reprinted with permission from
     Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,
     TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,
     THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
     pages 16-20

         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.

     SEE ALSO:  Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility 
		(Dr. Edwards is CCNR's President)
		There is a VAST WEALTH of information here.
		Hightly Recommended!!!  See a subset of link pointers at
                Recommended Reading

     NOTE:  the following is Dr. Edwards corrections to the transcript
            of his talk (forwarded to the ratitor), which never made it
            into print.
     ------------------------------------------------------------------

     URANIUM:
     Known Facts and Hidden Dangers

     invited address by Dr. Gordon Edwards
     September 14, 1992

                    Dr. Gordon Edwards, Quebec, Canada. Mathematician.

               TABLE OF CONTENTS

               Uranium
               Radioactivity
               Decay Products
               Radium
               Radon
               Radon Daughters
               Nuclear Fission
               Fission Products
               Health Effects of Radioactive Materials
               Uranium Tailings
               Conclusion

                                  Uranium

     What do we know about uranium? Well, uranium is the heaviest
     naturally occurring element on earth. It is a metal, like all
     other metals, except that it had no commercial value before the
     mid-twentieth century. Until the last fifty years it was produced
     only as a byproduct. Thus the entire history of the mining of
     uranium has taken place during my lifetime. Moreover, a great deal
     of it has occurred in my homeland, Canada, which was the first
     country to produce and process uranium as such.

         The first uranium processed by Canada was used to produce
     nuclear explosives for the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and
     Nagasaki in 1945. Indeed, the beginning of the nuclear weapons
     program marked the beginning of the uranium industry. By 1956,
     uranium had become the fourth most important export from Canada,
     after pulp, lumber and wheat; and every ounce of it was used to
     produce A-bombs and H-bombs for the American -- and, to a lesser
     extent, the British -- nuclear weapons programs. It was the only
     use uranium had at that time.

         Today, Canada remains the world's largest producer and
     exporter of uranium, ostensibly for peaceful purposes; that is, as
     fuel for civilian nuclear reactors. Canada is also one of the very
     few countries in the world in which uranium mining is currently
     expanding. In the province of Saskatchewan, there are
     environmental assessment hearings going on now, this year, having
     to do with the potential opening of five new uranium mines. This,
     despite the fact that the price of uranium is lower today than it
     has ever been. The price has been falling steadily for more than
     fifteen years, and is now at an all-time low.

         I hope that those attending this conference will write to the
     Prime Minister of Canada (c/o House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario,
     Canada, K1A 0A6) and to the Premier of Saskatchewan (c/o
     Saskatchewan Legislature, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada) asking
     them not to continue the expansion of this industry. Why? Because
     uranium is the deadliest metal on earth. As you will see, the
     scientific evidence fully bears out this conclusion. I would now
     like to explain why.

         Both the commercial value and the dangers of uranium are based
     on two extra-ordinary characteristics which it possesses. First of
     all, uranium is radioactive. Secondly, uranium is fissionable.
     These are two quite different properties, however, and they should
     not be confused.

                               Radioactivity

     The phenomenon of radioactivity was accidentally discovered in
     1896 when Henri Becquerel put a rock in a drawer. The rock
     contained uranium, and the drawer contained a photographic plate,
     which was well-wrapped and shielded from the light. Some weeks
     later, when Becquerel unwrapped and developed the plate, he found
     rays of light on the photograph emanating exactly from the point
     of contact where the rock had been resting on it. Being a
     scientist, he was astounded. He could think of no possible way in
     which an inert rock could spontaneously be releasing energy --
     especially such a penetrating form of energy. Moreover, the energy
     release had taken place in total darkness, in the absence of any
     external stimulation -- there was no chemical reaction, no
     exposure to sunlight, nor anything else. Becquerel had discovered
     radioactivity.

         Marie Curie decided to pursue the mystery further. She got
     some uranium ore from the Erz mountains, not very far from here.
     She chemically separated the uranium from the rest of the crushed
     rock (she had to crush the rock and dissolve it in acid to get the
     uranium out, which is what we still do today in mining uranium)
     and she found that even after the uranium had been removed, the
     crushed rock remained very radioactive -- much more so than the
     uranium itself. Here was a mystery indeed. Why is it that
     eighty-five percent of the radioactivity stays behind in the
     crushed rock?

