Posted at: 12/14/2009 1:56 PM
Updated at: 12/14/2009 2:01 PM
By: The Associated Press
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - A company with offices in Albuquerque and Carlsbad will assess more than 35 abandoned uranium mines in New Mexico under a contract awarded by the state Mining and Minerals Division, which is working with federal and tribal groups to catalog and clean up abandoned sites.
Intera Inc. will assess sites on federal and private lands throughout New Mexico.
State Mining and Minerals Division Director Bill Brancard calls the project a step forward in reducing exposure to health and safety hazards associated with abandoned mines and their legacy of radiological contamination.
Read more:
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/s1310542.shtml?cat=514
Showing posts with label abandoned-uranium-mines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abandoned-uranium-mines. Show all posts
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Radiation level high at Gabon uranium mine (France mining in Africa)
Comment: The French are always the post child of the nukes it is because Nukes do not care about the people lives they destroy, only the free money from nation's government taxpayers!
WATCHDOG WARNS:Radiation level high at Gabon uranium mine.
A former uranium mine at Mounana in southeast Gabon is putting out radiation levels markedly higher than normal, a French association said.The Newest Articles Where will Bandic be distributing the gifts? See his schedule here..
LIBREVILLE, December 9, 2009 (AFP) - A former uranium mine at Mounana in southeast Gabon is putting out radiation levels "markedly higher than normal," a French association said in a report Wednesday.
The radiation levels at the mine, run for 40 years by a subsidiary of the French nuclear giant Areva, are "in numerous areas accessible to the public, markedly higher than normal. Some values at ground level are between twice and 50 times higher."
The report came from the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (CRIIRAD), which surveyed the Mounama site last May, and found millions of tonnes of radioactive material dumped in water or the forest.
The association said that the Uranium Mining Company of Franceville (COMUF), which operated the mine between 1958 and 1999, had "produced 7.5 million tonnes of radioactive mud, of which more than two million tonnes were dumped" in a river.
"The measurements taken in 2009 also confirm that the homes of the managers and the workers of COMUF were constructed with radioactive materials. People were thus subjected without knowing it to totally unjustified doses of radiation."
Since 2007, the population of Mounana has been at odds with COMUF and Areva over radioactive waste and non-governmental organisations have become involved in the issue.
In June, Areva announced that it would set up a health safety observatory around sites in Gabon and Niger in collaboration with the French NGOs Sherpa and Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World).
Oglas.
Read more at:
http://www.javno.com/en-world/radiation-level-high-at-gabon-uranium-mine_285540
WATCHDOG WARNS:Radiation level high at Gabon uranium mine.
A former uranium mine at Mounana in southeast Gabon is putting out radiation levels markedly higher than normal, a French association said.The Newest Articles Where will Bandic be distributing the gifts? See his schedule here..
LIBREVILLE, December 9, 2009 (AFP) - A former uranium mine at Mounana in southeast Gabon is putting out radiation levels "markedly higher than normal," a French association said in a report Wednesday.
The radiation levels at the mine, run for 40 years by a subsidiary of the French nuclear giant Areva, are "in numerous areas accessible to the public, markedly higher than normal. Some values at ground level are between twice and 50 times higher."
The report came from the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (CRIIRAD), which surveyed the Mounama site last May, and found millions of tonnes of radioactive material dumped in water or the forest.
The association said that the Uranium Mining Company of Franceville (COMUF), which operated the mine between 1958 and 1999, had "produced 7.5 million tonnes of radioactive mud, of which more than two million tonnes were dumped" in a river.
"The measurements taken in 2009 also confirm that the homes of the managers and the workers of COMUF were constructed with radioactive materials. People were thus subjected without knowing it to totally unjustified doses of radiation."
Since 2007, the population of Mounana has been at odds with COMUF and Areva over radioactive waste and non-governmental organisations have become involved in the issue.
In June, Areva announced that it would set up a health safety observatory around sites in Gabon and Niger in collaboration with the French NGOs Sherpa and Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World).
Oglas.
Read more at:
http://www.javno.com/en-world/radiation-level-high-at-gabon-uranium-mine_285540
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Areva trying to block TV documentary on residual contamination left around former uranium mine sites in France
Comments: According to web page of the local, Canadian uranium corporation, uses France as example of the perfect uranium mining, well, duh, France has ruin their land, air and water with uranium mining and nuke power! Thanks KM!
Areva trying to block TV documentary on residual contamination left around former uranium mine sites in France
Areva, once again, spares no efforts to prove that it rightly received the 2008 Public Eye Award as one of "the world's most irresponsible companies":
On Feb. 11, 2009, public service TV chain France 3 plans to air a programme on the residual contamination found at former uranium mine sites all over France.
The broadcast titled "Uranium : le scandale de la France contaminée" (Uranium: the scandal of contaminated France) is to be aired in the monthly programme Pièces à conviction (Incriminating evidence).
