Dr. Edwards on Uranium Tailings and Radon...some very scary facts.

In 1992, Dr. Gordon Edwards delivered an address at the World Uranium Hearings held in Salzburg, Austria. The title of his address was "Uranium: Known Facts and Hidden Dangers". It is an excellent summary of the issues involved with uranium from the moment it is extracted from the ground until the moment it loses its danger...hundreds of thousands of years from now.

The text of his speech is here: http://www.ccnr.org/salzburg.html

Last week, I received an email from an SCC'er captioned " Who would want radioactive dustblown their way?" Included in the email was this weather report for the day:

"National Weather Service

March 19, 2008

Damaging winds from thunderstorms are possible late this afternoon and this evening in the Danville area, according to Danville Emergency Services.

Showers and thunderstorms are forecast after 2 pm and these storms have the potential to produce damaging winds in excess of 60 mph."

The email author also wrote: "If VUI plans an open pit mining and milling operation, how will they stop radioactive particles from being blown for Lord knows how far and who knows where? This would be just one of the many exposure methods which would have to be carefully examined when researching how contamination could possibly spread outside the mining perimeter."

Consider the email author's words in light of this quote from Dr. Edwards' speech. Very, very frightening, to say the least.

"When we extract uranium from the ground, we dig up the rock, we crush it and we leave behind this finely pulverized material -- it's like flour. In Canada we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste, called uranium tailings. As Marie Curie observed, 85 percent of the radioactivity in the ore remains behind in that crushed rock. How long will it be there? . . . . Well, it turns out that the effective half-life of this radioactivity is 80,000 years. That means in 80,000 years there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as there is today.


And as these tailings are left on the surface of the earth, they are blown by the wind, they are washed by the rain into the water systems, and they inevitably spread. Once the mining companies close down, who is going to look after this material forever? How does anyone, in fact, guard 200 million tons of radioactive sand safely forever, and keep it out of the environment?


In addition, as the tailings are sitting there on the surface, they are continually generating radon gas. Radon is about eight times heavier than air, so it stays close to the ground. It'll travel 1,000 miles in just a few days in a light breeze. And as it drifts along, it deposits on the vegetation below the radon daughters, which are the radioactive byproducts that I told you about, including polonium. So that you actually get radon daughters in animals, fish and plants thousands of miles away from where the uranium mining is done. It's a mechanism for pumping radioactivity into the environment for millennia to come, and this is one of the hidden dangers."


All uranium ends up as either nuclear weapons or highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. That's the destiny of all the uranium that's mined. And in the process of mining the uranium we liberate these naturally occurring radioactive substances, which are among the most harmful materials known to science."