         Starting with many tons of rock, Madame Curie proceeded to
     separate out all the chemical elements she knew. It was
     painstaking work. Finally she was left with a small beaker of
     concentrated, highly radioactive liquid. By evaporating the water,
     she felt sure she would discover whatever was causing this intense
     radioactivity. But when the liquid was evaporated, the beaker was,
     apparently, completely empty. She was deeply disappointed. She
     couldn't fathom what had gone wrong. But when she returned to the
     laboratory late at night, she found the beaker glowing brightly in
     the dark, and she realized that it wasn't empty after all. In this
     way, Marie Curie discovered two new elements: radium and polonium.
     We now know these are inevitable byproducts of uranium.

         By 1906, all the basic facts of radioactivity were known,
     except for the central mystery as to "why"; this we do not
     understand. Indeed, science doesn't really understand why anything
     is the way it is. All science can do is describe how things
     behave. Science tells us, for example, that all material things
     are made up of tiny atoms. The atoms found in most substances are
     remarkably stable, but in the case of radioactive materials, the
     atoms are unstable.

         Consider the water in this glass. It is made up of stable
     atoms. Pure water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and
     these atoms are, as far as science can determine, eternal and
     unchangeable. The very same atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that are
     in this glass of water were around, in some other combinations, in
     the days of the dinosaurs.

         But radioactive substances have unstable atoms which can and
     will explode microscopically, and when they do, they give off a
     burst of energy. This process is called "radioactive
     disintegration" or "radioactive decay". When radioactive atoms
     explode, they give off highly energetic charged particles of two
     types: alpha and beta. These are particles, they're not invisible
     rays. They are like pieces of shrapnel from an explosion. And this
     microscopic shrapnel does great damage because of the high energy
     of the particles which are given off.

                               Decay Products

     When a radioactive atom explodes, that atom is changed permanently
     into a new substance. And radium turns out to be one of the
     results of exploding uranium atoms. So wherever you find uranium
     on the earth, you will always find radium with it because it is
     one of about a dozen so-called "decay products" of uranium.

         To be more precise, when uranium disintegrates it turns into a
     substance called protactinium, which is also radioactive. And when
     that disintegrates it turns into a substance named thorium, which
     is likewise radioactive. When thorium disintegrates it turns into
     radium; when radium disintegrates it turns into radon gas. And
     when radon gas atoms disintegrate, they turn into what are called
     the "radon daughters", or "radon progeny", of which there are
     about half a dozen radioactive materials, including polonium.

         Finally, in this progression, you end up with a stable
     substance, which in itself is highly toxic: lead. But because the
     radioactivity of the other materials is so much more dangerous
     than this toxic heavy metal, people don't even talk about the lead
     at the end of the chain. They think that once all the
     radioactivity is gone, what's left is perfectly safe. It isn't --
     but the lead that remains is just a whole lot less dangerous than
     the radioactive materials that produced it.

         So all the radioactive decay products of uranium remain in the
     crushed rock when uranium is separated from the ore. That's why
     Marie Curie found most of the radioactivity left behind in the
     residues, including all the radium and all the polonium.

                                   Radium

     Well, how did the story of uranium progress? Because uranium was
     less radioactive than its daughter products, it was not valued
     commercially. But radium was. And radium began to be used
     principally for two purposes. One was to burn cancerous growths. I
     should tell you that both Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie suffered
     grievous burns which were very difficult to heal and which left
     permanent scars just as a result of handling radium. Other
     scientists got the idea that if they embedded a needle containing
     radium inside a cancerous tumor, it would burn the cancer -- and
     indeed it did. That was the beginning of cancer therapy using
     radiation, wherein the harmful effects of atomic radiation are
     directed against cancerous cells instead of healthy cells. Of
     course, atomic radiation does similar damage to healthy cells.

         Now, the other main use for radium was as a luminous paint,
     because of the glow-in-the-dark phenomenon that Marie Curie had
     observed. Believe it or not, the price of uranium in the 1920s was
     $100,000 a gram -- and this is using dollars of the twenties! It
     was a very expensive commodity, but only very little was needed
     for any given purpose. Some of it was used to make luminous paint,
     with which they would paint dials so they could be read even in
     the dark.

         Now the young women who painted these things began to get
     sick. This was first reported by an American dentist called Blum,
     who said that he had some very young women -- 19 years old, 18
     years old, 20 years old -- coming into his dentistry office. Their
     teeth were falling out, their gums were badly infected and
     bleeding profusely, they were anemic, their bones were soft, and
     in some cases their jawbones had spontaneously fractured. Some of
     them died of severe anemia.

