Map: Location of uranium exploration area in Niger
Comment: Are the French chasing uranium in Virginia, Ace believes so, will write about it later but look how the French treat other people around the world. The Nukes of VA are always referring to the French nuke power success! The French are not energy independent, France does not have uranium, France takes uranium from other countries, and therefore, the French are failures at Nuke Power! Great article will be three parts! No to uranium mining and milling!
04/02/2010
By Cordula Meyer
For the past 40 years, the French state-owned company Areva has been mining uranium for Europe's nuclear power needs in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth. One local activist is taking on the company, claiming that water and dust have been contaminated and workers are dying as a result of its activities.
But in the desert region where Alhacen comes from, there is no harmony between markets and morality. He wanted to tell Ackermann about it, after a group of critical shareholders had invited him to attend the Deutsche Bank shareholders' meeting. Alhacen, wearing a traditional Tuareg robe, a face veil and a turban, stood out among the other people attending the meeting. He was calm as he walked up to the lectern, his face projected onto a large screen on the wall.
"Bonjour, Monsieur Ackermann," Alhacen began, speaking French with an African accent.
He had five minutes to describe to Ackermann the catastrophe he has been fighting for the past nine years.
He said he was the founder of an environmental organization in the city of Arlit in northern Niger. He said that Areva, a French company, is mining uranium there. He also described the alleged dark side of Areva's operations: millions of tons of radioactive waste, contaminated water and serious illnesses. And Deutsche Bank was partially connected to this, Alhacen said, because it lends a lot of money to Areva.
Mysterious Illnesses
Alhacen founded his organization, Aghirin Man, nine years ago, when he noticed that many of his fellow workers were dying of mysterious illnesses. In Alhacen's Tuareg language, Aghirin Man means "Protection of the Soul."
These two dingy rooms are Alhacen's headquarters in his fight against Areva, a global conglomerate.
The French established their first mining company eight years after Niger's independence. Uranium was deposited in sediments in the region millions of years ago, when it was a river delta. Since 1968, excavating machines have dug more than 100,000 tons of the nuclear fuel out of the ground beneath the Sahara.
The Saudi Arabia of the Nuclear Industry
France has 58 nuclear reactors, which generate most of the country's electricity, and the fuel for those reactors comes from Niger. As one of the world's largest uranium suppliers, Niger is to the nuclear industry what Saudi Arabia is to the oil industry.
Uranium from Niger has served as a fuel for Europe's energy supply for 40 years. But unlike Saudi Arabia, Niger has arguably reaped little but misery in return. The country in Africa's Sahel zone is one of the world's least-developed nations. One in four children dies before the age of five.
The conditions in Niger are one of the dirty sides of supposedly clean nuclear energy.
The activities there are well hidden from the outside world: The uranium mining takes place in the middle of nowhere.
Recently, however, a Greenpeace team went to Arlit. They brought along Geiger counters, which detected levels of radioactivity that were far higher than they should have been. There are two uranium mines in the area, one near Arlit and the other near the nearby town of Akokan. One is an open pit mine and the other reaches about 250 meters (820 feet) underground -- the world's largest underground uranium mine.
Read more:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686774-2,00.html
