Comment: You hear the uranium mining pushers making comments that uranium mining and regulations will keep you safe, "We are not mining like they did back in the 1930, when they did not understand the problems of uranium mining". To be frank, this is big fat liar and the nuke pushers know this but have very little regards of human life, they love the monies! So tell the uranium mining bunch they are greedy and since 1896 the knowledge of uranium was discovered and will and does hurt people!
In 1896 Henri Becquerel (Figure 3) discovered radioactivity.
He found that a
chunk of uranium ore gives off an invisible kind of light, now called “atomic
radiation”. One type of atomic radiation has great penetrating power, similar to
X-rays; this type is called “gamma radiation”.
Less penetrating forms of atomic radiation also exist, called “alpha” and “beta” rays. Atomic radiation is harmful to living things because it damages cells and often makes them grow wrong.
Atomic radiation is caused by the spontaneous disintegration of unstable atoms. Any material which gives off atomic radiation is said to be “radioactive”.
There are dozens of radioactive materials that exist in nature and hundreds more are created by man as fission products. One “becquerel” of radioactivity indicates that one atomic disintegration is taking place every second.
Radioactivity is not the same thing as nuclear fission; unlike fission, it cannot be controlled.
Scientists do not know how to speed up, slow down, start or stop radioactivity.
By the 1930s it was well known that exposure to atomic radiation can cause many kinds of biological damage
Including radiation burns, anemia (blood damage), cataracts (eye damage), cancer, leukemia, damage to unborn babies, and damage to the sperm and eggs of men and women. Thus radiation protection is very important.
However, once radioactive materials enter the body, the damage is done internally and protection becomes difficult or impossible (Figure 4).
Each radioactive material has its own characteristics, and each one behaves differently in the environment and in the body. Radium-226 behaves like calcium, so inside the body it goes to the bones, the teeth, and mother’s milk.
Radon-222 is a gas; it is inhaled into the lungs. Cesium-137 resembles potassium; it goes into muscles. In these cases, the damage is done inside the body.
The consensus of scientific knowledge is that any exposure to atomic radiation increases the risk of cancer and leukemia.
There is no truly safe dose, but the risks are small when the doses are small.
Uranium Decay Products – Radium, Polonium, and Radon
In 1898, Marie Curie (Figure 7) discovered something surprising. After removing the uranium from the ore that contained it, she found that the residues were a lot more radioactive than the uranium itself. She reasoned that there must have been something in the rock besides uranium – some substance that is far more radioactive than uranium.
After months of hard work, she found two new substances in the residues, previously unknown, that she named “polonium” and “radium”. These substances are extremely radioactive. They give off both penetrating and non-penetrating forms of atomic radiation. Before long, one of Marie’s students discovered a radioactive gas that is given off by radium. This was yet another newly discovered radioactive material called “radon”.
It turns out that when a radioactive atom disintegrates and gives off atomic radiation, it becomes a completely different kind of atom, representing a new material altogether. This by-product material is called a “decay product” since it is produced as a result of atomic disintegration – a process commonly called “radioactive decay”.
In some cases a decay product is itself radioactive, and then, when its atoms decay they turn into yet another, different decay product. If that second decay product is also radioactive then you will get a third decay product, and possibly a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and so on.
Radium – From Priceless to Worthless
Radioactivity was regarded as magical, and radium was used not only for sensible purposes like shrinking cancerous tumours, but also for foolish things.
Young women (Figure 9) were hired to paint watch faces with radium paint to make them glow in the dark. By the 1920s many of these women had developed severe anemia. Some died quickly. Others had gums that became badly infected and teeth that began falling out. Their jawbones grew soft and were quite easily broken. The dentist who reported these symptoms used the phrase “radium jaw” to describe the situation. The cause was obvious.
By the late 1920s the radium dial painters began to show an epidemic of bone cancer. When their bodies were autopsied it was found that microscopic amounts of radium had been ingested by the girls and had distributed itself throughout their entire skeleton. Years later, many who didn’t get bone cancer developed cancers of the head from radium poisoning.
In the 1930s the first radium mine was opened in Canada’s Northwest Territories on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake. Men of the Sahtu Dene Indian nation were hired at a very low rate of pay to carry sacks of radium concentrates on their backs. They loaded the sacks on barges and often lay on them for 8 hours during the crossing so they could unload the sacks at the western end of the lake. They were never told that this work was dangerous.
The Dene settlement of Deline is now known as the “village of widows” because so many men died of cancer years after handling the radioactive ore from the mine. In Figure 10, two Dene men display this excerpt from a 1931 Canadian government document:
“Recent investigations in the field of radium poisoning have led to the conclusion that precautions are necessary even in the handling of materials of low radioactivity. The ingestion of small amounts of radioactive dust or emanation [radon] over a long period of time will cause a build up of radioactive material in the body, which eventually may have serious consequences. Lung cancer, bone necrosis and rapid anemia are possible diseases due to deposition of radioactive substances in the cell tissue or bone structure of the body.” [Canada, Department of Mines, 1931]
This document was prepared to warn the scientists in Ottawa who had to handle samples of radioactive ore, but nobody warned the miners or the Dene men who carried the ore sacks.
By the 1940s, radium had become worthless – a waste byproduct of uranium mining. There was no market for radium any more. Too many people had been killed by handling it.
Read more:
http://www.ccamu.ca/uranium-science.htm
