Re: Uranium story in Sydney Morning Herald

[Franz Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 04:29 09.01.2000 -0600, Björn Cedervall wrote:


>More thoughts: No doubt that there is a family tragedy involved.
>What is disturbing, as with so many previous stories of similar kinds, is 
>that the writer makes no effort to explain the context in an understandable 
>way. 


I miss as usual any numbers on radionuclide concentrations, doses and
doserates.

Nevertheless - even taking the usual way of reporting about nuclear issues
in the media into consideration - my personal opinion is that it is not
unlikely that the report contains a lot of truth. The health effects of
radon and dust to miners is well studied in developed countries like for
instance USA, the former Czechoslovakia, the former German Democratic
Republic etc. Why should we doubt that there are the same effects in India?
The question, whether every single case reported in the newspaper is
related to radiation is really secondary - it would be bad enough if only
half of them or 10% were related. 

Furthermore not only radiation or radon poses hazards, also the chemicals
used in the production of yellow cake are poisonous and especially the
heavy metals usually associated with the uranium ore are far from
negligible. I refer to the many remediation projects especially in the USA
which have been finished already, are under progress or are to be
considered. (By the way, are there any news about the Moab-site?)

Problems with tailings, which contain the radium and the daughter products
and are therefore highly radioactive, have been described in the
literature. There is enough literature available about remediation of
former mining sites and tailings. 

One has also to consider that the circumstances under which people work in
developing countries are a lot different from the ones in developed and
highly industrialized countries. And we know that the worth of a life as it
is used in some radiation protection calculations is by far lower for
developing countries than in the others.

I suppose that there are some facts told in the article which are very
unlikely to be wrong - for instance the distance of villages to the
tailings. And this is sure not right to expose people to the dust or spray
from radioactive tailings.


So I conclude that there is a certain probability that at least a large
part of the article is true.

Some environmentalists and greens say that everything related to nuclear
power and radiation is bad - we should not go to the same level to say that
everything associated with radiation is good and any negative news are
wrong, without having the facts controlled.

Regards,

Franz






Franz Schoenhofer
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A-1160 Vienna
Austria
Tel.: +43-1-495 53 08
Fax.: same number
mobile phone: +43-664-338 0 333
e-mail: schoenho@via.at

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