Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and her counterpart in Arizona, Governor Katie Hobbs, have called on the federal government to do more to clean up uranium contamination in their states. The two Democrats wrote a letter to the Council of Environmental Quality, a body within the Executive Office of the President.
The letter says that New Mexico and Arizona have more than 650 abandoned uranium mines that are not being addressed and that there isn't the funding necessary to clean them up.
It points out that most uranium extracted was used in the development of nuclear weapons, and contends that because it was used in federal government interests, it's incumbent on the government to help pay for cleanup.
Much of the contamination is on tribal land. In 1979, one of the biggest nuclear accidents in U.S. history happened in the Church Rock chapter of the Navajo Nation, when a dam failed and more than 1,000 tons of uranium waste flooded the Rio Puerco. The effects still linger today.
The letter requests that the federal government support state cleanup efforts, including under a state law passed in New Mexico last year.
Lujan Grisham and Hobbs want the Council on Environmental Quality to identify someone as a point of contact to work with representatives of the states and tribal communities.
They say more than two dozen federal and state agencies have overlapping jurisdictions in this work, which slows things down.