         The only thing these women had in common was that they worked
     in a radium dial painting factory in New Jersey. Blum called this
     phenomenon "radium jaw". A few years later, the women who had
     recovered from these symptoms started developing problems in the
     rest of their skeleton. They suffered weakening of the bone,
     spontaneous fractures of the hip and of other bones, and growths
     -- tumors, some of which were cancerous -- in the bones
     themselves. Now, bone cancer is such an exceedingly rare disease,
     that there was little doubt that this cancer was caused by
     exposure to radium.

         It was discovered that simply by wetting the tip of the brush
     in order to get a nice clean figure on the dials, these women were
     ingesting minute quantities of radium. And that was sufficient to
     cause all these symptoms. When autopsies were performed on the
     corpses of these women, doctors discovered that in their entire
     skeleton there were only a few micrograms of radium. This quantity
     was so small, that no conventional chemical analysis could detect
     it. Nevertheless, this tiny amount of radium had distributed
     itself so thoroughly through their skeleton, that you could take a
     picture of any one of their bones just by laying it on a
     photographic plate in a dark room, It is called an auto-radiograph
     -- that is, an x-ray picture with no x-ray machine.

         So this was our first introduction to the harmful effects of
     even minute quantities of such substances. By the way, many of the
     women who survived this phase of the assault later on developed
     cancers of the head -- cancer of the sinuses, cancer of the soft
     palate, and other types of head cancers. We now know how these
     were caused. Remember, radium is radioactive -- even inside the
     body. As I told you earlier, when radium atoms disintegrate, they
     turn into radon gas. So radon gas was being produced inside the
     bodies of these women. In fact, one test for radium contamination
     is to check a person's exhaled breath and see if it has radon gas
     in it; if it does, that person must have radium in his or her
     body. In the case of the radium dial painters, the radon gas was
     being produced in the bones, dissolved in the blood, and pumped by
     the heart up to the head where it collected in the sinus and other
     cavities. And there it was irradiating the delicate living tissues
     and causing head cancers.

                                   Radon

     Now, it so happens that for hundreds of years, going back to the
     15th century, there had been reports that miners working in the
     Erz mountains had been dying at a tremendous rate from some
     unknown lung diseases. We're talking here about 75 percent
     mortality in some cases. It wasn't until the late 19th century
     that the principal disease was diagnosed and found to be lung
     cancer. At that time, lung cancer was virtually unknown among the
     surrounding population; yet these miners were experiencing in some
     cases up to 50 percent lung cancer mortality. The other lung
     ailments were not lung cancer, but other types of debilitating
     lung damage.

         By the 1930s it had been established that this epidemic of
     lung cancer and other lung diseases was caused by breathing
     radioactive materials in the atmosphere of the mine. In animal
     experiments, radon gas was identified as the main killer.

         Uranium finally acquired commercial value in 1942, when we
     discovered that we could make atomic bombs with it. Only then did
     we start mining uranium for itself and not as a byproduct of
     something else. A few years earlier, in 1938, it was discovered
     that uranium is not only radioactive, it is also fissionable,
     which makes it unique among all naturally occurring radioactive
     materials. When uranium atoms undergo the fission process, large
     amounts of energy are released. Unlike the process of radioactive
     decay, which cannot be turned on and off, nuclear fission can be
     controlled. The energy release caused by fission can be speeded
     up, slowed down, started or stopped. It can be used to destroy
     cities in the form of nuclear weapons, or to boil water inside a
     nuclear reactor.

         Suddenly, uranium was in demand. We sent miners into the mines
     in North America at a permissible level of radiation exposure
     which was comparable to the levels that those miners in the Erz
     mountains had been getting back in the 19th century. And of
     course, the results were entirely predictable: an epidemic of lung
     cancer and other lung diseases. One has to ask therefore: Why were
     these consequences not predicted and prevented?

                              Radon Daughters

     The answer is, in part, that the scientists refused to believe
     that such a small amount of radon gas could cause such a huge
     increase in cancer. As it turns out, the scientists were wrong.
     One of the basic things they overlooked, is that if you take a
     sample of radon gas -- right now, if I filled a tube with radon
     gas in front of your eyes, and measured the radiation in that tube
     -- within three hours, the level of radioactivity would increase
     by a factor of about five. Why?

