India's Generation of Children Crippled by Uranium Waste

Published on Sunday, August 30, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
India's Generation of Children Crippled by Uranium Waste

Observer investigation uncovers link between dramatic rise in birth defects in Punjab and pollution from coal-fired power stations

by Gethin Chamberlain

Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country's borders.

Gurpreet Sigh, 7, who has cerebral palsy and microcephaly, and is from Sirsar, 50km from the Punjabi town of Bathinda. He is being treated at the Baba Farid centre for Special Children in Bathinda Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain.
Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.

Health workers in the Punjabi cities of Bathinda and Faridkot knew something was terribly wrong when they saw a sharp increase in the number of birth defects, physical and mental abnormalities, and cancers. They suspected that children were being slowly poisoned.

But it was only when a visiting scientist arranged for tests to be carried out at a German laboratory that the true nature of their plight became clear. The results were unequivocal. The children had massive levels of uranium in their bodies, in one case more than 60 times the maximum safe limit.

The results were both momentous and mysterious. Uranium occurs naturally throughout the world, but is normally only present in low background levels which pose no threat to human health. There was no obvious source in the Punjab that could account for such high levels of contamination.

And if a few hundred children - spread over a large area - were contaminated, how many thousands more might also be affected? Those are questions the Indian authorities appear determined not to answer. Staff at the clinics say they were visited and threatened with closure if they spoke out. The South African scientist whose curiosity exposed the scandal says she has been warned by the authorities that she may not be allowed back into the country.

But an Observer investigation has now uncovered disturbing evidence to suggest a link between the contamination and the region's coal-fired power stations. It is already known that the fine fly ash produced when coal is burned contains concentrated levels of uranium and a new report published by Russia's leading nuclear research institution warns of an increased radiation hazard to people living near coal-fired thermal power stations.

The test results for children born and living in areas around the state's power stations show high levels of uranium in their bodies. Tests on ground water show that levels of uranium around the plants are up to 15 times the World Health Organisation's maximum safe limits. Tests also show that it extends across large parts of the state, which is home to 24 million people.

The findings have implications not only for the rest of India - Punjab produces two-thirds of the wheat in the country's central reserves and 40% of its rice - but for many other countries planning to build new power plants, including China, Russia, India, Germany and the US. In Britain, there are plans for a coal-fired station at the Kingsnorth facility in Kent.

The victims are being treated at the Baba Farid centres for special children in Bathinda - where there are two coal-fired thermal plants - and in nearby Faridkot. It was staff at those clinics who first voiced concerns about the increasing numbers of admissions involving severely handicapped children. They were being born with hydrocephaly, microcephaly, cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome and other complications. Several have already died.

Dr Pritpal Singh, who runs the Faridkot clinic, said the numbers of children affected by the pollution had risen dramatically in the past six or seven years. But he added that the Indian authorities appeared determined to bury the scandal. "They can't just detoxify these kids, they have to detoxify the whole Punjab. That is the reason for their reluctance," he said. "They threatened us and said if we didn't stop commenting on what's happening, they would close our clinic.

"But I decided that if I kept silent it would go on for years and no one would do anything about it. If I keep silent then the next day it will be my child. The children are dying in front of me."

Dr Carin Smit, the South African clinical metal toxicologist who arranged for the tests to be carried out in Germany, said that the situation could no longer be ignored. "There is evidence of harm for these children in my care and... it is an imperative that their bodies be cleaned up and their metabolisms be supported to deal with such a devastating presence of radioactive material," she said.

"If the contamination is as widespread as it would appear to be - as far west as Muktsar on the Pakistani border, and as far east as the foothills of Himachal Pradesh - then millions are at high risk and every new baby born to a contaminated mother is at risk."

In the Faridkot centre last week, Harmanbir Kaur, 15, was rocking gently backwards and forwards. When her test results came back, they showed she had 10 times the safe limit of uranium in her body. Her brother, Naunihal Singh, six, has double the safe level.

