Nuclear power and reprocessing plants are leaving growing stockpiles of radioactive waste around the planet which will threaten the health of both people and planet for hundreds of thousands of years. But so does uranium mining, at great human and financial cost now and the future, a factor usually ignored in the debate about continuing with nuclear power.

Miners
Excessive levels of disease in miners were first reported in Schneeberg, Germany in 1546 and continued for several centuries. In 1879 it was demonstrated that about half of the cases were lung cancer, giving the miners a lung cancer rate four times higher than in the general population. The same grim statistic was later found among the miners in Joachimsthal, Czechoslovakia. The ores being mined in both cases happened to be particularly rich in uranium. Uranium miners around the world currently experience similar rates.

Local populations
Once mined, the uranium ore is crushed into a fine sand and the uranium extracted using a wide range of chemicals, many toxic. The remaining sand is stored in huge dust ‘reservoirs’ called ‘tailings’. The radioactivity of these ‘tailings’ is still 85% of the original ore, including thorium-230 and radium-226, and they give off at least 10,000 times more radon gas than the original ore.

Fallout from uranium mines
Every uranium mine is a slow nuclear bomb, spreading deadly radioactive poisons over vast areas of the Earth, as surely as the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the Chernobyl disaster did. Helped by a light breeze, radon gas can travel a thousand miles in just a few days. Being much heavier than air, it travels low to the ground, depositing radioactive fallout on vegetation, soil and water, and entering the food chain.

Radioactive homes
Many homes and schools near mines were built using the sand-like uranium tailings as a construction material. As a result, some of the buildings ended up with levels of radon gas and radioactive particles even higher than those permitted in the mines.

In the US alone there are 220 million tons of uranium tailings, in Canada 150 million tons. The tailings will remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Everyone agrees that, like the waste from nuclear power stations, these materials are too dangerous to leave on the surface of the earth, yet no one has devised a satisfactory method for permanently containing them. Even at a very modest rate, say $10 per ton, and if ever we devise a safe method, it will cost billions of dollars to dispose of these wastes.

Ed.-

(i) The tailings also contain heavy metals, acids, ammonia and salts.

(ii) In 1979, a new tailings reservoir dam at Churchrock (New Mexico, US) collapsed. The resulting spill was the greatest accidental release of radioactive material into the environment prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.