A share of a $5.15 billion settlement related to the environmental legacy of a company acquired by Anadarko will clean up contamination from about 50 Cold War-era uranium mines on Navajo land.
The Navajo Nation and the Environmental Protection Agency will use about $1 billion to clean up areas contaminated with radioactive material from mines operated by Kerr-McGee, the EPA announced last week. The work is expected to remediate 10 percent of the abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo reservation, which covers 27,000 square miles in three southwestern states.
The settlement resolves fraudulent conveyance claims related to the spinoff of a company called Tronox that held most of Kerr-McGee's environmental liability and filed for bankruptcy in 2009. According to the EPA, it is the largest bankruptcy-related settlement for environmental cleanup ever. The settlement will also fund chemical contamination cleanup at Lake Mead and at more than 2,700 other sites across the country.