Let's not kid ourselves: Uranium mining (nuclear energy) kills people.

garybeck

With the debate on nuclear energy coming to a peak, we hear much talk about the safety (or lack of safety)of a nuclear power plant, and and how we might deal with nuclear waste, but often neglected in the debate is discussion of uranium mining.

That’s because there’s not much to debate about it. It’s nasty. While nuclear advocates will tout its safety and say “not a single person has died from nuclear power,” this is ignoring nuclear energy’s dirty little secret: Uranium mining kills people.

Below is a collection of articles, studies, and links to information that documents the deaths and illnesses directly related to uranium mining. Hopefully people will stop ignoring this important issue and it will become part of the debate:

A French state-owned company mines uranium in northern Niger where mine workers are not informed about health risks, and analysis shows radioactive contamination of air, water and soil. The local organization that represents the mine workers, spoke of “suspicious deaths among the workers, caused by radioactive dust and contaminated groundwater.” {citation found at URL at top of post}

Engineers say cleaning up the mill tailings at a single site, the defunct Atlas mill on the banks of the Colorado River just outside of Moab, could cost $300 million.   The dead and dying include miners and mill workers, innocent children who found mill tailings to be an inviting sand box, mothers who swept and dusted the wind-borne radioactive dust that filtered into their homes. {citation found at URL at top of post}

...Excess deaths from lung cancer among two groups of European miners had been associated with relatively high concentrations of radon in the mine atmosphere. In that same year … conclusions were drawn that prolonged breathing of air containing a high concentration of radon, may have caused what was estimated at that time to be a 30-fold increase in the incidence of lung cancer. {citation found at URL at top of post}

In Canada we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste, called uranium tailings. As Marie Curie observed, 85 percent of the radioactivity in the ore remains behind in that crushed rock. How long will it be there? . . . . Well, it turns out that the effective half-life of this radioactivity is 80,000 years. That means in 80,000 years there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as there is today. ... In addition, as the tailings are sitting there on the surface, they are continually generating radon gas.  It’ll travel 1,000 miles in just a few days in a light breeze. And as it drifts along, it deposits on the vegetation below the radon daughters, which are the radioactive byproducts {citation found at URL at top of post}

And let’s not forget, that uranium mining often takes place in areas where impoverished people are taken advanatage of, and have no legal recourse to prevent it. Native American land and third-world nations are often targeted for uranium mining because no one with power or money wants it happening in their backyard.

But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not just the safety of of the plant, and it’s not just a matter of finding a good way to store the waste.

Nuclear energy, in particular uranium mining, kills people.

Read more:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7740158
http://solarbus.org/blog/?p=113