A year and a half later, the former mine in Cameron, Ariz., is not fenced off to either humans or animals, and cattle keep on to roam through the site and eat grass that might be tainted with uranium and other toxic substances.“Those cattle go to auction in Sun Valley and are sold on the open market,” said Ronald Tohannie, a project manager through the Navajo advocacy group Forgotten People. “Then public eat the meat.”
The owner of Valley Livestock Auction in Sun Valley, Ariz., Derrek Wagoner, established that he buys cattle from the Navajo reservation and is aware that cattle graze on uranium mines there. He added that cattle come to him since all over the Southwest, where there are plenty of former uranium mines.There is no dispute that beef and milk since those cattle make their way into the food chain. What is not precisely known is how much radioactive material plants absorb during the soil, how much the cattle ingest by grazing on the plants and what the effect power be on humans.
Livestock grazing around the abandoned mines is ordinary throughout the Southwest, according to many environmentalists, scientists, government officials and people in the cattle business. The Colorado Plateau is mainly rich in reserves and in the former mines, which for 40 years supplied crucial materials for the nation’s cold-war nuclear weapons program.
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