February 18th, 2010 Posted in Green Earth News, Progressive Politics, Vermont Blog | No Comments »
With the debate on nuclear energy coming to a peak, we hear much talk about the safety (or lack of safety)of a nuclear power plant, and and how we might deal with nuclear waste, but often neglected in the debate is discussion of uranium mining. That’s because there’s not much to debate about it. It’s nasty. While nuclear advocates will tout its safety and say “not a single person has died from nuclear power,” this is ignoring nuclear energy’s dirty little secret: Uranium mining kills people.
Below is a collection of articles, studies, and links to information that documents the deaths and illnesses directly related to uranium mining. Hopefully people will stop ignoring this important issue and it will become part of the debate.
During the 1950s, many Navajos in the U.S. became uranium miners, as many uranium deposits were discovered on Navajo reservations. A statistically significant subset of these early miners later developed small cell carcinoma after exposure to uranium ore. Radon-222, a natural decay product of uranium, has been shown to be the cancer-causing agent.[51] Some American survivors and their descendants received compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990. More….
A French state-owned company mines uranium in northern Niger where mine workers are not informed about health risks, and analysis shows radioactive contamination of air, water and soil. The local organization that represents the mine workers, spoke of “suspicious deaths among the workers, caused by radioactive dust and contaminated groundwater.” More….
Engineers say cleaning up the mill tailings at a single site, the defunct Atlas mill on the banks of the Colorado River just outside of Moab, could cost $300 million… families of those who did not survive the effects of prolonged exposure to radiation are not laughing. The dead and dying include miners and mill workers, innocent children who found mill tailings to be an inviting sand box, mothers who swept and dusted the wind-borne radioactive dust that filtered into their homes. Chip Ward, an environmental activist and author of the book “Canaries on the Rim,” argues the U.S. government officials knowingly and willfully sacrificed rural Utahns’ health and safety in their urgency for nuclear superiority. More….
HEALTH DANGERS OF URANIUM MINING, by The British Columbia Medical Association.
“excess deaths from lung cancer among two groups of European miners had been associated with relatively high concentrations of radon in the mine atmosphere. In that same year … conclusions were drawn that prolonged breathing of air containing a high concentration of radon, may have caused what was estimated at that time to be a 30-fold increase in the incidence of lung cancer” Full Report…
And so we have now discovered yet a third category of documented and scientifically accepted harmful effects of radiation and that is mental retardation in children who were irradiated while still in the womb. . . .
When we extract uranium from the ground, we dig up the rock, we crush it and we leave behind this finely pulverized material — it’s like flour. In Canada we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste, called uranium tailings. As Marie Curie observed, 85 percent of the radioactivity in the ore remains behind in that crushed rock. How long will it be there? . . . . Well, it turns out that the effective half-life of this radioactivity is 80,000 years. That means in 80,000 years there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as there is today.
In addition, as the tailings are sitting there on the surface, they are continually generating radon gas. Radon is about eight times heavier than air, so it stays close to the ground. It’ll travel 1,000 miles in just a few days in a light breeze. And as it drifts along, it deposits on the vegetation below the radon daughters, which are the radioactive byproducts that I told you about, including polonium. So that you actually get radon daughters in animals, fish and plants thousands of miles away from where the uranium mining is done. It’s a mechanism for pumping radioactivity into the environment for millennia to come, and this is one of the hidden dangers.
(from URANIUM: Known Facts and Hidden Dangers; THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992)
And let’s not forget, that uranium mining often takes place in areas where impoverished people are taken advanatage of, and have no legal recourse to prevent it. Native American land and third-world nations are often targeted for uranium mining because no one with power or money wants it happening in their backyard.
I could go on but I invite those who are not yet convinced, to do their own research. A quick Google search will give you many more articles and links like this. Like many, I was not familiar with this problem until I looked into it myself because the media seems to only discuss nuclear waste and nuclear power plant safety.
But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not just the safety of of the plant, and it’s not just a matter of finding a good way to store the waste. Nuclear energy, in particular uranium mining, kills people.
People often ask, is there enough vegetable oil to replace all our petroleum needs? Is there enough farmland to grow the vegetables required? The short answer is no. We could certainly put a dent in it but if we tried to produce all the fuel we need with vegetables, we’d run out of room to grow our food crops.
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