by Anna Tilman
Yellowcake is the bright yellow uranium powder produced when raw uranium ore is crushed and purified. It is actually a mixture of uranium oxides, mostly U3O8 (urania), and ranges in colour from yellow to orange to dark green. It is this yellowcake that is packaged in steel drums, traded and sent across the world to be further processed, converted to different forms, enriched and used in the manufacture of nuclear fuel or bombs.
The yellowcake trail is lined with environmental devastation, sickness and death. The nuclear industry has always been a law unto itself, sheltered by governments promoting the industry as a safe and clean means of satisfying the insatiable demand for energy. Yet no insurance company in the world will sell liability insurance to a nuclear power plant. Nuclear scientists and engineers strongly endorse nuclear power, caught up in their fascination with the unique properties of uranium and the power it unleashes.
Nuclear (radioactive) waste is deadly to human beings in amounts as small as a millionth of a gram, and we have produced it in hundreds of thousands of tonnes. It is already leaking out of totally inadequate containment, not only from mine sites, refineries and nuclear power plants, but also from nuclear weapons programs. There is no way to get rid of it and it remains lethal for millions of years.
For decades, Canada has been the world's largest producer of uranium, the largest uranium mine in the world, and the largest publicly traded uranium mining company - As Canadians, we need to understand the detrimental impacts of uranium mining, processing and use to our country and to the health and environment of communities affected by these operations. At every stage there is polluted air, land, and water, wreaking permanent destruction on the health and environment of communities - especially, native communities, their food sources, and their natural habitat.
Once exploration and mining starts, there is no end - the mines can be closed and abandoned as often is the case, but the radioactive tailings remain.
Early History of Uranium in Canada
Canada's foray into uranium mining began in 1930, when a prospector for Eldorado Gold Mines discovered pitchblende, a uranium-bearing mineral, on the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, about 450 kilometres north of Yellowknife. The ore body was one of the richest known uranium deposits in the world.
At that time, radium, a radioactive decay product of uranium, thought to be a miracle cure for cancer, commanded prices as high as $75,000 per ounce in the 1930s. Uranium itself was only incidental and of no economic interest. So in 1932, Eldorado built a radium refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, 5000 km away from Port Radium, the mine on Great Bear Lake.
It took about 74 tonnes of ore to yield little more than 3 grams of radium. Dene men from the local community of Déline, the only inhabited community on Great Bear Lake, were hired to carry cloth sacks of radioactive ore to the shipping sites. The community later became known as a "village of widows."
Read more:
http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/yellowcake-trail-part-one-history-uranium-mining-canada
