Tagged: tribes

In a February letter to the Department of Energy, Gov. Matt Mead expressed concern that the passive handling of uranium contamination on the Wind River Reservation might not be living up to the DOE’s remedial action plan.

The DOE asserted that the site would clean itself up after 100 years, and despite that uranium tailings were removed from the site decades ago, spikes in uranium were measured in DOE monitoring wells in 2010.

“My view is ‘hey, it’s in the state of Wyoming, it’s a state issue’,” says Mead. There is, in my mind, some confusion or at least doubt on how this last years flooding impacted that and whether or not this 100 year remediation process is accurate.”

In the wake of a congressional hearing over a draft report by the Environmental Protection Agency that links hydraulic fracturing with water contamination in the town of Pavillion, the Wind River Tribes are pushing to take a bigger role in the investigation.

“It’s critically important that we really get into the center of these discussions, that we make sure that our sovereignty and our jurisdiction is not infringed upon in any way and that we make sure that our Wind River Environmental Quality Department and our unique legal and political relationship with the United States government is upheld in a manner that supports and upholds our jurisdiction and our authority,” says Eastern Shoshone Business Council Wes Martel.