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 are irradiated while still in the womb. . . .
Hidden dangers: When we extract uranium from the ground, we dig up the rock, we crush it and we leave behind this finely pulverized -- it's like flour. In Canada, we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste. 85 percent of the radioactivity is 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. So it means in 80,000 years, there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as now. You know, that dwarfs the entire prehistory of the Salzburg region which goes way back to ancient, ancient times. Even archeological remains -- 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 blow in the wind, they wash in 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 do you in fact guard 200 million tons of radioactive sand safely forever?
But on top of all that, as the tailings are sitting there on the surface, they are continually generating this substance called radon gas. And the radon gas comes up, it's about eight times heavier than air, and so it stays low to the ground, it'll travel 1,000 miles in just a few days in a light wind. And, in fact, as it goes along, it deposits on the vegetation below the radon daughters, which are the solid products that I told you about including polonium, so that you actually get radon in animals and plants thousands of miles away from where the uranium mining is done. And it's a mechanism for pumping radioactivity into the environment for millennia to come. So this is one of the hidden dangers.
Basically, what we are doing on the planet by mining uranium is two things: All uranium ends up as either nuclear weapons or highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. That's the destiny of all 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 substances known to science.

Known Facts and Hidden Dangers of Uranium Mining

Dr. Gordon Edwards, Quebec, Canada. Mathematician.

First of all, uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element on earth. It is a metal, like other metals, except that until the last 50 years, it had no commercial value. Nobody wanted uranium. Since that time it has been mined and, in fact, the whole history of the mining of uranium, therefore, has taken place during my lifetime. Moreover, a great deal of it has taken place in my country, Canada, which was the first country to produce uranium. That uranium was produced for the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1956, for example, uranium was the fourth most important export from Canada, and at that time, every ounce of it was for bombs. It was all for nuclear weapons. That was the only use at that time.

Now, incidentally, Canada is one of the few countries in the world which is expanding uranium mining. At the present time, in the province of Saskatchewan, there are environmental assessment meetings going on having to do with the potential opening of five new uranium mines, even though the price of uranium is lower than it has ever been. It has been falling for more than 15 years and is at an all-time low. Nevertheless, they are talking about opening new mines. One thing I would hope is that people attending this conference might write to the Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney in Ottawa, and to the Premier of Saskatchewan, Roy Romanov, asking them not to continue the expansion of the production of this, which I think the scientific evidence bears out is the most dangerous metal on earth, and really perhaps the most dangerous substance on earth. And I would now like to explain why.

Both the commercial value and the dangers of uranium are based on two extraordinary characteristics. The first of these is that it is radioactive. The second is that it is fissionable. And these are quite different things.

In 1896, the phenomenon of radioactivity was discovered when Henry Becquerel put a stone in a drawer. That stone contained uranium, and that drawer contained a photographic plate, which was well-wrapped and shielded from the light. Nevertheless, over a period of weeks when the stone was resting on the plate, when Henry Becquerel developed the photograph, he discovered rays of light on the photograph emanating from exactly the point of contact where the stone had been on the plate. And he was astounded as a scientist because there was no explanation that he could think of as to why an inert stone could be producing energy with no external stimulation, no chemical reaction, no contact with the sun or anything else. And this was the discovery of radioactivity.

Marie Curie decided to pursue this mystery further. She got some uranium ore from the Erz Mountains [Erzgebirge] not too far from here really, and she separated chemically the uranium from the rest of the crushed rock. She had to crush the rock and dissolve it in acid to get it out, which is what we still do today in mining uranium. And she found that after she had separated the uranium, the crushed rock was still much more radioactive than the uranium. In fact, 85 percent of the radioactivity was in the crushed rock. This was a mystery, and she proceeded -- starting with tons of rock -- she proceeded to separate out all the chemical elements she knew until, finally, she was left with a small beaker of highly concentrated radioactivity, which had no uranium in it, by the way. And she felt that if she evaporated the liquid, she should then find what it is that's causing this radioactivity. When the liquid was evaporated, she was much disappointed to discover that the beaker was completely -- apparently -- empty. And she couldn't fathom what had gone wrong. When she returned to the laboratory late at night, she found that the beaker was glowing brightly in the dark, and she realized it was not empty at all. This led to the discovery of two new elements: radium and polonium. Now we know what they are.

In fact, by 1906, all the basic facts of radioactivity had been understood. Except for the central mystery as to why. This we do not understand. Science really doesn't understand why anything is. All science does is explain how it seems to behave. But what we now know is that substances which are radioactive have unstable atoms. Unlike the water in this glass which is made up of stable atoms, these hydrogen atoms were around and these oxygen atoms were around in the days of the dinosaurs, the very same atoms. But radioactive substances have unstable atoms which will explode microscopically, and when they do, they give off a burst of energy and they give off in fact highly energetic charged particles of two types: alpha and beta. These are particles, they're not invisible rays. It's like shrapnel from an explosion. And it does great damage because of the high energy of these particles which are given off. When the atom explodes, the 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. When uranium explodes it turns into a substance called protactinium, which is also radioactive. When it explodes it turns into a substance named thorium, which is also radioactive. When thorium explodes it turns into radium, when radium explodes it turns into radon gas. When radon gas atoms explode, they turn into what are called the radon daughters, of which there are about five. Finally, in this progression, you end up with a stable substance, which in itself is highly toxic: lead. But the radioactivity is so much more dangerous, that people don't even talk about the lead at the end of the chain. They think that all the radioactivity is gone, it's now safe. In fact, lead is one of the most toxic heavy metals we know.

