A bill that would change the dynamic between the federal government and tribal nations on the cleanup of abandoned mines received a U.S. House committee hearing on Wednesday.
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment advanced the Legacy Mine Cleanup Act of 2025, among other pieces of legislation.
The bill has bipartisan support from Arizona’s congressional delegation, including U.S. Reps. Eli Crane, Greg Stanton and Sen. Mark Kelly and the backing of Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren. A version of the bill was first introduced in Congress in 2022 but didn’t pass at that time.
The bill would codify the Office of Mountains, Deserts, and Plains within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to better track mine sites that need cleanup.
That office would coordinate mine cleanup actions between the EPA and local governments and release best practices for remediating sites like the roughly 500 abandoned uranium mines on and near the Navajo Nation.
If the House version of the bill is passed in its current form, the office would also identify “innovative technologies and reuse approaches that support and make progress toward those cleanup actions.”
Those innovative technologies could include one backed by the Wyoming-based company DISA Tech that involves harvesting uranium mine waste to recover the ore within it.
“Our technology, high-pressure slurry ablation, is a mechanical process that uses water and particle-on-particle collisions to strip uranium, radium and vanadium off the sand [of mine tailings],” Greyson Buckingham, co-founder and CEO of DISA Tech, said at the Wednesday hearing. “In EPA’s own [2023] study on the Navajo Nation, it cut contamination by more than 90%.”
But a 2025 paper from the EPA on DISA Tech’s process, also conducted on the Navajo Nation, says it “did not achieve site-specific Navajo residential cleanup goals for uranium.”
The cleanup method has faced pushback from environmental advocates, like the group Dooda DISA, who say it’s still experimental, uses too much water and doesn’t fully clean up contamination.
On its Facebook page, Dooda DISA writes that high-pressure slurry ablation “directly conflicts with the 2005 Diné Natural Resources Protection Act banning uranium mining.”
Besides looking into new remediation methods, the bill would also give tribes funding for cleaning up abandoned hardrock mines.
The Government Accountability Office estimates there are about 140,000 such mines in the U.S.
The committee also reviewed a bill that would task the EPA with creating a national critical minerals recovery strategy within two years.
Buckingham told the committee he and DISA Tech support that bill, known as the CHARM Act, in addition to the Legacy Mine Cleanup Act of 2025.
