Japan, US activists condemn secret transfer of nuclear waste to uranium mill near tribal lands

The Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, announced on June 11 that newly discovered documents had shown that Energy Fuels Inc had imported the waste from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), arriving on January 16.

The waste – uranium ore and ion-exchange resin with absorbed uranium – had been shipped across the Pacific to the port of Everett, in Washington state, and transported by road to the Energy Fuels’ uranium mill at White Mesa. The facility was already controversial as it is less than 2km from Bears Ears National Monument and close to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s ancestral lands.

In a statement provided to This Week in Asia, Tim Peterson, cultural landscapes director for the Grand Canyon Trust, said, “This latest shipment from Japan shifts the burden of Japan’s radioactive legacy from Japanese citizens to the people of White Mesa.

“If the mill’s operators are getting paid to receive this shipment from Japan, it’s not for processing uranium, but for disposing of waste the Japanese people don’t want near their communities.”

“While the mill may extract a small amount of uranium from these materials, more than 99 per cent of them will likely end up buried in the waste pits at the White Mesa Mill along with the more than 700 million pounds [350,000 tonnes] of radioactive waste already there,” Peterson added.

The US and Japanese companies have not revealed the amount paid to process and dispose of the waste, although the trust has confirmed that Japan paid the mill company US$5.8 million in 2005 to take delivery of 500 tonnes of soil contaminated with radioactivity.

The transfer of the waste to the US has not been reported in the Japanese mainstream media.

“I was not aware of this