Well, how did the story progress? The story progressed that uranium itself, because it was not as highly radioactive as its daughter products, 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, both Henry 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. And so they got the idea that perhaps if they injected a needle containing radium into a cancerous tumor, it would burn the cancer, and indeed it did. And this is cancer therapy using radiation. It's the harmful effects of radiation directed against cancerous cells as against healthy cells, but it does equal damage to healthy cells.

Now, the other use was as a luminous paint, because of the glow-in-the-dark phenomenon that Marie Curie had observed. And believe it or not, the price of uranium in the twenties -- and this is using dollars of the twenties -- was 100,000 dollars a gram. A very expensive commodity. And they used to use this, among other things, to make a luminous paint, which they would paint dials with. Now, the women who painted these things began to become sick. This was first reported by an American dentist, 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 bleeding profusely, they were anemic, and in some cases their jawbones had spontaneously fractured. And the only thing these women had in common was that they worked in a radium dial painting factory. Some of them died of severe anemia. He 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 started developing weakening of the bone, spontaneous fractures of the hip and of other bones, and growths, tumors, some of them cancerous, in the bones. Now, bone cancer is such an exceedingly rare disease, that there was little doubt that this was caused by radium. And it was discovered that simply by wetting the tip of the brush in order to get a nice figure on the dials, they were ingesting tiny, tiny, minute quantities of radium and this was sufficient to develop all these symptoms. When they did autopsies on these women, they discovered that in the skeleton of these women was only a few micrograms of radium. Now, this quantity is 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 the bones just by laying them on a photographic plate in a dark room and you could get essentially what is called an auto-radiograph -- an x-ray 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, women who survived this phase of the assault, many of them later on developed cancers of the head, cancer of the sinuses, cancer of the soft palate, and other types of head cancers. These were caused, it is now known, because the radium inside the body is radioactive. Even though there's only small amounts, I told you that when the radium atoms disintegrate, they turn into radon gas. The radon gas was being produced inside their body. In fact, one test for radium was to check the exhaled breath and see if it had radon gas in it. And if it did, they must have radium in their body. The radon gas was being transmitted by the bloodstream and was collecting in the head. And there it was irradiating the delicate tissues and causing head cancers.

Now, it so happens that going back to the 15th century, there had been reports that all the miners working in the Erz Mountains had been dying at a tremendous rate from some unknown lung disease. And we're talking here about 75 percent mortality in some cases. And it wasn't until the late 19th century that it was diagnosed that this was indeed lung cancer, which at that time was virtually unknown among the surrounding population. But these miners were experiencing in some cases up to 50 percent lung cancer. The other lung ailments were not lung cancer but unrelated lung damage. It was believed that this was caused by breathing radioactive material in the atmosphere of the mine, and we now know that this is radon gas. But when uranium finally got commercial value, which was in 1942 -- it was in 1942 that uranium suddenly became a commercial commodity, and the reason why is because 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. And we sent miners into the mines in North America at a permissible level of radiation exposure which was entirely comparable to the levels that those miners in the Erz Mountains had been getting in the 19th century. And, of course, the results were predictable.

One has to ask: Why were they not predicted? The answer is, the scientists could not understand why such a small amount of radon gas could cause such a huge increase in cancer. The scientists were wrong. One of the things that they overlooked, for example, is that if you took a tube and filled it with radon gas -- right now, if I filled a tube with radon gas in front of your eyes -- and measured the radiation in this tube, within half an hour, the level of radioactivity would increase by a factor of about five. It would end up five times as radioactive after half an hour than it was when you started. Why? Because as the radon atoms disintegrate, they produce other radioactive substances. And so, in fact, you have a multiplication of new radioactive substances in the tube, and you end up with five times the radioactivity you started 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, it's five times as radioactive as radon in the laboratory. And those are called "radon daughters", and they're extremely dangerous. The worst of the radon daughters, by the way, is a substance called polonium, and polonium is at least as toxic as plutonium, and in many cases more toxic, it seems.

