Well Water in Cibola County, New Mexico

The Homestake Mining Company Superfund site: real, ongoing, and still active

About 5.5 miles north of the Village of Milan sits the former Homestake Mining Company uranium mill, which processed ore during the Cold War-era boom that made Grants "the uranium capital of the world." The mill stored liquid waste from processing in large, unlined tailings ponds; that waste seeped into the shallow alluvial aquifer beneath and downgradient of the site, contaminating groundwater with uranium and other radionuclides. The site has been under U.S. EPA Superfund oversight for decades, and it remains an open, actively studied cleanup site today -- EPA has been running a multi-phase back-diffusion groundwater study (Phase I completed in 2024, Phase II running into 2025, Phase III beginning late 2025 and continuing into early 2026), and Homestake itself has concluded that fully remediating the groundwater to state protection standards is unlikely, and is instead preparing an application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an Alternate Concentration Limit -- essentially, a request to leave the contamination in place at a higher permitted level rather than clean it up further.

The contamination isn't confined to the mill site itself. Independent 2005 sampling by the New Mexico Environment Department and EPA of residential wells in the area found contaminants in 33 of 34 wells tested, with elevated uranium specifically in 21 of them. Reporting has also identified the San Andres-Glorieta aquifer -- described as the last remaining clean groundwater source for Milan, many private well owners, and the Pueblos of Laguna and Acoma -- as under threat from converging contamination plumes tied to the broader Grants Mining District's roughly 85 legacy uranium mines and four mill sites, not just the Homestake site alone.

Homestake's response: buying out and demolishing homes rather than fully cleaning the water

Rather than achieving a full water-quality cleanup, Homestake concluded around 2020 that remediating the contaminated groundwater to drinking-water standards in the affected subdivisions -- Murray Acres and Broadview Acres among them -- was not feasible, and the company instead began offering to buy out and demolish homes in the most affected areas after elevated indoor radon levels were also documented in some homes. Independent reporting (ProPublica, High Country News, and others) has documented long-term health concerns in these communities, including elevated rates of thyroid disease and cancer among residents. This is directly relevant to a land buyer: a property inside or near the plume boundary may already have been through this buyout process, may be eligible for it, or may simply be a property whose well water a prospective buyer should not assume is safe without independent testing -- regardless of what the seller believes or has been told historically.

What to actually do before relying on a well near Grants or Milan

1. Check the parcel's location against the EPA Homestake Mining Company Superfund Site boundary and plume maps (available through EPA's site profile page) before assuming a property outside Grants or Milan proper is unaffected -- the plume geometry, not city limits, determines exposure.
2. Have any existing well independently tested for uranium and gross alpha/radionuclide activity, not just standard bacteriological and mineral content -- a standard basic well-water test package often does not include radionuclide screening by default.
3. Ask NMED's Ground Water Quality Bureau (which maintains its own Homestake site page) and the EPA Region 6 Superfund program directly whether the specific parcel or subdivision has been part of any monitoring, buyout, or remediation program, and request any available historical testing data for that address.
4. If the property is in or near Murray Acres, Broadview Acres, or another subdivision identified in this contamination history, ask specifically whether a Homestake buyout offer was ever made for that property and, if so, why it wasn't accepted -- this is directly relevant to resale value and habitability, not just an environmental footnote.
5. Don't treat a functioning, currently-used well as proof of safe water -- given the documented multi-decade timeline and the company's own conclusion that full remediation isn't achievable, water quality here should be verified fresh rather than assumed from a neighbor's or prior owner's experience.