Paper Title: Radiation Detection on Abandoned Uranium Mines on the Navajo Nation

Author's name: Roshonda Shurly, Dr Sundaram Arumugam, Dr. Peter Romine

From 1944 to 1986, the United States government extracted uranium ore from the Navajo Nation reservation. The Navajo Nation is a part of northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico totaling 17,545,000 acres of land. The Navajo Nation is a beautiful and sacred homeland to over 250,000 people. Today, the Navajo Nation is scattered with over 500 abandoned uranium mines. The radiation from the uranium mine is a national health and environmental hazard to the Navajo community. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are great candidates for radiation monitoring and environmental testing contamination. For this project, we will select a radiation detector to mount onto a UAV to test the radiation levels of abandoned uranium mines. Thorough research will be conducted on what radiation detector will be used and why we chose this detector. We will also use the programming language Python to create an algorithm that will capture the radiation levels from a data set that was received from the United States Geological Survey. The United States Geological Survey collected data from a magnetometer field and the data set will be imported into python.

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