Now, what was it that made uranium commercially valuable? It was the discovery of another property of uranium, different from radioactivity. In fact, uranium is the only naturally occurring substance which has this property, and it's called fissionability, or more properly, it is a fissile material. Now, what this means is that, yes, these atoms will disintegrate if you just leave them alone, but what happens if you poke them? What happens if you bombard them with a tiny particle called a neutron? It turns out, in that case, you can force a much more violent disintegration which is called fission. In the case of fission, the uranium atom doesn't just disintegrate, but it breaks apart into two large chunks, and in the process it gives off more neutrons, and it also gives off about 400 times as much energy as is given off by a radioactive event. Now, the fact that this is triggered by a neutron -- radioactivity is not triggered, and because radioactivity is not triggered, 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 a problem. But with fission, we can start it, stop it, control it. And by using one neutron we can split one uranium atom, which can then split two, which can then split four, which can then split eight, and 40 quintillion uranium atoms can be split with only 40 generations of splittings. And, by the way, that takes place in less than a thousandth of a second. And that is really what constitutes the atomic bomb.

Now, when you think about that, you will now realize that all of the radioactive materials which escape from an atomic bomb when it explodes are basically broken bits of uranium atoms. So when we talk about radioactive fallout -- you see, uranium disguises itself. In the case of radium it disguises itself as radium, but radium is actually just a transformed form of uranium. It is another element down the chain of decay. Similarly with polonium, similarly with radon gas -- it's all uranium. And similarly with the fallout from atomic bombs. These are all broken bits of uranium atoms. The materials that were released from the Chernobyl reactor are all broken bits of uranium atoms. And incidentally, 80 percent of the total radiation dose that escaped from Chernobyl was equivalent to just a couple of kilograms of radioactive materials -- just a couple of kilograms actually escaped from that plant that gave 80 percent of the dose. To this day, in Wales, England, for example, the meat is unsuitable for human consumption because of contamination by a particular by-product which is called cesium. Now, by the way, these things which are called fission products, which are in the bomb fallout and which are in nuclear reactors, should not be confused with the other radioactive materials I told you about earlier, which are the daughter products of uranium. The daughter products of uranium are about two dozen in number, there are approximately 25 of them, give or take one or two. When you talk about fission products, these are completely different substances. They are broken bits of uranium atoms which have been violently broken apart by the fission process, and there are over 300 of those.

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. And, by the way, these are not invisible rays, they are materials. They're exactly like other materials except for the fact that they're radioactive. For instance, radioactive iodine. Why is there iodine in your table salt? Well, it's one of the few examples of preventive medicine we have. The iodine, when it's eaten in the table salt, goes to the thyroid gland, and there it helps to prevent goiter. It helps to prevent a disease of the thyroid gland. Well, radioactive iodine does exactly the same thing. If a child or an adult gets radioactive iodine in the diet, the radioactive iodine goes there, 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 live. Those can develop into thyroid cancers, and, of course you can also have damage to germ cells -- eggs -- and so on.

By the way, there is one other effect of radiation, at low levels even, which wasn't mentioned in the previous talk, and that is that now we know that not only is cancer caused by radiation, even down to the lowest levels -- also genetic mutations, as Alice Stewart mentioned, are caused right down to the lowest levels. It is now confirmed -- only in recent years, by the way -- by the scientific community that mental retardation is caused by radiation in the womb, and this seems to be also linear, that is proportional to dose, right down to the lowest levels. 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 are irradiated while still in the womb.

Now, if I could just wrap up, I have to tell you one thing which is extremely important. The title of my talk was supposed to be "Known Facts and Hidden Dangers". I've told you a little bit of known facts. There's much more.

Hidden dangers: When we extract uranium from the ground, we dig up the rock, we crush it and we leave behind this finely pulverized -- it's like flour. In Canada, we have 200 million tons of this radioactive waste. 85 percent of the radioactivity is 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. So it means in 80,000 years, there will be half as much radioactivity in these tailings as now. You know, that dwarfs the entire prehistory of the Salzburg region which goes way back to ancient, ancient times. Even archeological remains -- 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 blow in the wind, they wash in 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 do you in fact guard 200 million tons of radioactive sand safely forever?

But on top of all that, as the tailings are sitting there on the surface, they are continually generating this substance called radon gas. And the radon gas comes up, it's about eight times heavier than air, and so it stays low to the ground, it'll travel 1,000 miles in just a few days in a light wind. And, in fact, as it goes along, it deposits on the vegetation below the radon daughters, which are the solid products that I told you about including polonium, so that you actually get radon in animals and plants thousands of miles away from where the uranium mining is done. And it's a mechanism for pumping radioactivity into the environment for millennia to come. So this is one of the hidden dangers.

Basically, what we are doing on the planet by mining uranium is two things: All uranium ends up as either nuclear weapons or highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. That's the destiny of all 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 substances known to science.

So, I think that we as a human community have to come to grips with this problem and say to ourselves -- and bearing in mind one other thing, and that is, that nuclear technology never was a solution to a human problem. We have here a situation where it is a technology in search of an application. We don't need nuclear technology for electricity. All you need for electricity is to spin a wheel, and there's many ways of doing it: water power, wind power, etc., etc. Nuclear power needs an application. It's up to us as humans in a community to say: Enough is enough! We do not want to permanently increase our radiation levels on the planet. We have enough problems.

Thank you.




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.