         As the radon atoms disintegrate, they produce other
     radioactive substances. And so, in fact, you have a multiplication
     of new radioactive materials which weren't there to begin with.
     This is one of the things the scientists overlooked. So that when
     the miners go into a mine where the radon has been collecting for
     several hours, it's five times as radioactive as radon in the
     laboratory. And those other substances -- the radon daughters --
     are extremely dangerous. The worst of the radon daughters, by the
     way, is a substance called polonium -- the same polonium that
     Marie Curie discovered so many years ago. Recent scientific
     evidence shows that polonium is, in many circumstances, at least
     as toxic as plutonium, and in some cases more toxic.

                              Nuclear Fission

     Now, what is that property that made uranium commercially
     valuable? It's called fissionability. More precisely, uranium is
     called a "fissile" material. Let me explain what that means.

         Yes, uranium atoms are radioactive, and so they will
     disintegrate if you just leave them alone; but what happens if you
     poke them? What happens if you bombard uranium atoms with tiny
     particles called neutrons? It turns out that in that case, you can
     force a much more violent disintegration of the atom, which is
     called fission. When fission occurs, the uranium atom doesn't just
     disintegrate, it actually breaks apart into two or three large
     chunks. In the process it gives off some extra neutrons, and it
     also gives off about 400 times as much energy as is produced by a
     radioactive disintegration event.

         Now, the fact that fission is triggered by a neutron makes it
     quite different from normal radioactivity. Radioactivity is not
     triggered, and therefore science does not know how to control it.
     We have no mechanism for speeding up, slowing down, starting or
     stopping radioactivity. That's why radioactive wastes are such a
     problem. But with fission, we can start it, stop it, and control
     it, just by maintaining control over the extra neutrons that are
     produced at each stage. Starting with just one neutron, we can
     split one uranium atom, and the extra neutrons can go on to split
     two more uranium atoms, giving even more neutrons which can then
     split four atoms, which can then split eight atoms, and so on. In
     this way, forty quintillion uranium atoms can be split with only
     sixty generations of splittings, all triggered by a single
     neutron. [A quintillion is a billion billion, or a million million
     million.] This whole "chain reaction", as it is called, takes
     place in less than a thousandth of a second. That is really what
     constitutes the atomic bomb.

                              Fission Products

     You may now realize that all of the radioactive materials which
     escape from an atomic bomb when it explodes, are basically the
     broken bits of uranium atoms. These are new radioactive materials,
     called "fission products", which are created by the splitting of
     uranium atoms. There are hundreds of them. They all have different
     names, and different chemical and biologically properties. Most of
     them did not exist in nature before the advent of nuclear
     technology.

         You see, uranium travels in many disguises. In every sample of
     uranium ore, one finds radium -- but radium is, in a certain
     sense, just a transformation of uranium. Speaking loosely, one
     could say that it is a disguised form of uranium. It is just one
     of the many elements in the chain of decay. Similarly with
     polonium. Similarly with radon gas. These are all just different
     manifestations of uranium, so to speak, resulting from radioactive
     decay.

         And similarly with the fallout from atomic bombs; all those
     radioactive materials which are released by nuclear explosions --
     such as iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137, krypton-85, and all
     the rest -- they are all broken bits of uranium atoms. They are
     additional disguises for uranium, resulting from nuclear fission.

         The radioactive poisons that were released from the Chernobyl
     reactor are also broken bits of uranium atoms. Incidentally, 80
     percent of the total radiation dose delivered by the Chernobyl
     accident worldwide was caused by the escape of just a couple of
     kilograms of radioactive materials from the damaged nuclear plant.
     It doesn't take much.... To this day, the sheep in Wales are
     unsuitable for human consumption because of contamination by one
     particular by-product of the Chernobyl accident called cesium-137.
     But every atom of cesium-137 from Chernobyl started out as an atom
     of uranium.

         These radioactive materials, which are called fission products
     -- the ones in the bomb fallout and which in nuclear reactors --
     should not be confused with the other radioactive materials I told
     you about earlier, which are the decay products of uranium. The
     decay products of uranium are due to radioactive disintegration.
     They are about two dozen in number, and they occur in nature
     because uranium does. When you talk about fission products,
     however, you are dealing with completely different substances.
     They are created only inside nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors.
     They are the leftover pieces of uranium atoms which have been
     violently broken apart by the fission process. There are over 300
     of them altogether, when you consider that -- being radioactive --
     each of the fission products also has its own decay products!

                  Health Effects of Radioactive Materials

     And so this one material, uranium, is responsible for introducing
     into the human environment a tremendously large range of
     radioactive materials which are all very inimical to biological
     organisms. These are not invisible rays, they are materials. They
     get into our water, our food, and the air we breathe. They're
     exactly like other materials except for the fact that they're
     radioactive.

