considering some of the smaller abandoned mines, where the total volume of waste material is around 10,000 tons.

“If we can match that up with this commitment, then we might be able to get one mine completely cleaned up,� Etsitty said.

Other provisions of the agreement cover insurance, driver qualification and training for the company's contractor, Hammond Trucking, as well as emergency response procedures in the case of an ore spill.

While acknowledging that fears about environmental contamination and radioactivity will persist both on the Navajo Nation and in Flagstaff, Moore insisted that the transportation would be safe.

“We’ve hauled hundreds of thousands of tons of uranium ore in the vicinity -- not necessarily through Flagstaff, but certainly north and through the Navajo Nation -- with no spills, no incidences, no environmental damage, no health issues or anything like that,� Moore said.

“People that live along the route or that drive along that route will receive zero dose of radiation from our trucks. Zero,� he emphasized.

Opposition persists

Though the agreement ends the legal dispute between Energy Fuels and the Navajo Nation, other tribes have also challenged the company’s operations. The Havasupai Tribe, which relies on an aquifer that extends below Pinyon Plain Mine, has fought the resumption of uranium mining for decades. (At the time of publication, the Havasupai Tribal Council had not responded to a request for comment. Energy Fuels contends that the portion of the Redwall-Muav Aquifer located beneath the mine does not feed springs on the Havasupai Reservation, an assessment by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.) The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, meanwhile, has , concerned about the potential for contamination and health impacts nearby.

Amber Reimondo, energy director for Grand Canyon Trust, said in a statement, “We're pleased for the Navajo Nation that it has reached an agreement addressing the Nation’s objections to transporting uranium ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine across its lands. Yet broader problems with the Pinyon Plain Mine and the White Mesa Mill remain, and in their objections to the mine and mill, the affected communities and tribes � including the Havasupai Tribe, the Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe � will continue to have our support.�

Opposition remains within the Navajo Nation. Leona Morgan, a Diné activist and co-founder of the anti-nuclear group Haul No!, is disappointed and “a little infuriated� by news of the agreement.

“The need, the urgency that we have for uranium cleanup, that should never be connected to new production of radioactive wastes,� Morgan said.

Individual Navajo communities, she added, “have basically been held hostage by the federal government waiting for these cleanups,� and over the course of decades have become resigned to accepting “bad cleanup plans.�

“Now it’s going to the level of our nation,� she said.

The agreement helps remove some waste materials from Navajo lands, but in doing so, it contributes to “creating the biggest radioactive waste storage dump in the United States� at White Mesa, on the ancestral homelands of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Morgan said.

“What we see in this negotiation,� she said, “is setting the stage for a lot more production down the road.�

Morgan is also not convinced the agreement does enough to protect communities and the environment along the route. If a driver were incapacitated and unable to call for an emergency response, bystanders at the scene might not know how to respond safely, she suggested: “It’s not guaranteed that people on the ground are even going to know what to do or who to call.�

It was at least slightly encouraging, she said, that the Navajo Nation was able to make Energy Fuels come to the negotiating table and extract any concessions at all.

But the company’s claim to being a “partner� rings false to her. Regardless of any agreement with the government, “Energy Fuels is not a partner to the people,� she said. “We don’t trust uranium companies.�

The settlement is “not the best outcome, but � it’s going to push us to do even more, to educate more, to hold our government accountable,� Morgan said.

Ultimately she believes that the federal government should be responsible for closer oversight of uranium mining companies. Referencing the federally funded uranium boom that led to the proliferation and abandonment of mines on tribal land, she said Indigenous nations “have a huge charge, a weight on their shoulders, of all of the work they have to do because of the problems imposed and created first by the federal government.�

No community wants uranium waste nearby, she said, and the only way to avoid generating more of that waste is to scale back the uses of nuclear power.

“We wouldn’t need uranium if we didn’t have nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. So we have to look at the bigger picture outside of the [Navajo] Nation,� Morgan said.

When Energy Fuels first resumed operations at Pinyon Plain in early 2024, uranium prices had spiked to a 16-year high, driven in part by international commitments to build additional nuclear reactors to replace fossil fuels. Since then, prices have dropped -- from a spot price of over $100 per pound to around $70 per pound. Moore acknowledged that prices were “significantly� down.

“But it’s not really affecting us too much, because we have contracts to sell this material to U.S. nuclear power plants,� he said. “It’s still going to be a good mine for us.