The Dirty, Working-Class Problem

Abstract

Discussions of nuclear power frequently leave out consideration of the necessity of mining and processing uranium ore. When people claim nuclear power has not killed anyone, they ignore the proof of thousands of deaths of miners and the likely harm to health of nearby residents. A particularly disturbing aspect of uranium mining is that it often affects indigenous people disproportionately.

Doug Brugge is the primary author of this chapter.

When people think of nuclear power, they usually associate it with sophisticated nuclear reactors and their adjacent cooling towers. Despite being over 70 years old, nuclear technology remains a prime example of modern, high-tech engineering and a sign of the advanced state of our civilization. But the uranium fuel rods that are at the center of the controlled nuclear reaction that boils water for steam, begin as ore, dirt and rock. Buried in the ground, uranium must be mined and processed before becoming the fuel that can sustain a nuclear reaction.

The mining, milling of uranium ore into yellow cake and conversion of yellow cake into a form that can be enriched for use as fuel, was, and still is in most of the world, a dirty and dangerous process for the workers. It is also one that contaminates adjacent land and water putting the families of the workers and local communities at risk. The scale of this problem is small compared to climate change, but as will be apparent in this chapter, the impact to many local communities, especially indigenous communities, can be devastating.

As a clarifying example, we will focus on the United States here, then briefly expand to a global context after that. Uranium mining in the US picked up after 1948 when the US Government assured a price for the ore and designated itself as the sole purchaser. By the late 1950s, the mining of uranium was a growing industry (Fig. 2.1), concentrated in the Southwestern US on the Colorado Plateau, where it remained active into the 1980s.

Fig. 2.1

Navajo uranium miners in the 1950s in the Southwestern United States. (Source: Utah.gov)

In a pattern that was repeated in many other countries and recapitulated today in other parts of the world, mining encroached substantially on indigenous communities. Most prominently in the US, the Navajo People were drawn into mining. For many of them it was their first experience with wage labor. Pay was low, but for people who had not had previous access to money, access the cash was appealing. (Brugge & Goble, 2002).

George Tutt, a Navajo man who had worked in the uranium mines described the rudimentary methods and conditions that constituted the first step of the process that led to nuclear bombs and power, “… we built tunnels and hauled it [uranium] out. We used wheelbarrows, shovels, and picks. They were the only tools we used.”

Nor were they provided information about the health risks. He goes on to say, “We thought we were very fortunate, but we were not told, ‘later on this will affect you in this way.’ True, the men worked. When work stopped at the end of the shift, they just got out of the mines and went straight home. They were not told to wash or anything like that.” (Miller, 2007). Of course, the most significant hazard in underground mines was radon gas and its radioactive offspring, which were invisible and odorless, followed by silica dust, which was readily apparent.

As in other countries that engaged in mining uranium in the post-World War period, the US, led by our Public Health Service, conducted a longitudinal epidemiology study of the miners. The goal of the study was not to determine whether the radon would cause lung cancer, as that had been firmly established by the late 1940s, but rather to estimate the dose response relationship. Miners enrolled in the study were not told of the risks they were unknowingly taking (Brugge & Goble, 2002).

The entire mining operation was cloaked in national security concerns that superseded consideration of the health of the miners or damage to the environment with its resulting risk to their families and communities. By 1959 the PHS study had shown a statistically significant association between radon exposure and lung cancer, as was expected, but a federal standard limiting radon exposure did not go into effect until 1969, until far too late to protect thousands of miners.

As miners became aware of the harms they were suffering, most obviously lung cancers at an early age, including among non-smokers, they began to ask questions and eventually, overcoming a steep learning curve, organized to seek compensation. The Navajo people took the lead in the campaign, trying first to sue the US Government. When that was blocked in court, they sought redress in Congress.

The initial injustice of the mining was compounded by what became a two-decade long campaign before the US Congress passed the Radiation Compensation Act in 1990. RECA extended monetary compensation to former miners and their families. Sadly, RECA contained within it further unfairness. The qualifying criteria in 1990 RECA were so stringent that they excluded many deserving miners and their families. In essence, the law, and with it the US Government, rubbed salt in still open wounds of many former miners and their families.

Another decade of advocacy was necessary to correct most, but even then, not all of the shortcomings of the original RECA legislation. The new RECA law, which went into effect in 2000, lowered the threshold for eligibility to a doubling of lung cancer risk and expanded eligible workers to include mill workers and above ground miners. It also moved oversight from the Department of Justice, which was perceived to be indifferent to workers, to the Department of Labor.

The accounting of compensation that RECA eventually paid out provides a record of the toll of death and illness left behind by uranium mining in the US. According to the US Department of Labor, as of 2024, benefits have been provided to more than 9000 uranium workers for a total of over $900 million (Table 2.1). The number of workers compensated is an important value because it is a conservative estimate of the harm mining uranium caused in one country.