According to the programme's investigators, 300 million tonnes of radioactive waste have been left at 210 former uranium mining sites in France without any protective measures nor surveillance.
Areva announced on Jan. 29, 2009, to call the regulatory authority Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) to prevent the airing of the programme. (AFP/Le Républicain Lorrain Jan. 30, 2009)
Wednesday, February 11 - 20h35
Pièces à Conviction n°72 Exhibits No. 72
Uranium : le scandale de la France contaminée Uranium: the scandal of contaminated France
Discreetly in the countryside, nearby villages or towns, highly dangerous radioactive waste have been scattered or buried methodically for decades.
Pire encore, ils ont parfois servi à construire des routes, des parkings, et même des logements, des écoles ou des aires de jeu pour les enfants... Worse, they sometimes used to build roads, parking lots, and even homes, schools or play areas for children ... Sans aucune mise en garde sur les risques encourus ! Without any warning about the risks!
Car entre 1945 et 2001, la France a exploité 210 mines d'uranium sur son territoire. For between 1945 and 2001, France has operated the 210 uranium mines on its territory. Elles ont produit 300 millions de tonnes de déchets radioactifs qui ont été abandonnés sans mesure de protection ou de surveillance particulière. They have produced 300 million tons of radioactive waste were left unprotected or special monitoring.
Qui sont les responsables ? Who is responsible? Pourquoi ceux qui ont tenté de donner l'alerte n'ont-ils jamais été écoutés ? Why those who tried to raise the alarm they have never been heard? Pourquoi l'Etat n'at-il pas alerté les riverains ? Why the State Has not alerted the residents?
Elise Lucet et l'équipe de Pièces à conviction ont mené l'enquête sur ce scandale, au coeur des campagnes et des villes françaises. Elise Lucet and team Exhibits led the investigation into the scandal at the heart of town and country French.
Read more at:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://programmes.france3.fr/pieces-a-conviction/51415247-fr.php&ei=PuMSS6jtK9CUtgeZwbTDBA&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBQQ7gEwAg&prev=/search%3Fq%3DUranium%2B:%2Ble%2Bscandale%2Bde%2Bla%2BFrance%2Bcontamin%25C3%25A9e%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1I7DMUS_en
http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/378/3709.html
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
New Mexico compared to Chernobyl–in an art review
Comment: Is this history repenting itself with uranium mining, keep the ban on uranium mining!
By Marjorie Childress
11/17/09 10:55 AM
“Ground Zero. In some ways, New Mexico comes a close second to Chernobyl.”
So begins a review, published this week in the Akron Beacon Journal, of an exhibit of photographs of Patrick Nagatani. The New Mexico photographer’s work is on display at the Akron Art Museum for the next few months, in an exhibition titled “Nuclear Enchantment.”
Nagatani’s work is “…all about questioning society’s blind faith in the so-called experts, in particular the expertise of science.” Nagatani’s work not only questions that faith but ridicules it, the piece states.
It then labels the New Mexico moniker “Land of Enchantment” as more accurately our “Better Business Bureau nickname.”
Known by its Better Business Bureau nickname as ”Land of Enchantment,” New Mexico is also the birthplace of the nuclear age. It has sites linked to research and development, weapon stockpiles, uranium mines, test sites and reactors alarmingly close not only to large population areas, but also to the tribal lands of the Hopi and Pueblo Indians, the oldest continuous culture in our country.
While the piece doesn’t show the actual pictures, it has great descriptions of the work. Here’s an example:
Uranium Tailings, Anaconda Minerals Corporation, Laguna Pueblo Reservation, New Mexico is a 1990 lifocolor print that illustrates a common misconception.
”If you’re on the right side of a Southwest Airlines 737 heading west and look down [if you're not over the wing],” Nagatani noted, ”you see beautiful white deposits below that make a striking contrast with the gray-brown landscape.
”I have to laugh to myself when I hear people around me admiring these ‘natural’ formations. They’re uranium tailings deposits, acres and acres of them.
”They’re all hot, they’re all radioactive.” And they’re mostly on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, believed to have been settled in 1699.
Various academic and individual scientific studies combined with oral histories and community based assessments over the years don’t make the comparison to Chernobyl a stretch.
A contentious debate over the future of uranium mining in New Mexico is currently underway. The Navajo Nation in 2005 banned uranium mining on its land, but mining companies are pursuing the development of new mines on the public and private land that snakes into and around Navajo land due to an expectation that a new uranium boom is looming.
