Ecology and Socialism by Chris Williams

Author:Chris Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2010-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The mining and refining of uranium is a highly pollution-and energy-intensive business in its own right. The fissile material needed in nuclear reactors, the isotope of uranium, U- 235, is only 0.7 percent of uranium ore. This means more than 99 percent of the rock that has been mined to obtain the uranium ore is left behind as highly toxic “tailings” containing over a dozen radioactive elements. One processing plant in India, at Jaduguda, processes more than 1,000 tons of ore per day to generate a mere 200 tons of uranium ore per year from an original 350,000 tons of mined rock. To make it useful in power plants, this then has to be “enriched” up to a concentration of 3-5 percent. The tailings cannot be left lying around as they will dry and spread radioactive particles via the wind into the surrounding watercourses, fields, and plants.

Similar to the “containment” of coal ash, they are pumped into giant dams containing millions of tons of radioactive waste. According to one report, Indians living within 1 kilometer of a tailing dam “showed that 47 percent of women had developed menstrual problems, 18 percent had suffered miscarriages or had given birth to stillborn babies, and 30 percent had other fertility problems.” Many of the children who do survive are born with “deformities, skeletal distortions, partly deformed skulls and organs.”53

While many people have heard of the 1979 near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the explosion in 1986 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, hundreds of other accidents, leaks, and near-misses have occurred with less media attention. For example:A recent simple power failure at a Swedish nuclear plant… [resulted in] Sweden [having to] shut down four of its 10 nuclear plants after faults were discovered. Emergency power systems at the Forsmark plant failed for 20 minutes during a power cut. If power was not restored there could have been a major incident within hours. A former director of the plant later said that “it was pure luck there wasn’t a meltdown.” The closure of the plants removed at a stroke roughly 20 percent of Sweden’s electricity supply.54

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