Nuclear Energy

Arizona, Nevada, and California. Because it is tasteless and odorless, people in these contaminated
populations cannot tell whether they are drinking radioactive water, breathing radioactive air, or
eating fish or food that will induce bone cancer or leukemia. These wastes are taking a terrible toll:
thousands of Navajos are suffering and dying from uranium-induced cancers. No one knows how
many exactly, because the authorities do not keep a track. Epidemiological studies reveal that
Navajo children living near the mines and mills suffered five times the rate of bone cancer and 15
times the rate of testicular and ovarian cancers as other Americans. The people living on these lands
will continue to pay this price in the future too, for thousands of years, unless these wastes are
cleaned up. But that is a very costly operation, would cost billions of dollars. The US government
and the nuclear industry have made no attempts to clean up this massive radioactive pollution, as it
is tribals, and not the well-heeled of America, who are affected! lxxvii
2. Uranium Milling and Mill tailings lxxviii
Uranium mills are normally located near the mines to save transportation costs. The wastes
generated from the milling process are in the form of sludge and are called uranium mill tailings.
Uranium mill tailings are normally pumped to settling ponds, where they are abandoned.
Since the uranium represents only a minor fraction of the ore (for example 0.1%), the
amount of sludge or mill tailings is nearly identical to that of the ore mined. In the US, over the last
40 years, apart from the mine waste, over 100 million tons of mill waste has also accumulated on
Navajo lands. In Europe, the largest settling ponds are in Germany: the Culmitzsch tailings dam
contains 90 million tonnes of solids, and the Helmsdorf tailings dam contains 50 million tonnes of
solids.
Since only the uranium is removed, the sludge contains all the remaining constituents of the
ore, including the long-lived decay products of Uranium – Thorium 230 and Radium 226. Further,
due to technical limitations, all of the uranium present in the ore cannot be extracted. Therefore, the
sludge also contains 5% to 10% of the uranium initially present in the ore.
The sludge thus contains 85% of the initial radioactivity of the ore. One of its deadly
radioactive constituents is the uranium decay product, Thorium-230. Thorium-230 is the uranium
decay product with the longest lifetime, decaying at a half-life of 80,000 years. This means that it
will last for hundreds of thousands of years – in human terms, forever. Thorium is especially toxic
to the liver and the spleen. It has been known to cause leukaemia and other blood diseases. It decays
to produce radium-226, which in turn produces radon gas (discussed in the previous section on
uranium mining), a very powerful cancer-causing agent. Even small doses inhaled repeatedly over a
long time can cause lung cancer. Even though radon-222 has a comparatively short half-life of 3.8
days, its quantity will not diminish for a long time, because it is constantly being replenished by the
decay of the very long-lived thorium-230.
Hence, the radioactivity contained in the tailings and the radon releases will continue to be
in significant amounts for hundreds of thousands of years!
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