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.