Dr. Linda Harvey

September 26, 2008

Uranium Mining- the Physician’s Role

I can sum up the message of this presentation in two sentences:

1) Uranium mining cannot be done safely.

2) Doing it unsafely stands to have devastating consequences for most if not all human beings for a very long time.

There, you can go home now. Or you can stay for the details.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m not an expert in a lot of the fields I am touching on in this. I’m a family doc, and a retired one at that, who was dragged into this kicking and screaming when I discovered that some persons wanted to mine uranium in my neighborhood.

Uranium mining is intimately linked with the nuclear power industry, and with weapons. ‘No uranium mining’ means ‘no functioning nuclear reactors’, and functioning reactors mean uranium has been mined somewhere, sometime. Byproducts of the nuclear power industry: plutonium, and enriched and depleted uranium, form the mainstays of weapons production. In countries where it is politically incorrect to build atomic bomb factories, this is their only source. The medical isotope market was developed largely to use byproducts of fission, and perhaps make a bit of money from them. I am convinced that with a little effort and creativity we could find other ways of doing most of what they do.

In unearthing uranium, we have to take some responsibility for the uses to which it will be put, particularly as many of these uses are unique to uranium, and so profound in their implications for life on earth.

In using nuclear power, we have to take full responsibility for the contamination and environmental degradation this causes at all stages. This includes uranium mining, the escape of isotopes and waste heat from reactors and the biological effects these cause, weapons production from the by products and long-term contamination emanating from spent fuel and other long-lived isotopes. This is a huge responsibility, and one which we have been handling very badly. “Blowing off” would be another way of saying it, onto our grandchildren.

Mining and Exploration, or ”What’s Yours is Mine”:

In Ontario. a number of residents don’t own the mineral rights under their properties, and a mining company can come in and strip off the vegetation, trench, drill, move up to 10 tons of rock, and generally leave a mess. Some of my neighbors are in this position. We own our mineral rights, but that’s not going to protect us from the kind of contamination that emanates from a uranium mine. At the “advanced exploration” stage, which is what we are facing in our community right now, holes about 1-2” in diameter and up to 1200 feet deep are drilled into rock, usually into the most concentrated deposits. A hole that deep is almost certain to penetrate through aquifers, giving water access to radioactive rock surfaces. Many uranium compounds and decay products are soluble, toxic and radioactive. In our area of fractured granite bedrock, many of the aquifers interconnect. If you contaminate one, you contaminate them all.

This is the hazard we are facing to our groundwater right now. In Ontario there are absolutely no regulations to protect our wells. The Mining Act trumps essentially all environmental legislation, including the Clean Water Act. Nobody is even prepared to admit there is a problem. The government says uranium mining is safe. Public Health authorities insist that uranium is “natural” and won’t hurt you. Nor can we get a straight answer out of either the company or the government about whether drilling has or has not actually started, so we can figure out for ourselves whether we need to test or take precautions.

This sorry situation repeats itself in several other communities in Ontario.

If this is the level of responsibility to which the relevant parties hold themselves, what can we expect later on when mining starts?

Uranium, at levels in excess of the safe drinking water standard of .02 mg/L or 20 ppb., is principally toxic to the kidney, in particular the proximal tubules.(1) It does emit alpha radiation, but this effect is considered not worrisome at these concentrations. There is evidence of carcinogenicity in mine and mill workers. Uranium does have estrogen mimicking effects and can affect fertility, fetal growth and viability. It may be teratogenic and may be associated with reproductive cancers. It concentrates in bone and may interfere with the activity of osteoblasts, possibly contributing to bone cancers and osteoporosis.(1)

Uranium is known to bind strongly to DNA via the phosphate groups, and in that privileged position may actually be more damaging than thought. 1) It can fire its alpha particles directly into the genetic material of the cell, and 2) there is some new evidence emerging that the uranium atom may capture incident gamma rays and re-radiate the energy as a cascade of high speed electrons, which are actually far more damaging to intracellular structures.(2)

Uranium in well water may also be associated with some of its daughter elements such as radium and radon. (3) Their combined radioactivity may be a limiting factor in water quality.

Mining, in this case open pit mining, involves digging thousands of tons of radioactive rock out of a giant hole ( Rossing mine in Namibia is 1km wide, 3km long and 1/3 km deep)(4). It is then transported to a milling facility, crushed to a fine sand-like consistency (a recipe for radioactive dust) and the uranium separated out, usually with strong acids or alkalis. The waste rock, containing about 85% of its original radioactivity, is removed to tailings ponds or containments nearby, and left for posterity.

Naturally, huge amounts of carbon-based energy can be expected to be used in this process, as are huge amounts of water and land. The water and land are contaminated irreversibly. Very clean and green.

Contamination moves outwards from the site by air, water, soil and biological agency.

Radon gas is continuously produced by the decay of thorium through radium into radon. In undisturbed deposits, this gas is trapped within rock formations until it decays with a half-life of ~4 days into polonium 218, a solid. In crushed tailings, much of it is free to float off. In a 10km/hr breeze, in 4 days it can get 960 km. More if it’s windier. Radon, lodging in lung, is the 2nd leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. After its initial decay, it decays 7 more times over the next 20 years or so, giving off a burst of radioactivity each time, until it becomes the stable lead 206.

Formed free on the breeze from radon, these single-atom radioactive solids tend to adhere to dust particles, and move around or settle out where dust does. I leave to your imagination what this means in terms of containment.