Harmanbir was born in Muktsar, 25 miles from Faridkot. Her mother, Kulbir Kaur, 37, watched her slowly degenerate from a healthy baby into the girl she is today, dribbling constantly, unable to feed herself, lost in a world of her own. "God knows what sin I have committed. When we go to our village people say there is a curse of God on you, but I don't believe so," she said. "Every part of this area is affected. We never imagined that there would be uranium in our kids."

A few miles down the road in Bathinda, Sukhminder Singh, 48, a farmer, watched his son Kulwinder, 13, staring into space while curling his hands up under his chin. Tests showed Kulwinder has 19 times the maximum safe level of uranium in his body. He has cerebral palsy and has already had seven operations to unbend his arms and legs.

"The government should investigate it because if our child is affected it will also affect future generations," he said. "What are they waiting for? How many children do they want to be affected? Another generation? I can leave the house for work, but my wife is always with him. Sometimes she cries and asks why God is playing with our luck. Every morning he sends a new trouble."

Doni Choudhary, aged 15 months, is waiting to be tested, though staff say he shows similar symptoms to those who have tested positive and are treating him for suspected uranium poisoning. His mother, Neelum, 22, from the state capital, Chandigarh, says he was born with hydrocephaly. His legs are useless.

"He is dependent on others. After me, who can care for him?" Neelum asks. "He tries to speak but he can't express himself and my heart cries. When will he understand that his legs don't work? What will he feel?"

India's reluctance to acknowledge the problem is hardly unexpected: the country is heavily committed to an expansion of thermal plants in Punjab and other states. Neither was it any surprise when a team of scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy visited the area and concluded that while the concentration of uranium in drinking water was "slightly high", there was "nothing to worry" about. Yet some tests recorded levels of uranium in the ground water as high as 224mcg/l (micrograms per litre) - 15 times higher than the safe level of 15mcg/l recommended by the WHO. (The US Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum safe level of 20mcg/l.)

Some scientists have proposed that the ground water may have been contaminated by contact with granite rocks that rise above the ground about 150 miles away to the south in the Tosham hills, in Haryana state. A continuation of these rocks is believed to run deep below the thick alluvial deposits that form the plains of Punjab.

Increasing demands for water, in particular to irrigate the rice crop, have led to greater dependence on tube wells. That in turn is depleting the water table in the state at an alarming rate - by at least 30cm a year, according to one study - with the result that water is being drawn from ever deeper levels. However, this theory seems to be in conflict with evidence from parents of many of the children, who say they use the mains supply, which comes from other sources.

There have also been claims that the contamination may have been exacerbated by depleted uranium carried on the wind from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a seminar in Amritsar in April, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, a former chief of the naval staff, suggested that areas within a 1,000-mile radius of Kabul - including Punjab - may be affected by depleted uranium. Although the prevailing monsoon winds blow either from the north-east or the south-west, there are times when a depression originating in the Mediterranean can result in rainfall in Punjab.

Meanwhile, smoke continues to pour from the power station chimneys and lorries shuttle backwards and forwards, taking away the fly ash to be mixed into cement at the neighbouring Ambuja factory. Inside the plant last week, there was ash everywhere, forming drifts, clinging to the skin, getting into the throat.

Ravindra Singh, the plant's security officer, said that most of the ash went to the cement works, while the rest was dumped in ash ponds. It would be more efficient to burn better quality coal that left less ash, he said. Every day the plant burned 6,000 tons of coal. He had no idea how much ash that generated, but the stream of lorries to take it away was continuous.

The first coal-fired power station in Punjab was commissioned in Bathinda in 1974, followed by another in nearby Lehra Mohabat in 1998. There is a third to the east, at Rupnagar.

Tests on ground water in villages in Bathinda district found the highest average concentration of uranium - 56.95mcg/l - in the town of Bucho Mandi, a short distance from the Lehra Mohabat ash pond. Such a concentration of uranium means the lifetime cancer risk in the village was more than 153 times higher than in the normal population. Tests on ground water in the village of Jai Singh Wala, close to the Bathinda ash pond, showed an average level of 52.79mcg/l. People living there said they used the ash to spread on the roads and even on the floors of their homes.

Scientists in Punjab who have studied the presence of uranium in the state have dismissed the government denials as a whitewash. "If the government says there is a high level of uranium in an area that would create havoc - they don't want to openly say something like that," said Dr Chander Parkash, a wetland ecologist working at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.