Table 2.1 Radiation exposure compensation: claims to date summary of claims Received by 1/30/2024

This estimate of health consequences is conservative because the criteria for compensation are narrow and strict. A successful applicant must have been diagnosed with one of the following diseases: primary lung cancer; fibrosis of the lung; pulmonary fibrosis; cor pulmonale related to fibrosis of the lung; silicosis; or pneumoconiosis (also renal diseases for mill workers). In addition, their work history must either be calculated to exceed a doubling of risk for lung cancer, or they must have worked for at least 1 year.

These criteria likely underestimate the toll for two primary reasons. First, lung cancer is probabilistic which means that many workers developed lung cancer from uranium mining at exposures below the doubling of risk threshold. That is, at half the doubling of risk exposure, one-third of the lung cancers would be expected to be caused by radon in the mines. Workers at that level of exposure are not eligible for compensation. It is even possible that most of the lung cancer was caused by exposures below the cut-off because so many workers had low exposures. Second, the assignment of exposure has considerable error as it is based on air monitoring in a tiny fraction of mines.

We humans are not, however, moved as much by statistics as we are by personal stories. Minnie Tsosie, a Navajo woman who was left a widow when her husband, who had worked in the mines, relates her husband’s illness:

Some years after [working another job since mining] he suddenly started having fevers quite frequently. At night he would get feverish, he said he thought his bones would ache…. it continued like that for many years. There was a time when it was like that and I never paid too much attention, until one time I started telling him to have a doctor check him….Then he went to see a doctor and he was told that the pain that he was feeling was caused from the mine work he had done. He was given pills and thereafter he took the pills. That made things better for a short while and then he would feel bad again. Then he got worse and it did not take long after that, not many years, it immediately brought his life down. From the time he was at his worst it was less than a year and he died. It did not take long. (Brugge & Goble, 2002)

The US example is bad enough by itself, but, sadly, it is only one of many worldwide. The National Academies of Sciences, in its 1996 report on the risks of radon exposure, cites cohort studies of lung cancer in uranium miners from seven counties: the US, France, China, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Canada, and France (NRC, 1999). Uranium mining historically affected miners in many additional countries, notably in the former East Germany, for whom a record of the consequences is not as readily available.

Thus, the deaths and illnesses in US workers are a small fraction of the global health burden from mining uranium. It has sometimes been claimed that nuclear power either killed no one or very few people. The only way to make that claim credibly is to ignore the mining, milling, and processing of uranium and the tens of thousands of deaths and illnesses that resulted.

Today, mining in high income countries has mostly ended. The main exceptions being Australia and Canada. In the US and EU, mining of uranium is currently rare to non-existent, albeit with occasional, largely unsuccessful, efforts to revive it. However, the decline of active mining was not the end of the story because most of the inactive mines and mills became hazardous waste sites that required remediation.

Decades later, these sites continue to present a threat to the health of people living nearby or spending time on them. As with the impact of uranium mining on the health of miners themselves, the legacy of abandoned mines and mills is a global concern, with similar stories spread around the many countries that engaged in uranium mining. Disturbingly, the association with indigenous and tribal peoples is also replicated in many countries, including the First Nations in Canada and Aboriginal People in Australia.

While remediation of abandoned mines has progressed slowly in the US, remediation of mills was undertaken by the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978 (UMTRCA), resulting in former mill sites being largely under control (Lohmann, 2022). “By August 1999, remedial actions were completed at 18 sites ... Those sites are now subject to long-term care and maintenance under the general NRC license (U.S.NRC, 2017). The cost of this to the US taxpayers was over $2 billion and will require ongoing site monitoring and maintenance essentially forever (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

A uranium mill tailings remedial site. (Source: Doug Brugge)

For people who experienced the deaths of many, in some small communities a majority, of the men who worked in the mines, it was a completely reasonable concern that the families might also have been exposed and therefore at risk. George Lapahie, a Navajo man, and former miner, said in a 1995 interview:

Today, we are experiencing a great amount of problems. That is what happened to my children. They have tumor problems. What is it coming from? Through their investigation they have traced it to the uranium. One had serious work done on his head. Their skull was cut and had radiation treatment. That is how it is. Another was affected in their internal organs. My sons and daughter are like that. Where is this coming from? In the past there were never stories about this. Now, those of us who have worked with uranium, our children are affected by it. In Shiprock, there was a big pile of it. [The children] used to go over there because we [lived] nearby. The houses which were on this side of it, I bought a home there. From there I went to work. They used to ride their bikes on the tailing pile to play and now it is like that today. (Brugge & Goble, 2002)

It is unlikely that radon is the causal agent of cancers for people exposed in the community, as opposed to the workplace, because radon disperses easily outdoors. Instead, the leading concern is solid radioisotopes, such as uranium and radium, and non-radioactive elements such as arsenic, all of which are found in high concentrations in uranium ore and could be ingested in drinking water or food or inhaled in dust.

