There are bits of radioactive material scattered throughout the earth’s crust, and when you excavate tons and tons of rock, you’re going to get exposed to a lot of it. Even renewable power relies on people unearthing the cobalt, indium, and other materials for solar panels and batteries. Coal and tar sands mining cause the same problems on a larger scale. Mining of all kinds scars the land and puts people in danger. Other studies have suggested that modern-day miners are more likely to get sick than white-collar workers. Studies have found increased risks ranging from lung cancer to diabetes in communities near uranium mines (though there’s not enough evidence to prove that mining is the cause). So mining’s much safer, but that’s not the same as safe. “One thing I can say about mining is that it’s radically different than it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Vestergaard says. It takes at least a decade to complete all the environmental- and social-impact assessments needed before you start a new mine. Mining today is much safer than it was during the Cold War, Vestergaard says. The federal government has fairly sophisticated clean-up plans, but politicians have refused to provide the money needed to carry them out, says Cindy Vestergaard, who studies the uranium supply chain at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “An undetermined amount of uranium mines still exist on native lands, and the government hasn’t finished cleaning up the ones we know about,” says Cecilia Martinez, executive director of the environmental justice group, Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy. Many uranium mines were on the Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile territory in northern Arizona and New Mexico. The government responded by not doing anything until the 1970s.” “But these recommendations were made in classified public health documents in the 1950s. “They made recommendations - better ventilation in the mines, radiation monitors,” Malin says. After all, they were making a secret weapon. Officials saw early on that the work posed a hazard, says Stephanie Malin, a sociologist at Colorado State University, but they didn’t tell the miners or the people living in the surrounding communities. government began digging for uranium throughout the Southwest to create the first atomic bombs. They told us it was parts of his lungs.”ĭuring World War II, the U.S. One described her uncle’s decline to Hessler: “His lungs just crystallized and he was spitting up this bloody stuff. The writer Peter Hessler visited the uranium towns of Utah and Colorado and met men breathing through oxygen respirators and women who had buried miners after they suffered agonizing deaths. There’s a reason for this: It’s appalling. When I started asking around about reasons to oppose nuclear power, I was surprised by how the history of uranium mining kept coming up. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. And they continue to pop up throughout the nuclear life cycle, from enrichment and reactor operation to the radioactive waste at the end. The risks of nuclear power appear right from the beginning of the process with uranium mining. Nobody, for instance, wants to get stuck with nuclear waste that stays radioactive for 10,000 years - but perhaps some would prefer that to coal waste, which contains mercury and lead and remains toxic forever. Often, nuclear nightmares are considered in isolation rather than weighed against the alternatives. That’s why some have pushed to keep existing nuclear power plants open, and even build more. So do these horrors mean nuclear power shouldn’t be part of our tool kit for fighting climate change? After all, it doesn’t produce greenhouse gases. But there are plenty of other risks of nuclear power that aren’t so obvious: the hazards of uranium mining, the fouled water, and the radioactive waste. Is it any wonder that nuclear power scares people? The word nuclear alone conjures up a parade of terrors: the sinister radiation, the whiff of apocalypse, and the tendency to go boom.
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