Both he and Dr Surinder Singh, who works at the same university and has also carried out tests on the state's ground water, said it was clear that uranium was present in large quantities and should be investigated further.

Another scientist, Dr GS Dhillon, a former chief engineer with the irrigation department, is convinced that the uranium has come from the power stations and accuses the authorities of failing to control the ash ponds, which he believes have contaminated the ground water.

Their concerns are bolstered by a report from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's leading state organisation for nuclear research, published last month in the Russian Academy of Sciences' Thermal Engineering journal. The report's author, DA Krylov, raised serious doubts about the safety of coal-fired thermal power stations (TPSs), concluding that radiation from ash residues and from chimney emissions built up around coal-fired power plants and posed an additional risk to those living and working in the area.

"Natural radionuclides contained in coals concentrate in ash-and-slag wastes and gas-aerosol emissions as these coals are fired at TPSs, with the result that an elevated man-made radiation background builds up around TPSs," the report stated. The situation became worse, the report said, if ash was used as a construction material or as a filling material for roads.

A previous report in the magazine Scientific American, citing various sources, claimed that fly ash emitted by power plants "carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy", adding: "When coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/30-1

Kosovo urged to rehouse Roma, away from lead mine

* Human Rights Watch says children's health suffering

By Fatos Bytyci

MITROVICA, Kosovo, June 24 (Reuters) - A human rights group urged Kosovo authorities on Wednesday to resettle some 700 Roma people living near the country's largest lead and zinc mine, saying pollution from it was stunting some children's growth.

Some 8,000 Roma whose houses were destroyed during the 1998-99 Kosovo war found temporary refuge in Cesmin Lug Camp outside Trepca mine, in the outskirts of the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica.

Most have left in search of jobs and a brighter future, but 700 remain near a vast complex of lead, zinc and silver mining that until the 1990s was a font of Yugoslav export revenue and employed 23,000 people.

In a report, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said that blood samples taken from children living in the camp showed "unacceptably high lead levels."

"Excessive lead levels in the human body can cause damage to the nervous and reproductive systems and kidney failure. Very high lead levels lead to coma and death," the report said.

"Children are especially badly affected, with some suffering from stunted physical and mental growth."

In the past two years around 70 Roma families were resettled from camps and moved to new houses built in the Albanian-dominated part of Mitrovica with money provided by Kosovo authorities and international donors.

"We have done a lot in the past year," said Ismail Smakiqi deputy mayor in the Albanian part of Mitrovica. "We are just waiting for the donors to help us and build more houses."

Kosovo is still recovering from the 1998-99 war with Yugoslavia, in which NATO intervened in its support with several months of bombing raids to halt the killing of ethnic Albanian civilians. Kosovo's two-million-strong Albanian majority declared indepndence from Serbia last year.

The global financial crisis and constant tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs have clouded the climate for investment in the economy, which officials say needs double-digit growth to make inroads into Kosovo's 45 percent unemployment rate.

Latif Masurica and his five children are among those Roma still living near the Trepca mine in the camp set up by the United Nations administration after NATO bombing ended.

"Everyone asks me how do I see the future? I don't see a future," he said. (Additional reporting by Branislav Krstic. Editing by Ivana Sekularac and Mark Trevelyan)



http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLO658957._CH_.2400

From the Archives: A School in Coal’s Shadow

Comment: Good story, just replace the coal with uranium. The government will protect us with their lose standards, so demand our county to protect us against uranium mining and milling!

By Kari Lydersen, January 2007 issue

Even though he has told this story many times recently, Ed Wiley still struggles to hold back tears as he talks.

Wiley, forty-seven, describes his years working for a contractor for Massey Energy, which builds and maintains sludge impoundments—reservoirs that hold the gooey black waste from cleaning coal—here in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Coal provides just about the only decent-paying jobs in Appalachia, and Wiley’s work helped him build his family’s beautiful cabin with big windows looking out on a creek meandering by outside.

