Women who fought mining waste on reservation dies at 65

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - A woman who fought to clean up the legacy of uranium mining on the Spokane Indian Reservation died on New Year’s Day.

The Spokesman-Review reports that Deb Abrahamson died of cancer, which she attributed to the very pollution she devoted much of her life to fighting.

The 65-year-old Abrahamson was born in Nespelem, on the Colville Indian Reservation, on March 15, 1955, but she spent much of her life on the nearby Spokane reservation, where Dawn Mining Co. had opened the Midnite uranium mine a year before her birth.

In 1994, Abrahamson learned of a plan to ship more radioactive waste to the shuttered Dawn mill site. She joined Dawn Watch and helped stop the plan to add to the ecological disaster on the border of the Spokane reservation.

That was only the beginning of what would become a 25-year campaign to hold government officials and Dawn Mining accountable for dealing with the company’s waste. Dawn Mining processed some 58 million cubic feet of ore and produced 13 million pounds of “yellowcake,” a concentrated form of uranium that can be enriched and used in nuclear reactors and weapons, at the mine.