Click Title or Link to whole:
http://newmexicoindependent.com/41851/new-mexico-compared-to-chernobyl-in-an-art-review
Thursday, November 5, 2009
FALLOUT: Cold War-era Uranium Mining Leaves A Poisoned Legacy For The Navajo
By Katy Bolger
(NYULivewire) - On the side of Gray Mountain in northeast Arizona, Lorraine Curley lives alone in a two-room concrete home. Her roof is tarpaper and tin, and her bathroom is a wooden outhouse 50 feet from her door. Living without electricity or water is a way of life for Curley; she has, after all, been restricted by the Bennett Freeze, a law enacted in 1966 that prevented 18,000 reservation residents from repairing their homes, or building new ones, until the freeze was lifted in May 2009.
Curley would like a new home, and she’s not picky: It doesn’t need to have electricity or running water – a floor and insulation would be nice.
“Maybe I’ll never see a home,” she said. And at 79 years old, Curley is running out of time.
Curley is Diné, or Navajo, and like more than 180,000 others in her tribe, she lives on the reservation known as Navajo Nation, which spans a sprawling 27,000 miles stretched across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The land is also rich in highly sought-after natural resources, like coal and uranium, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With its vast and breathtaking sandstone vistas and scrubby desert floor, the territory includes some of the prettiest land in America, but its people, scattered throughout, are some of the country’s most desperately underserved.
Because of its sovereign status, Indian territory is not regulated by federal environmental standards.
In addition to oil and natural-gas drilling, the Nation was subjected to uranium mining from 1944 through 1986, when almost four tons of uranium ore was extracted for use in the arsenal build-up of the Cold War.
It was mined without regard to the safety of the miners, the nearby residents or even the mineral-rich land itself, resulting in the inevitable pollution of the air and water. As a consequence, the land they treasure so deeply has turned against the Navajo people, many of whom have developed severe health problems from drinking contaminated water and breathing contaminated air.
To complicate matters, there are dozens of laws on the books, which further entangle the rights and responsibilities of the federal government, the Navajo government and the people themselves.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, because of regulated uranium mining and abandoned mines, there are “homes and drinking water sources (in the Navajo Nation) with elevated levels of radiation. Potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.”
“There was neglect, no public outreach,” Colorado said. “Contamination was kept from people; they sat on that information of contaminated wells.”
Activists say there are more than 1,200 abandoned mines in the Nation (although the Abandoned Land Mine Office consolidates that number, and puts it closer to 500).
The uranium-mining companies are long gone, but the contamination remains.
“Exploiting indigenous people is one of the hallmarks of state corporate crime,” said Linda Robyn, a Chippewa Indian and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University, who is studying the link between corporate-government complicity in environmental disregard for the Navajo’s well being. “Navajos are really, really poor, with astronomical unemployment, substandard health care, drug abuse. It is a good place for corporations to exploit the people.”
Robyn says, to her knowledge, no corporate entity has ever been prosecuted for uranium contamination on Navajo soil, and yet as far back as the 1930s there was an awareness of the health risks associated with uranium. Somehow the message never made it to the Navajo. As recently as the 1980, U.S. EPA scientists were putting Geiger counters to the walls of hogans near abandoned mines to measure radiation and seeing readings that were off the charts.
“I drank water from the Tochachi Spring,” she said in her native Navajo, interpreted by the president of the Forgotten People, Don Yellowman. “My doctor told me my gall bladder was not working, and I had internal bleeding. I have asthma, seizures, a problem with lung and liver,” she added, alluding to the cancer that has spread throughout her body.
Pauline Lefthand, 41, also came to the meeting, albeit slowly and with help from her daughter and son-in-law, one at each arm. She sat heavily in a metal chair and often nodded off during the meeting. She takes 15 pills a day, including strong painkillers.
“We did. We drank a lot of water from the well,” she said. “That’s what we lived on. It’s one of the best waters,” she added, referring to the cool, refreshing taste of the water, which nonetheless was poisoned by tasteless, odorless radionuclides.
Ten years ago, Lefthand began going “downhill.” Her legs grew purple and swollen. She went to a doctor, who told her that both her kidneys were “gone.”
“I went on dialysis,” Lefthand recalled. “I have arthritis, I have had my bladder and appendix removed. I had stomach surgery; they took my large intestines out.”
The medicine she is prescribed also has taken its toll.
“When I started, I weighed 135 pounds, then I went up to 247 pounds. Now I weigh 192,” she said.
Lefthand’s daughter Deidre Walker, 18, was there to support her mother, whom she said has had “kidney failure, diabetes, seizures” since Walker was eight years old. Two years ago, Walker gave her mother one of her own kidneys.
Despite decades of contamination, the EPA began posting warning signs on drinking wells and in local post offices only three years ago. Other education has been more grassroots, such as the recent community meeting. Local and national environmental groups are actively reaching out to educate the Navajo about the drinking water, and to build a consensus against new coal mining and power plants.
