A Warning to Malawi about the dangers of Uranium Mining

Comment: history of uranium mining across the world!


President Bingu wa Mutharika has officially commission the US$200 million Kayelekera Uranium Mining Project run by an Australian firm, Paladin Africa Limited, in the northern district of Karonga saying the project will become Malawi’s top foreign earner.

Launching the project on Friday, President Mutharika said the mining will contribute about 10 percent to Malawi’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of about US$2 billion” more

While this is commendable we all need to be aware of the dangers of Mining Uranium.

And so we have now discovered yet a third category of documented and scientifically accepted harmful effects of radiation and that is mental retardation in children who were irradiated while still in the womb. . . .

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. You know, that dwarfs the entire prehistory of the Salzburg region which goes way back to ancient, ancient times.

Even archaeological remains date back no further than 80,000 years. We don't have any records of human existence going back that far. That's the half-life of this material. 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.

Source: THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992

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