Bearing in mind that the radon decay chain has a half-life in the order of 20 years, and that radon will be produced continuously in tailings for thousands of years, radon-based radioactivity in the environment from existing tailings can be expected to increase slowly to an equilibrium level in about 120 years. We are not there yet.

Groundwater, and surface water, in the vicinity of uranium mining operations almost always gets contaminated. Between the breaking open of aquifers, the use of copious amounts of water to control dust, or to create slurry for extraction, and the exposure of tailings to run-off and flooding, etc., water really doesn’t have much of a chance.

Solid piles of tailings are subject to erosion by wind and water. Tree roots and plants take up this material, often concentrating it,(5,6) and are eaten by critters- birds, insects, mice, deer, etc. which disperse it in their feces or their bodies. Leaves blow away. Seeds travel. You get the picture.

I challenge anybody to find, dig up and process uranium safely.

The Truth about Tailings, or “Don’t Worry… Be Happy.”:

Let’s look at what happens to tailings in the real world.

In Ontario, near Bancroft and Haliburton, there are 6 million tons of abandoned uranium mine tailings which are under the jurisdiction of neither the federal nor the provincial governments. (7) Yes, neither. They were left by mines which closed before 1977, the year the AECB (Atomic Energy Control Board), later replaced by the CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), was created. Because of this, these federal agencies deny any responsibility for them. Because uranium mining is now federally regulated, the Ontario government will have nothing to do with them. They “have not undergone any remedial work designed to place them in a safe condition.”(7)

Tons of radioactive rock are laying around unprotected, with contaminants leaching out, wind blowing dust, radon gas escaping, fencing and signage falling into disrepair and the area being used more and more for hunting, hiking and recreation, fill being taken for construction purposes from unmarked radioactive sites, etc. The surrounding communities are left to deal with this on their own, without meaningful support or resources.

What are the risks from these tailings? According to the CAIRS study, a person walking over a tailings pile for 1 hr every day will absorb a gamma radiation dose of on average 0.73 mSv/yr.(7) This would be in addition to the 1.0 mSv/yr of background gamma radiation we all receive. This doesn’t sound like much. Consider that doubling your exposure will double your cancer risk, and that you will also be exposed to higher than normal levels of radon gas near the tailings.

Now consider that if you built a house on the tailings, of if substantial amounts of fill were used near your house, or to mix concrete for your house, and you spend between 8 and 24 hrs/day in your house, your radiation exposure could be substantial. Certainly well over the maximum of 1.0 mSv/yr. above background recommended for the general public (8). (In this scenario up to 0.73X24=17.52 mSv/yr.)

Use of contaminated materials in construction has been a problem not only in the Bancroft area, but in Elliot Lake, in Port Hope, where there is a uranium refinery dealing with highly radioactive material, and in the United States in Navaho territory where there was intensive uranium mining in the past.

The tailings under the watchful eye of the CNSC do not always fare much better. Near the decommissioned mines at Elliot Lake, tailings piles were covered with water to prevent radon gas escape, a standard procedure. Unfortunately this manoevre requires maintenance: containments for the water, monitoring of levels and some source for replenishment if they become low. Recent drought has caused serious difficulty. Some 15 years into the 1000 year period for which it was designed, the system is failing.(9) The Elliott Lake area boasts 60M tons of uranium tailings.(7)

In reality, we may be slowing down the exodus of contaminated material from these sites. We are certainly not preventing it.

Historical Perspective, or ”Now you see it…Now you don’t”:

Radiation is invisible, unfelt, inapparent to any of our senses. At low doses and dose rates, it can act decades or even generations after the exposure.

This makes it just too easy to ignore, discount and dismiss.

And this is exactly what has happened, systematically, from the first atomic blast at Hiroshima onwards. History shows us a litany of botched, bungled and blown opportunities to study, and learn from, the effects of radioactive exposure on human populations.

I am coming to believe this is not an accident. In the words of Dr. Rosalie Bertell in 1996, “Since 1951 [the opening of the above ground nuclear weapons test site in Nevada], the myth that you can’t study low level radiation has prevailed….The fallout from more than 500 nuclear explosions spread through the whole northern hemisphere. At that time there was a concerted effort to declare that low level radiation wasn’t harmful and that there was no way to prove any effects were connected with them.”(10)

As an example, at Hiroshima, in the studies of survivors, the test group contained individuals within a certain distance of the blast. Those who came into, and remained in, heavily contaminated areas searching for relatives or helping out, some of them exposed to more radiation than survivors of the blast who left the area, were placed in the control group.(11) This served to obfuscate and confuse studies of this population forever. And acted to minimize the consequences of radiation exposure.

More often, studies have not been done at all. The population exposed at Three Mile Island was never followed medically.(12) We don’t even have a clear idea of what they were exposed to. The one gamma monitor on the premises went off scale early in the event sequence. Alpha and beta emissions were never measured. We know considerable amounts of iodine 131, cesium 137 and strontium 90 were released. We don’t know how much. And yet the official story is that no one died as a result of the accident.

Here in Canada, there have been no official health studies done on the impact of uranium mining on communities around the Elliot Lake mines,(13) the largest in Ontario. There have been some statistics pulled from the general cancer registries, but no definitive studies documenting health parameters of this population compared to others. Even though, in 1963-1976 “Ontario Water Resources Commission surveys and reports show high levels of radioactive and chemical contamination in all 55 miles of the Serpent River waterway downstream from the mines and tailings sites. ..No fish are living in the watershed.”(14) Several communities were using this material as drinking water.

There have been no studies of the impacts of uranium mining on the health of communities in the Bancroft and Haliburton areas. There are anecdotal reports of clusters of illness, but these are not useful.