In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit decided El Paso Natural Gas Co. v. United
States, No. 12-5156 (D.C. Cir. Apr. 4, 2014). The decision
narrowly interprets the government's duty to remediate uranium
waste sites and toxic dumps located on tribal lands, and sets a
high bar for Indian tribes to assert breach of trust claims against
the federal government.
The case involved historical contamination on three sites on
Navajo and Hopi land near Tuba, Arizona, including a former uranium
processing mill site and two waste dumps, one of which had been
operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs ("BIA"). El
Paso Natural Gas Company, the successor-in-interest to a former
operator of the uranium mill site, filed claims against the United
States under the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of
1978 ("Mill Tailings Act") and the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act ("RCRA"). The Navajo Nation ("the
Tribe") intervened as a
