Comments: Nobody in the whole world wants uranium mining, govts of USA, Canada, France and Australia, stop the terriost attacks on us and our families with uranium mining ! Keep the uranium ban, Uranium needs to stay in the ground!
A Vast Canadian Wilderness Poised for a Uranium Boom
Canada’s Nunavut Territory is the largest undisturbed wilderness in the Northern Hemisphere. It also contains large deposits of uranium, generating intense interest from mining companies and raising concerns that a mining boom could harm the caribou at the center of Inuit life.
by ed struzik
Until her semi-nomadic family moved into the tiny Inuit community of Baker Lake in the 1950s, Joan Scottie never knew there was a wider world beyond her own on the tundra of the Nunavut Territory in the Canadian Arctic. She didn’t see the inside of a school until she was a teenager and didn’t venture south until she was an adult
But that all changed in 1978, when a Soviet satellite carrying 100 pounds of enriched uranium for an onboard nuclear reactor crashed into the middle of the wilderness she knew so well, resulting in a military search that recovered some of the radioactive debris. Everything that Scottie learned about uranium after that convinced her she wanted nothing to do with a mineral that had the potential to cause such serious health problems or be used for military purposes
So when a German mining company showed up at Baker Lake ten years later with a plan to extract uranium from an area that included a key caribou calving ground, Scottie and her Inuit neighbors weighed the environmental implications against the economic advantages and voted emphatically to say “No.” The German company eventually dropped its plans.
Now, however, the Inuit grandmother of two finds herself once again on the front lines of a grassroots movement trying to block several new companies from mining uranium from the same lodes near Baker Lake. And this time the playing field has changed.
In spite of the global recession of 2008 and the March 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which caused some countries to reconsider nuclear power, uranium exploration is proceeding at a record pace in this part of the world. In Scottie’s backyard, the French mining giant, Areva — partnering with JCU Exploration of Canada and the DAEWOO Corporation of Korea — is actively exploring a major uranium lode at Kiggavik, the site of the former planned German mine, 50 miles west of Baker Lake. Other companies also are considering building mines in the surrounding tundra
Read more:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_vast_canadian_wilderness_poised_for_a_uranium_boom/2489/
Peter Watts: Uranium should stay in the ground
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Arabunna man Peter Watts is the co-chair of ANFA, the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance. Formed in 1997, ANFA (formerly the Alliance Against Uranium) brings together Aboriginal people and relevant NGO’s concerned about existing or proposed nuclear developments in Australia, particularly on Aboriginal homelands.
In early 2012, Watts represented ANFA at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World, held in Yokohama, Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima disasters.
At a time when the Japanese people were grappling with their government’s plans to reactivate the 50 reactors switched off following the catastrophic failures of multiple reactors in Fukushima, Peter brought a message from Australia; expressing shame that Australian uranium was implicated in the disaster; describing the local impacts of uranium mining; and calling all nations to work together to end the nuclear industry. The transcript and video of his speech is below.
My name is Peter Watts.
I am an Aboriginal man, an Arabunna man, from Australia. Thank you for inviting me here to tell my story.
I am very happy to participate in this meeting about shutting down the nuclear fuel chain.
For me this means stopping uranium mining — all of the world's nuclear problems begin with uranium mining.
Australia has 33% of the world’s uranium and sells to 14 countries — the US, France, Britain, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Canada and South Africa.
We need pressure on the governments of all of these countries to stop buying uranium.
The lands of the Kookotha people, the group that are from the land next to mine, are currently occupied by the world’s biggest mining company, BHP Billiton.
The mine is called Olympic Dam and it use 33 million litres of ground water per day, for free. The water is drawn by pipe from my land.
Since the beginning of time, Aboriginal people have taken care of our land Australia.
But the uranium mine poisons the water, land and life through releasing radiation.
When the triple disaster happened here in Japan in March last year, we expressed deep sympathy and solidarity with those who suffered so much and who will continue to suffer for a very long time.
But we were devastated to learn that Australia sold uranium to TEPCO and we feared that Australian uranium was part of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima.
Our job is to stop uranium from our country contaminating people and lands here and overseas. We take this job seriously. Together we can do it.
Please come to learn more about what is happening in Australia at 3pm today and again tomorrow at 10am.
We want to invite you to all sign postcards to our Prime Minister to say please no more uranium from our country to Japan. Please help us stop uranium mining.
Thank you.
Read more:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49872
