Opinion | Protecting the Navajo Nation from the new uranium rush

Protecting the Navajo Nation from the new uranium rush

By Tommy Rock, Ph.D.

Editor’s note: Dr. Tommy Rock is from Oljato-Monument Valley, Utah. He is an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University in the School of Earth Science and Sustainability and the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. Rock has spent his career documenting the impacts of uranium mining on Indigenous lands and advocating for environmental justice.

As global conversation shifts toward nuclear energy as a solution to climate change, a familiar shadow is once again stretching across the Southwest. For the 170,000 residents of the Navajo Nation, uranium mining is not a theoretical debate. It is a lived history of broken promises, contaminated water, and a legacy of loss. If we are to discuss a “nuclear future,” we must first demand justice and safety for the communities that have already paid the highest price.

The environmental and health hazards linked to uranium are not relics of the past. My work with communities such as Sanders, Cameron, Oljato, among others, has shown that abandoned sites – remnants of a 20th-century boom – continue to leach arsenic and uranium into the aquifers our elders and children rely on. We see the toll in higher rates of kidney disease and lung cancer. We also see it in the “Navajo Birth Cohort Study,” which found heavy metals in newborns’ systems.

The desecration of our land and water is an ongoing crisis. To prevent history from repeating itself, we must adopt a comprehensive management approach that prioritizes human life over corporate profit.

To read the full article, please see the Feb. 19, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.

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