By Prof. Fred Mendelsohn
Convenor of the Victorian branch of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War,
Professor of Medicine at Melbourne University and a leading Australian scientist.Uranium mining is a hazard to people and the environment because radioactive contamination follows the mining, processing and refining of uranium and its use in reactors and weapons. While radiation exposure can be reduced by improved practices in mining, there remain major problems of health and long-term safety, especially in the countries to which we export uranium.
Radiation exposure can induce cancer and inheritable genetic damage, both of which usually appear decades after exposure. The type of cancer produced depends on the type of radiation and the nature of the radioisotope, and especially where it is deposited or concentrated in the body. There is no safe lower limit of radiation exposure and it is recommended that it be kept as low as reasonably achievable. The proposed underground mine at Jabiluka, being in such a rich ore-grade, would pose a radiological hazard to workers.
Uranium 238 and its decay products are hazardous if inhaled in the dust from blasting or mechanical handling. However, the major hazard to miners is radon-222, a radioactive gas which decays to products which readily lodge in the lung. The concentrates (yellow cake) from uranium processing also pose a hazard, even if only small amounts are inhaled.
An increase in lung cancer in uranium miners was noted more than a century ago and has been confirmed many times since – in Germany, Czechoslovakia, USA, Canada and France. In Australia a study on the health of workers at South Australia's Radium Hill mine, which closed in 1960, indicated an excess of cancers among the workforce.
The discarded tailings from uranium milling contain high levels of radioactivity and present problems for waste management. The leaching of long-lived radionuclides into ground water, or their dispersal by wind, must be prevented. Serious environmental contamination exists at mines in Canada, at Elliot Lake in Ontario and Key Lake in Saskatchewan, and in South Africa at Witterstrand. These problems are not restricted to civil applications of nuclear technology as the production of nuclear weapons has also led to radioactive contamination of the environment.
The Hanford site in Washington State, the world's first large-scale plutonium production plant, now stores 256,000 cubic metres of highly radioactive liquid waste and more than 2,000 tonnes of spent reactor fuel. Plutonium, named after the god of Hell, is a highly toxic, heavy, radioactive element. It is not found in nature and is a product of the nuclear fuel cycle that remains active and deadly for more than 100,000 years.
Hanford is one of the most contaminated sites in the United States, with widespread radioactive contamination of soil, sediments and surface water. Many other US sites involved in nuclear weapons production or testing are also contaminated and include the Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Rocky Flats in Colorado and the Savannah River in South Carolina. These sites will continue to be problems for future generations. Similar radioactive pollution occurs in Russia and the territories of the former Soviet Union – a hot legacy of a cold war.
Article from "Unclean, Unsafe & Unwanted - The Nuclear Industry Nightmare",
a special insert prepared for the June 1996 issue of Habitat,
produced by the Australian Conservation Foundation.
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