“I was making $13.50 an hour, and I had a medical card,” says Wiley. “I’d never made that much before. That had me blinded. I never thought about the environment. I never thought about nothing.”

But then two and a half years ago, his granddaughter, Kayla, called him three days in a row to have him pick her up early from nearby Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, West Virginia. She was complaining of coughing and severe headaches. On the third day, he started leafing through the register parents sign when they pick up sick kids. There seemed to be an unusually high number: 15 to 20 out of about 270 students were leaving sick each day.

Kayla had her own diagnosis: the coal processing plant and sludge impoundment operated by subsidiaries of Massey Energy that loom right above the school.

“I looked over at Possum”—his nickname for Kayla—“and she had a weird bluish-purplish look,” says Wiley, his face twisted with emotion. “When she looked back at me she had tears running down her face and she said, ‘Gramps, that coal mine is making us kids sick.’ Those tears are what woke me up. I realized I was setting things up that could possibly kill my granddaughter and hundreds of other kids.”

Just a few hundred yards from the school’s playground, directly adjacent to school property, sits a silo full of coal and the Goals Coal processing plant, where coal is washed and pulverized. Large conveyor beltlines snake through the surrounding hills bringing coal to the plant. Above the processing plant is a 385-foot-tall earthen dam with a steep, terraced face, holding back the sludge impoundment. Wiley worked on this, the Shumate dam, and similar structures all over West Virginia. The Shumate dam can hold up to 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge, a mix of coal byproducts and more than sixty chemicals used to clean coal. Toxic heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, uranium, manganese, cadmium, and nickel, among other things, are found in coal sludge.

“I’ve worked on just about every Massey site,” said Wiley. “I’ve wallered in this slurry, laid in it, worked in it all day. They don’t teach you about all the chemicals in there.”
(Calls to Massey Energy for this story were not returned.)

If the impoundment above Marsh Fork Elementary were to fail, according to a report by Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspector Jim Elkins, the more than 200 elementary students and other local residents would be in grave danger.

“Fatalities would be expected to occur,” says an MSHA report by Elkins.

“We’re expendable,” says Maria Gunnoe, an outspoken area resident who says her well water supply was poisoned by nearby mining. “[The failure of the Shumate dam] is a catastrophic event that will happen, and no one will do anything to stop it from happening, and the people who are trying are being ridiculed and threatened.”

More than 150 of these sludge impoundments, also called slurry ponds, dot the mountains of West Virginia. From the air, they look like black or unnaturally green ponds nestled on blasted off mountaintops or filled-in valleys.

In October 2000, a Massey subsidiary’s impoundment failed in Martin County, Kentucky, and released more than 200 million gallons of coal slurry. Wiley worked on the cleanup. In an infamous 1972 disaster, a sludge deluge resulting from an impoundment failure in Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, killed 125 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

The Shumate dam already has a troubled history. The processing plant and impoundment were built in the 1980s, long after the school, which was originally constructed in the 1930s. In the 1990s, Massey Energy, one of the country’s largest coal companies, purchased the facility from Peabody Energy, another industry giant. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 prohibits coal facilities within 300 feet of a school, but since permits for the Sundial operation were pending before the act passed, it was grandfathered in.

In November 1998, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined the company for piling coal refuse in layers up to ten feet thick, when they are supposed to be only a foot thick, as journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman noted. Larger layers are harder to compact and thus present a greater risk of collapse down the line. A few months later, Elkins again cited the dam for refuse layers five to ten feet thick, noting that “it is reasonably likely an accident would occur” if changes weren’t made. Those citations resulted in fines of only $680.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the impoundment at least seventeen other times in the past decade, for allowing erosion gullies to form and for using wood waste to build up the dam, noted Mokhiber and Weissman. Once the wood rots, it creates spaces that weaken the dam.

But an August 19, 2005, report from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection states that after inspections by several state and federal agencies, the Shumate impoundment was found to be constructed and maintained in compliance with federal and state laws.

A Massey subsidiary operates a 1,849-acre strip mine in the hills just above the impoundment. Wiley says that he can often feel his house shaking from blasting in the strip mine.

“If my house is shaking, what is it doing to that unstable dam?” he asks.

