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Two groups challenging the Crownpoint Uranium Project (CUP) have asked the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reopen the licensing hearing for the project to consider new evidence that raises "an exceptionally grave safety issue", that NRC's standard for cleansing ground water of uranium after mining "poses a serious public health hazard."

In papers filed with the five-member Commission on March 15, Eastern Navajo Dineh Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) and Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), citing recent scientific studies and the expert testimony of a Crownpoint, N.M., physician, argued that NRC erred in incorporating into the license it issued authorizing the CUP a, secondary ground water restoration standard, for uranium that is more than 30 times the level of uranium in drinking water now linked to kidney damage in humans.

ENDAUM and SRIC asserted that NRC's ground water restoration standard for uranium of 0.44 milligrams per liter (mg/l) is unsafe because recent Canadian studies found that low levels of uranium ingested in drinking water over long periods of time leads to kidney damage in both humans and laboratory animals. The groups said the new evidence is significant enough to warrant reopening and supplementing the record of their ongoing adjudication of a January 1998 license issued by NRC to Hydro Resources, Inc. (HRI), for the CUP.

"NRC seems to think it's okay to allow HRI to pollute our drinking water," said Kathleen Tsosie, ENDAUM's administrative officer. "Uranium is a poison, and the federal government has no business letting a mining company poison our precious water supply."

HRI plans to construct and operate uranium in situ leach (ISL) mines at contiguous sites in Church Rock (Sections 8 and 17) and two sites in Crownpoint, and to convert the uranium solutions into yellowcake at a processing plant in Crownpoint. Solution mining involves extracting uranium from its host rock by injecting oxidizing chemicals into hundreds of injection wells at each site and pumping the "pregnant" solution to the surface for processing. Mining would be done in the Westwater Canyon Aquifer, which serves the drinking water needs of more than 10,000 people in Crownpoint and other Eastern Agency chapters, and is an important source of domestic and livestock water in the Church Rock-Mariano Lake area.

ENDAUM, SRIC and two Navajo individuals are Interveners in an NRC administrative hearing on HRI's license. The Commission is expected to rule in the next month on the Interveners, September appeals of a NRC judge's decision to approve mining at Church Rock Section 8 and processing in Crownpoint. No mining is occurring at any of the proposed sites.

In support of their motion to reopen the hearing record, ENDAUM and SRIC presented an affidavit from Dr. John Fogarty, a physician in Crownpoint, who testified that human and animal studies conducted in Canada in the 1990s demonstrate that uranium ingested in drinking water causes kidney damage in humans and animals at levels lower than those assumed by the NRC Staff to be safe when it set the ground water restoration standard of 0.44 mg/l.

"The NRC staff is wrong to have accepted a uranium 'cleanup' level that is at least 20 times greater than the level of uranium in drinking water that has been shown to cause kidney impairment in chronically exposed individuals," Dr. Fogarty's affidavit asserts. "The research studies that the NRC staff used as a scientific basis for the standard are outdated and flawed. More recent studies demonstrate that humans show signs of kidney damage after consuming water over long periods of time with levels of uranium as low as 0.014 mg/l."

Dr. Fogarty, who has significant epidemiology experience as a practicing physician for both state and federal health agencies, criticized the NRC staff's use of "renal [i.e., kidney] failure" as a criterion for setting a uranium standard as "medically unacceptable" in view of the "enormous spectrum of disease that occurs before renal failure." He recommended that the uranium standard be "suspended immediately" and then amended "so that the standard requires HRI to return the ground water concentration in the restored water back to base line levels."

ENDAUM's and SRIC's motion and Dr. Fogarty's written testimony noted that the NRC's uranium cleanup standard is 63 to 440 times greater than the background uranium levels in Crownpoint=92s well water and 22 times greater than the level proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") in 1991 as a national drinking water standard. Dr. Fogarty also noted that several international, national and state health and environmental agencies (including EPA) have reviewed the new literature on uranium's chemical toxicity and are lowering their existing standards or guidelines on allowable levels of uranium in drinking water.

"Uranium is dangerous at very low levels, and most regulatory agencies, with the exception of NRC, are beginning to recognize this," said Chris Shuey, an environmental health specialist with SRIC. "The Commission would be remiss to ignore the grave safety implications raised by Dr. Fogarty's testimony and the findings of the recent human health studies."

Shuey noted that reopening the record would not harm HRI's interests because the company cannot commence mining any time soon. "HRI does not have a required EPA underground injection permit for the Section 8 site, and that the current market price for uranium is $6 to $8 less than the price HRI says it would need to mine profitably," he said.

Copies of ENDAUM's and SRIC's motion and its supporting documentation can be obtained by calling the individuals listed above. Additional information on ENDAUM's and SRIC's case against the HRI mines is available by visiting the following (URL: http://www.sric.org/Uranium).