This article appeared in Perception magazine, v. 10 n. 2, 1992
Fallout from Uranium Mines
In addition to killing uranium miners and those living in contaminated homes, each uranium mine is, in effect, a "slow bomb" -- spreading deadly radioactive poisons over vast areas of the earth, as surely as the Chernobyl disaster did, as surely as atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons have done, but at an insidiously slower rate. Radon gas can travel a thousand miles in just a few days, with a light breeze. As it travels low to the ground (it is much heavier than air) it deposits its "daughters" -- solid radioactive fallout -- on the vegetation, soil and water below; the resulting radioactive materials enter the food chain, ending up in fruits and berries, the flesh of fish and animals, and ultimately, in the bodies of human beings.
On February 25, 1986, the Wall Street Journal printed a front page story that portrayed the 220 million tons of uranium tailings in the U.S. as an ecological and financial time bomb. (In Canada, we have about 150 million tons of such tailings.) Everyone agrees that these materials are too dangerously radioactive to leave on the surface of the earth, yet no one has devised a satisfactory method for permanently containing them. Even at a very modest rate, say $10 per ton, it will cost billions of dollars to dispose of these wastes.
Uncontained in Time and Space
The tailings will remain dangerously radioactive for millions of years. Thorium- 230, itself a by-product of uranium, is an alpha-emitter with a half-life of almost 80,000 years. It continually replenishes all the other radioactive by-products of uranium in the abandoned tailings piles. Radium-226, a bone-seeking alpha-emitting carcinogen which is at least 20 times as harmful as strontium-90, is blown in the wind, washed by the rain, and leached into the waterways from the tailings piles, where it re-concentrates by factors of thousands in aquatic plants and by factors of hundreds in land plants. It has a half-life of 1,600 years. When the levels of radium increased in Canadian rivers as a result of uranium mining activities, the nuclear establishment obligingly increased the standard for an "acceptable level" of radium in drinking water by a factor of nine.
(The B.C. Medical Association refers to radium as a "superb carcinogen." It is known to have killed many of the women who patriotically painted radium on the dials of military instruments during World War II so that the readings would glow in the darkness of a cockpit or battlefield.)
In addition, the radon gas emissions from abandoned tailings can cause radioactive contamination on a continental and even on a global basis. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that radon emissions from uranium tailings in the Southwest U.S. can be expected to cause over 3,000 cancer deaths per century over the North American continent. Many researchers believe that this death toll is underestimated by at least a factor of ten, even if we ignore the fallout of solid radon daughters on leafy vegetation as the radon gas passes overhead, and even if we assume that the tailings are not blown by the wind, washed by the rain, or spread through the food chain, thereby distributing the source of contamination over a much wider area.
A Deadly Legacy
The legacy of uranium is truly a devastating one. Miners and smokers dead and dying, vast reservoirs of tailings releasing radioactive poisons into the biosphere, radon daughters accumulating in buildings and in the food chain -- and all for the sake of building more bombs and nuclear reactors. The radioactive fission products that were released into the atmosphere from Chernobyl -- iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137, and the rest -- are all the broken pieces or uranium atoms left over from the fission process. Even the extraordinary toxicity of plutonium can be rightfully attributed to uranium, since plutonium is created by transmutation of uranium through the absorption of neutrons.
Because Canada is the world's largest uranium producer and exporter, Canadians have an important role in halting the widespread use of uranium. If we do not come to grips with the Pandora's box of problems which it spawns, and soon, our children and grandchildren may find that we have left them with a burden too great for them to bear.
Read more:
http://www.ccnr.org/uranium_deadliest.html#fall
