A Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management program has identified 360 abandoned uranium mines on tribal lands across the western U.S. and is working with other government agencies to assess the safety and environmental risk posed by the sites, Legacy Management said in a press release this month.
About 96% of the sites identified by the Defense-Related Uranium Mine (DRUM) program and cooperating federal, state and tribal agencies are located on Navajo Nation land, according to the Dec. 15 release. The mines once produced uranium ore for defense-related activities of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, a DOE predecessor agency.
The DRUM program will share preliminary screening information and other data with federal land agencies and state abandoned mine land programs, in order to determine which sites pose the most risk.
Field work on the DRUM program started in 2017 following a 2014 report to Congress that said roughly 4,225 mines extracted uranium ore for the government between 1947 and 1970. Many of these mines were believed to pose a threat to human health and the environment, although the report said the scope of the problem was unknown.
The first phase of the drum program started in 2017 with an inventory of old mines on public lands, the second phase or “campaign” is underway now with the tribal lands while the third will focus on private lands, Legacy Management said. As of this month, nearly 1,800 old mine sites have been catalogued. Work was slowed the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the DOE office.
The DRUM program will not duplicate U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleanup under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) or Superfund, but it will work with EPA to fill in information gaps on mine sites, according to the release.
Information gathered to date indicates about 60% of the abandoned sites contain physical hazards, such as unprotected mine entrees, according to a DOE website on the program.
The entire DRUM information-gathering effort should be complete in fiscal 2026, Legacy Management said in the release.
