Blind faith in nuclear
power overseas, growing resistance to coal-fired power plants, and
skyrocketing oil prices have driven uranium prices up and
resurrected a half-dead market. President Bush calls it the
cleanest, safest energy in the world.
We were duped once
before and paid dearly for our short-sightedness. The radioactive
dust still hasn’t settled from the uranium boom during the
Cold War that left an estimated 3,500 dead from lung diseases and a
trail of waste sites, including 130 acres of toxic tailings along
the Colorado River in Moab, Utah. If we can’t clean up that
mess, what will we do about new nuclear waste produced by our
insatiable appetite for energy?
It might help to remember
that we are all in this together, and that there are lessons to be
learned from recent history and the testimony of survivors. The
crushing of raw ore produced a mushroom cloud of dust, though
workers couldn’t see the dust that penetrated their lungs.
They went home in their work clothes, looking like they’d
been dipped in yellow flour. Bathing made them look human again,
but next morning their vacated pillows bore the yellow, radioactive
imprint of the backs of their skulls. After the laundry was done,
handfuls of yellow dust had to be scooped from the bottom of
washing tubs, and one widow recalls scattering the free mulch over
her vegetable garden. This was in the 1950s and ‘60s, before
the federal government mandated safety regulations.
The
vast majority of workers were never informed of the risks. Twenty
years after their exposure, they would be diagnosed with lymphatic
cancer, emphysema, silicosis (a disease well known to Appalachian
coal miners who called it black lung) or some other terminal
illness. When American uranium miners and millers on the sparsely
populated Colorado Plateau succumbed to lung diseases, cigarettes
were labeled the culprit, despite low smoking rates among the
predominantly Navajo and Mormon workers.
America’s
Cold War mentality cocooned in secrecy the industry’s
watchdog and promoter, the Atomic Energy Commission, and granted it
unprecedented power to corner the uranium market. The federal
government entrusted the safety of miners to the states. Records
that could have been released in the 1950s to verify the fears of
Public Health Service doctors were withheld from outsiders.
Ignorant of the risks, miners worked until the boom went bust, or
their health failed.
The diseases of the uranium industry
did not discriminate. Reservation Indian, itinerant Anglo,
fourth-generation Utah Mormon — a sick worker could be fired
without notice, severance and disability pay. If the diagnosis was
lung cancer, the patient might have two or three months to settle
his affairs.
It took more than 20 years of denied
workman’s compensation claims, anger-filled public meetings,
failed law suits, lost appeals, and more angry meetings before
Congress finally acknowledged the documented medical claims of
underground miners, nuclear test-site workers and
“downwinders,” passing the Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act in 1990. But the required documentation excluded
widows of Navajo miners who could produce no marriage certificates
from tribal wedding ceremonies. Millers, surface miners, truck
haulers and underground miners who began working after the
enactment of health and safety regulations in 1970 were not covered
at all. Neither were families whose houses were built on
radioactive foundations, whose water supply was contaminated, or
whose children played in the tailings.
Finally, in 2000,
the testimony of two Utah State University sociologists and the
victims they interviewed helped convince Congress to amend the 1990
act and extend coverage to surface miners, millers and truck
haulers, and take into account cultural differences. But proving
their case after the passage of so many years has proven
challenging, and in some cases, fruitless.
Proponents of
nuclear power today assure us that federal mining regulations will
protect workers. Before we swallow that promise, let’s figure
out a way to take care of the waste from the previous boom and bury
the rest of the dead. We failed to heed the advice of the
traditional healers of the Navajo Nation the first time, and what
they had to say then is just as relevant today: “If you
disturb the land, terrible illnesses will happen in retribution.
Disrupting one part of your life knocks the whole system off
balance.”
Jane Goetze is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She
writes in Logan, Utah.
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