Meanwhile, the daily health problems mount. In May 2005, the local grassroots group Coal River Mountain Watch did a survey of sixty households with children attending the school and found that 91 percent of the children had respiratory problems such as asthma or chronic bronchitis and 81 percent reported feeling sick at school with headaches, nausea, or other ailments.

Knowing the coal operations won’t be moved or curtailed any time soon, some residents, including Wiley, have been begging the state to build them a new elementary school in the community. But a spokesperson for the state Department of Education said there are no current plans to close the elementary school or build another one.

After a series of protests and rallies outside the coal prep plant, members of Coal River Mountain Watch met with West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin on June 22, 2005, to voice their concerns about the school. They said he promised to look into the matter and get back to them within several days. But instead of hearing back from him, a week later they found out the state government had approved plans for a second coal silo next to the school. (Last summer, the state department of environmental protection denied the permit for the second silo since it would be within 300 feet of the school. The coal prep plant continues to operate.)

“It’s my feeling that the state government can’t acknowledge the dangers of having a prep plant so close to an elementary school because they would be acknowledging the bigger issue that coal extraction and processing are threatening communities’ health overall,” says Hillary Hosta, an organizer for Coal River Mountain Watch. “There is so much coal extraction and processing so closely entwined in the area, that by acknowledging problems at Marsh Fork Elementary they’d be opening a much bigger can of worms.”

On July 5, 2005, an angry Ed Wiley drove about an hour to the state capitol and camped out on the steps until Manchin met with him and promised a thorough investigation of residents’ concerns.

Two days later, state inspectors visited the school to do air quality tests. A July 11, 2005, report from the West Virginia Department of Education says that air quality and air filters in the school met government standards, and no serious problems were found.

“We went in and did the air quality tests we do in all the schools in the state, and we did not get any information that would tell us to close the school for health reasons,” says education department spokesperson Liza Cordeiro.

But according to Stephen Lester, science director of the Virginia-based Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, the air quality tests done at Marsh Fork were “extremely limited” and “provide meaningless information” since they did not test specifically for heavy metals like nickel, lead, arsenic, and mercury found in coal dust. Rather, they conducted standard state tests for mold, air flow, and air filter upkeep. Lester said the Department of Education’s tests “fail to address the primary concern raised by parents” about whether their children are endangered by coal dust and chemical emissions from the processing plant.

A letter from the governor’s office on September 30, 2005, declared the multi-agency investigation into Marsh Fork completed. “The extensive investigation revealed no evidence of health risks or regulatory noncompliance,” the letter said.

But in response to pressure, the Raleigh County schools superintendent asked the EPA to conduct tests for coal dust. Cordeiro said they are still awaiting the results, though she said “initial reports do not indicate a problem.”

Wiley says, “They always say it meets federal standards, but so does Drano. That doesn’t mean you let your kids inhale it.”

Though the state still maintains it has no plans to build another elementary school, Wiley has founded an organization called Pennies of Promise to try to raise enough money for it, one penny at a time. The superintendent has said a new school would cost about $5 million. Last spring, the group collected about $460 worth of pennies from young students in the Bronx who heard about their struggle. In May, the group delivered these, in addition to pennies from Kayla’s piggy bank, to Governor Manchin in the lobby of the state capitol.

In September, Wiley walked nearly 500 miles from Charleston, West Virginia, to Washington, D.C. Along the way, he stuffed fliers in mailboxes and walked into barbershops and cafés to talk about the issue. When he arrived, Wiley and New Jersey Representative Frank Pallone held a press conference, along with Lois Gibbs (the hero of Love Canal) and other environmentalists. Wiley also met with West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who promised to help relocate Marsh Fork elementary students.

“If I have to, I’ll weld two wheelbarrows together like a piggy bank and wheel it around town asking for pennies and dimes to pay for the new school,” he says. “Those kids can’t stand up and tell the teacher, ‘I’m going home. I don’t like this.’ So we need to stand up for them.”

Kari Lydersen is a staff writer at the Washington Post Midwest bureau and a youth journalism instructor in Chicago. Her website is www.karilydersen.com.

http://www.progressive.org/lyderson0107.html