Uranium Mine and Mill Workers are Dying, and Nobody Will Take Responsibility

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Uranium Mine and Mill Workers are Dying, and Nobody Will Take Responsibility
In the Southwest, poisoned uranium workers are still seeking justice

BY Joseph Sorrentino


To talk to former uranium miners and their families is to talk about the dead and the dying. Brothers and sisters, coworkers and friends: a litany of names and diseases. Many were, as one worker put it, “ate up with cancer,” while others died from various lung and kidney diseases. When the former workers mention their own diseases, it’s clear, though unspoken, that they’re also dying. Some don’t wait for the disease to take them: “Poor guy says he don’t wanna be in a diaper,” says one worker of his brother-in-law, a former miner with lung disease who was facing hospice. “He got a gun and shot himself.”

Women who worked in the mines and mills also bore the risk of reproductive disorders and babies with birth defects. “[Supervisors] told me … as long as I could do the job, there was no reason to worry about my baby,” says Linda Evers, 57. Both of her children had birth defects. Her daughter was born without hips.

I spent a week interviewing former uranium workers (those who worked in the mines and the mills and, sometimes, both) and their families in the towns of Grants and Church Rock, N.M.: ground zero for uranium mining from the mid-1950s until the early 1980s. Years, sometimes decades, after laboring in the mines and mills, workers exhibit diseases associated with uranium exposure. The federal government, under a program called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), has paid more than $750 million in restitution to uranium workers on nearly 8,000 claims. But in order to receive compensation, workers have to have been employed before 1972—the year the federal government stopped purchasing uranium for its nuclear arms build-up. The workers I spoke with are part of a group of thousands who worked in uranium mines or mills after December 31, 1971, and have diseases linked to uranium exposure, but, so far, cannot get compensation from RECA.

Spouses of former workers also suffer health effects, even though they may have never set foot in a mine or mill. The Post ’71 Uranium Workers Committee, an advocacy organization cofounded by Linda Evers, surveyed 421 wives of uranium workers and found that 40 percent reported miscarriages, stillbirths or children with birth defects. One vector of contamination may have been laundry brought home from the mines. Cipriano Lucero, 61, worked in the Anaconda mill, where uranium was processed into yellowcake, a toxic substance. “[His clothes] were stinky and yellow and no matter how much bleach, they would never come out, they were still yellow,” says his wife, Liz, adding, “I would wash his clothes with our clothes.” ...............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18852/uranium-mines-and-mills-reca-act

[madokie]

1. Oh but

Nuclear energy is perfectly safe, it hasn't killed anyone or so I read here by a few posters in the EE group. Of course I don't believe a single word those posters say either.

If the truth was known we'd all be up in arms concerning nuclear energy. You can bet on that.

[LiberalEsto]

2. +1000!

I am sick of the pro-nukies on DU

[Mendocino]

3. Even after the mines are shutdown,

the old mine sites and tailing piles continue to contaminate. In Moab UT, one old mine has cost over $720 million to clean up. On the Navajo reservation there are over 500 mines. The entire budget allotted for these mines was about $110 million, enough to clean up two of them.