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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
9. Do you have any idea of how many of these miners, subject of so many fetishes, there were?
Sun Jan 21, 2018, 06:27 PM
Jan 2018

I do.

I wrote about them here: Sustaining the Wind Part 3 – Is Uranium Exhaustible? The references to the scientific papers from which my discussion excerpted below comes can be found in the links I provided when I submitted the work to Dr. Brooks for publication on his website.

I showed, citing something called the "scientific literature" that about 63 miners died earlier than expected in a control population from lung cancer, while fewer cancer deaths among the miners took place than expected in a control population from all other cancers. Many miners died from other causes - like automobile and other accidents

Right now, on this planet, not that our fetishizing anti-nuke selective attention crowd gives a shit about anyone who dies unless uranium is involved, 7 million people die every year from air pollution, about half from the combustion of of "renewable biomass," and the other half from dangerous fossil fuel waste.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

This works out to about 19,000 people per day, or around 800 every hour.

If a little fewr 70 uranium miners died from premature lung cancers, and there's good evidence they did, this amounts to about 13 minutes worth of air pollution deaths.

Like all anti-nuke fetishes, it's purely selective attention.

I note that nobody gives a shit when native Americans or anyone else dies in a coal mining accident, or black lung disease, or a gas explosion, but tons of books have been written about the uranium miners.

Now the Dine miners didn't die instantly, as shown that many were still alive well into old age, in contrast to say, people killed in a coal mine explosion, deaths numbering the thousands.

By contrast, most of the people who die because assholes carry on about the risks of nuclear energy while allowing the growth of fossil fuel combustion to kill more people each year than in the previous year from air pollution are under the age of 5.

But the uranium miners and their "suffering" matters, and the five year old's suffering is trivial.

Excuse me if this mentality disgusts me.

The relevant excerpt my analysis is here:


As I prepared this work, I took some time to wander around the stacks of the Firestone Library at Princeton University where, within a few minutes, without too much effort, I was able to assemble a small pile of books[50] on the terrible case of the Dine (Navajo) uranium miners who worked in the mid-20th century, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer than the general population. The general theme of these books if one leafs through them is this: In the late 1940’s mysterious people, military syndics vaguely involved with secret US government activities show up on the Dine (Navajo) Reservation in the “Four Corners” region of the United States, knowing that uranium is “dangerous” and/or “deadly” to convince naïve and uneducated Dine (Navajos) to dig the “dangerous ore” while concealing its true “deadly” nature. The uranium ends up killing many of the miners, thus furthering the long American history of genocide against the Native American peoples. There is a conspiratorial air to all of it; it begins, in these accounts, with the cold warrior American military drive to produce nuclear arms and then is enthusiastically taken up by the “evil” and “venal” conspirators who foist the “crime” of nuclear energy on an unsuspecting American public, this while killing even more innocent Native Americans...


...Still, one wonders, was hiring Dine/Navajo uranium miners yet another case of official deliberate racism as the pile of books in the Firestone library strongly implied?

Really?

A publication[51] in 2009 evaluated the cause of deaths among uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau and represented a follow up of a study of the health of these miners, 4,137 of them, of whom 3,358 were “white” (Caucasian) and 779 of whom were “non-white.” Of the 779 “non-white” we are told that 99% of them were “American Indians,” i.e. Native Americans. We may also read that the median year of birth for these miners, white and Native American, was 1922, meaning that a miner born in the median year would have been 83 years old in 2005, the year to which the follow up was conducted. (The oldest miner in the data set was born in 1913; the youngest was born in 1931.) Of the miners who were evaluated, 2,428 of them had died at the time the study was conducted, 826 of whom died after 1990, when the median subject would have been 68 years old.

Let’s ignore the “white” people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.

Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Let’s be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an “object.” Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The “Standard Mortality Ratio,” or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11. The “Standard Mortality Ratio” is the ratio, of course, the ratio between the number of deaths observed in the study population (in this case Native American Uranium Miners) to the number of deaths that would have been expected in a control population. At an SMR of 0.85, thus 54 deaths is (54/.085) – 54 = -10. Ten fewer Native American uranium miners died from “cancers other than lung cancer” than would have been expected in a population of that size. At the lower 95% confidence limit SMR, 0.64, the number would be 31 fewer deaths from “cancers other than lung cancer,” whereas at the higher limit SMR, 1.11, 5 additional deaths would have been recorded, compared with the general population.

Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 – (20 +9) = 63.


Thanks for your comment. It pretty much - once again, for the umpteenth time - lets me know all about the ethical universe in which anti-nukes live, a fetishist world where anything and everything is allowed to kill in massive amounts just to assure us that no one ever dies from radiation.

Please excuse me if I find this indifference to human life appalling.

Enjoy the coming work week.
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