         Take, for instance, radioactive iodine. It behaves just like
     ordinary iodine, which is not radioactive. Why is there iodine in
     our table salt? Well, it's one of the few examples of preventative
     medicine we have. The iodine, when it's eaten in the table salt,
     goes to the thyroid gland, and there it helps to prevent a disease
     of the thyroid gland called "goiter". Radioactive iodine does
     exactly the same thing. If a child or an adult gets radioactive
     iodine in the diet, the radioactive iodine goes to the thyroid
     too, and it also helps to prevent goiter. But while it's there,
     the atoms explode, and the shrapnel rips through the cells of the
     body, and in the process breaks thousands of chemical bonds
     randomly.

         It's like throwing a grenade into a computer. The probability
     of getting an improvement in a computer by throwing a grenade into
     it is very small, and similarly with radiation events and human
     cells. Now, the cells that die are really no problem, as long as
     not too many of them die. They can be replaced. The ones that are
     particularly dangerous are the ones that survive. Those damaged
     cells can develop into cancers. You can also have damage to germ
     cells -- eggs and sperm -- leading to genetically damaged
     children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren.

         As Alice Stewart mentioned in her talk, there are two
     categories of human illness that everyone agrees can be caused by
     exposure to atomic radiation even at very low levels. They are (1)
     cancers of all kinds, and also (2) genetic mutations -- which can
     be caused right down to the lowest levels of radiation exposure.
     Most scientists believe that these harmful effects are linearly
     related to the dose, so that if the dose is doubled, the number of
     cancers and genetic defects will also be doubled, and if the dose
     is cut in half, only half as many cancers and genetic defects will
     be seen. It is important to realize that if a damaging dose is
     spread out among a very large population, so that each individual
     receives only a very small portion of the total dose, the number
     of cancers and genetic defects is in no way diminished. Thus, in
     the case of radioactive pollution, dilution is no solution at all.

         However, there is one other effect of radiation at low levels
     which wasn't mentioned in the previous talk, and I would like to
     just mention it here. It has now been confirmed by the scientific
     community -- only in recent years, by the way -- that mental
     retardation is caused by radiation exposure in the womb. This type
     of biological damage also seems to be linear, that is,
     proportional to dose, right down to the lowest levels of exposure.
     There doesn't seem to be any cut-off point. 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.

                              Uranium Tailings

     Now, if I could just wrap up, I have to tell you something
     extremely important. The title of my talk was "Known facts and
     hidden dangers". I've told you a bit about the known facts. Now
     for at least one of the hidden dangers.

         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.

                                 Conclusion

     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.
     Couple this with the thought that nuclear technology never was a
     solution to any human problem. Nuclear weapons do not bring about
     a sane world, and nuclear power is not a viable answer to our
     energy problems. We don't even need it for electricity. All you
     need for conventional electricity generation is to spin a wheel,
     and there's many ways of doing it: water power, wind power,
     geothermal power, etc. In addition, there are other methods for
     producing electricity directly: solar photovoltaics, fuel cells,
     and so on. What we have here, in the case of nuclear power, from
     the very beginning, is a technology in search of an application.

         So, I think that we as a human community have to come to grips
     with this problem and say to ourselves and to others that enough
     is enough. We do not want to permanently increase our radiation
     levels on this planet. We have enough problems already.

     Thank you.

     Gordon Edwards, Ph.D.,
     mathematician -- consultant -- activist and president
     Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
     c.p. 236, Station Snowdon, Montreal QC, H3X 3T4 Canada
     internet: http://www.ccnr.org/   e-mail: ccnr@web.net
     phone/fax: (514) 489 5118

     Freda Meissner-Blau (Moderator)

     Thank you very, very much, Gordon Edwards. I think those two
     lectures gave a perfect background to the next step of our
     endeavors. Our objective of the meeting is really to give the
     voice to the victims of what we just have heard. And I should ask
     now to come up here, please, Mr. Vladimir Chernousenko, if he's
     here. And then, Mr. Guy White Thunder, Mr. James Garrett and the
     family Yazzie of Arizona -- that's Esther, Robert and their
     daughter Darnell.

     Now we are going to hear for the next hour the testimonies. Now,
     you may know, may have heard about Vladimir Chernousenko. He was
     the coordinator of the clean-up in Chernobyl. He is himself a
     physicist, and he definitely is a victim. He isn't feeling very
     well, and he has a lot to say to us. He has lived through the
     whole nightmare, so we want to give him as much time as he needs.