Katy Bolger, NYU Livewire
Click Title or Link to whole post:
http://www.azreporter.com/news/index.php?itemid=741
(NYULivewire) - On the side of Gray Mountain in northeast Arizona, Lorraine Curley lives alone in a two-room concrete home. Her roof is tarpaper and tin, and her bathroom is a wooden outhouse 50 feet from her door. Living without electricity or water is a way of life for Curley; she has, after all, been restricted by the Bennett Freeze, a law enacted in 1966 that prevented 18,000 reservation residents from repairing their homes, or building new ones, until the freeze was lifted in May 2009.
Curley would like a new home, and she’s not picky: It doesn’t need to have electricity or running water – a floor and insulation would be nice.
“Maybe I’ll never see a home,” she said. And at 79 years old, Curley is running out of time.
Curley is Diné, or Navajo, and like more than 180,000 others in her tribe, she lives on the reservation known as Navajo Nation, which spans a sprawling 27,000 miles stretched across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The land is also rich in highly sought-after natural resources, like coal and uranium, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With its vast and breathtaking sandstone vistas and scrubby desert floor, the territory includes some of the prettiest land in America, but its people, scattered throughout, are some of the country’s most desperately underserved.
Because of its sovereign status, Indian territory is not regulated by federal environmental standards.
In addition to oil and natural-gas drilling, the Nation was subjected to uranium mining from 1944 through 1986, when almost four tons of uranium ore was extracted for use in the arsenal build-up of the Cold War.
It was mined without regard to the safety of the miners, the nearby residents or even the mineral-rich land itself, resulting in the inevitable pollution of the air and water. As a consequence, the land they treasure so deeply has turned against the Navajo people, many of whom have developed severe health problems from drinking contaminated water and breathing contaminated air.
To complicate matters, there are dozens of laws on the books, which further entangle the rights and responsibilities of the federal government, the Navajo government and the people themselves.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, because of regulated uranium mining and abandoned mines, there are “homes and drinking water sources (in the Navajo Nation) with elevated levels of radiation. Potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.”
“There was neglect, no public outreach,” Colorado said. “Contamination was kept from people; they sat on that information of contaminated wells.”
Activists say there are more than 1,200 abandoned mines in the Nation (although the Abandoned Land Mine Office consolidates that number, and puts it closer to 500).
The uranium-mining companies are long gone, but the contamination remains.
“Exploiting indigenous people is one of the hallmarks of state corporate crime,” said Linda Robyn, a Chippewa Indian and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University, who is studying the link between corporate-government complicity in environmental disregard for the Navajo’s well being. “Navajos are really, really poor, with astronomical unemployment, substandard health care, drug abuse. It is a good place for corporations to exploit the people.”
Robyn says, to her knowledge, no corporate entity has ever been prosecuted for uranium contamination on Navajo soil, and yet as far back as the 1930s there was an awareness of the health risks associated with uranium. Somehow the message never made it to the Navajo. As recently as the 1980, U.S. EPA scientists were putting Geiger counters to the walls of hogans near abandoned mines to measure radiation and seeing readings that were off the charts.
“I drank water from the Tochachi Spring,” she said in her native Navajo, interpreted by the president of the Forgotten People, Don Yellowman. “My doctor told me my gall bladder was not working, and I had internal bleeding. I have asthma, seizures, a problem with lung and liver,” she added, alluding to the cancer that has spread throughout her body.
Pauline Lefthand, 41, also came to the meeting, albeit slowly and with help from her daughter and son-in-law, one at each arm. She sat heavily in a metal chair and often nodded off during the meeting. She takes 15 pills a day, including strong painkillers.
“We did. We drank a lot of water from the well,” she said. “That’s what we lived on. It’s one of the best waters,” she added, referring to the cool, refreshing taste of the water, which nonetheless was poisoned by tasteless, odorless radionuclides.
Ten years ago, Lefthand began going “downhill.” Her legs grew purple and swollen. She went to a doctor, who told her that both her kidneys were “gone.”
“I went on dialysis,” Lefthand recalled. “I have arthritis, I have had my bladder and appendix removed. I had stomach surgery; they took my large intestines out.”
The medicine she is prescribed also has taken its toll.
“When I started, I weighed 135 pounds, then I went up to 247 pounds. Now I weigh 192,” she said.
Lefthand’s daughter Deidre Walker, 18, was there to support her mother, whom she said has had “kidney failure, diabetes, seizures” since Walker was eight years old. Two years ago, Walker gave her mother one of her own kidneys.
Despite decades of contamination, the EPA began posting warning signs on drinking wells and in local post offices only three years ago. Other education has been more grassroots, such as the recent community meeting. Local and national environmental groups are actively reaching out to educate the Navajo about the drinking water, and to build a consensus against new coal mining and power plants.
Katy Bolger, NYU Livewire
Click Title or Link to whole post:
http://www.azreporter.com/news/index.php?itemid=741
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