The Rocky Mountain News is taking an in-depth look at how Navajo uranium miners are faring in receiving compensation from the U.S. government decades after their work.

The story says many uranium workers are by law supposed to be compensated automatically through a program created eight years ago. It compensates workers who sacrificed their health, and sometimes their lives, as they labored amid highly toxic and top-secret materials used to build nuclear weapons.

But the paper reports:

Many of the Navajo were compensated $100,000 by a previous program created in 1990 and were to be automatically eligible for the new one, so their total benefits would rise to the current standards.

Instead, the Navajos have joined other former nuclear workers in fighting a different cold war, this time against their own government.

The story continues:

A Rocky Mountain News investigation found that the compensation program has become so complex and adversarial that even claims that by law were to be automatically approved — the Navajo being a striking example — are being stonewalled.

Only one in four sick workers or their survivors has been compensated, while millions of tax dollars have been spent redoing faulty work, including repeatedly rewriting technical reports, re-examining old exposure records that workers say are wrong and reopening denied claims only to deny them again.

Uranium mining has left a legacy of health problems across the Navajo nation and federal agencies are just now coordinating efforts to try to clean the mess up.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which wrote a series on the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajos, the nation’s largest tribal homeland, which encompasses parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, contains about 1,000 abandoned uranium mines and four old processing mills.

The paper goes on:

From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for nuclear bombs. After 1971, utilities also bought uranium for nuclear power plants.

"The mine operators often left behind open tunnels, shafts and piles of radioactive waste. Federal inspectors knew of the hazards but seldom intervened. Meanwhile, Navajo cancer rates doubled and certain birth defects increased."

One estimate placed at 10,000 the number of people who worked in uranium mining in the United States from the late 1940s into the 1980s, with a disproportionate percentage of the workers being American Indians because of the location of the mining areas, according to an article in September 2007 edition of American Journal of Public Health.