Of course, Mr. Tutt’s observations do not constitute scientific proof that mining was the cause of his children’s illnesses. Rather, Mr. Tutt’s suspicions contribute to a hypothesis that deserved, and still deserves, to be researched. Fortunately, over the decades since the interview with Mr. Tutt, research has slowly advanced in this area.

The University of New Mexico, in collaboration with community-based organizations, has spearheaded several major research efforts on the possible effects of environmental (non-occupational) exposure to uranium mine waste. One critical finding from their research was that among over 1300 Navajo people, those living in close proximity to uranium mine features had greater kidney disease, diabetes and hypertension (Hund et al., 2015). Proximity is a relatively crude measure of exposure, so additional research is needed, but their findings substantiate that there is, indeed, reason for concern.

A 2007 study led by a Navajo woman at Northern Arizona University, another center for this line of research, exposed mice to environmentally realistic concentrations of uranium in their drinking water. She found that the exposure led to, “reduction of primary follicles, increased uterine weight, greater uterine luminal epithelial cell height, accelerated vaginal opening, and persistent presence of cornified vaginal cells” all indicators of exposure to compounds that mimic the hormone estrogen. Further, adding a molecule that blocks estrogen activity, prevented the changes induced by uranium (Brown, 2007). Animal studies are not human studies, but the findings were, and remain in our opinion, worrisome. There has been little follow-up on this result to our knowledge.

Monitoring of drinking water in the Navajo region has also repeatedly documented contamination by not only uranium, but also arsenic, which is often found in the same ore (Blake et al., 2015). Because many residents of the Navajo Nation use unregulated water sources originally intended only for livestock, there is increased risk of ingestion and elevated exposures.

While the level of health impact to community members is not as dramatic or easy to document as lung diseases in underground miners, the evidence so far is worrisome and suggests more should be done to reduce these exposures.

In the last decade, uranium mining in Central Asia and Africa, specifically in the countries of Kazakhstan and Namibia, but also Uzbekistan and Niger, has eclipsed output from Canada and Australia (World Population Review, 2023). The shift is hardly surprising. As the costs and consequences of uranium mining have become more apparent in high income countries, partly because regulations are more stringent, mining companies have sought friendlier locations that cost less and impose fewer restrictions.

One of us (Brugge) has traveled to Africa three times to participate in conferences there about uranium mining. In presentations, conversations, and site visits, it was obvious that mining on the African continent is largely replicating the laissez faire approach to mining in the US and other developed countries in the decades after World War II. Workers have little protection or knowledge of the risk. Control of environmental contamination is limited, exposing nearby communities. In South Africa, an informal settlement was visited that sat atop mine waste. It is clear to us that mine companies are taking advantage of low-income nations in Africa and that this trend is more likely to continue, and even expand, in the coming years (Winde et al., 2017; Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3

Uranium production and use from 1945 to 2004. (Source: Winde et al., 2017)

Similarly, a town in Tajikistan that is adjacent to an abandoned uranium mine also revealed uncontrolled piles of mine debris and elevated radiation in soil and water (Dustov et al., 2013). There is every reason to believe, given the ease with which these sites were identified, that similar situations exist in many places in Central Asia and Africa and, in all likelihood, elsewhere in developing countries.

It is a sorry statement of the primacy of profits over concern for the health and well being of people, that so little is being done to address the ongoing tragedy of uranium mining. To us, there are two pressing needs. First, and most urgently, there is a need to extend first world occupational safety and environmental regulations to uranium mining in developing countries. This will raise the cost of mining uranium, but that cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of generating electricity with nuclear power.

Second, we need to finish research that is underway to more precisely establish the risk from environmental exposures, both from ongoing mining and legacy mining in countries such as the US where mining has largely concluded.

A longer-term goal is to force the externalized costs of uranium mining into the costs incurred by mining companies. Despite some settlements that assessed costs to the companies that were responsible, in the US we taxpayers were left to pick up too much of the cost of remediation of contaminated sites and long-term maintenance of stored uranium waste.

Summary Points

• 1. Often ignored when considering the health and environmental impacts of nuclear power are the early stages of the industry, including mining, milling and processing uranium ore.

• 2. The health and social impact of mining and processing uranium is considerable and has frequently had disproportionate effects on indigenous communities.

• 3. Although mining uranium is in decline in most high income countries, it continues to be conducted in poorly regulated and hazardous ways in low income countries, especially in Africa and Central Asia.