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Radioactive waste- the "thousand-year problem"-threatens the
world of tomorrow.
S
orne thirty blocks from
Utah's State Capitol build–
ing and downtown Salt
Lake City is a 3.4-billion–
pound piJe of rather ordi–
nary-looking sand. Nobody thought
it was dangerous. And contractors
reported that the fine sandy tailings
from the uranium mili made excel–
lent fill for bornes and other build–
ings.
Before 1968, over 22,000 tons of
the tailings were used as fill at an
unknown number of building sites.
Eight hundred tons, compacted into
a six-foot !ayer, went under Salt
Lake City's main fire station when it
was built in 1958.
But the sand was not harmless,
and it in fact poses a monumental
problem that nobody likes to think or
talk about.
Deadly Hazards
"T housands of people work and live
in close proximity to the piJe and are
exposed to radioactive dust, radon
gas, decay products of radon gas, and
gamma radiation," says Lyman J.
Olsen, director of the Utah State Di–
vision of Health.
The biggest hazard from uranium
mili tail ings is radon-222, a radioac–
tive gas that emits cancer-causing ra–
diation as it decays into otber ra–
dioactive elements. A tailings piJe
may exude radon gas at up to 500
times the natural background rate.
The hazard is especially great if ra–
don and its decay products are a l–
lowed to accumulate in a confined
space such as the basement of a
home. And scientists are now finding
that Salt Lake City firemen are be–
ing exposed to radiation levels seven
times higher than those allowed for
underground uranium miners, and
50 times greater than those accept–
able for the general public.
The volume of these hazardous tail–
ings-500 million cubic feet- is im–
mense. T he amount is enough to cover
The
PLAIN TRUTH May 1979
a football field with a piJe over two
miles high. Besides the 27 mili ion tons
of tailings found at inactive sites such
as the one in Salt Lake City, another
113 million tons have accumulated at
sites where uranium is presently
milled. By the year 2000, there could
be a billion tons ofsueh wastes.
And perhaps surprisingly, the tail–
ings still contain 85 percent of the
radioactivity originally in the urani–
um ore.
NUCLEAR
GARBAGE
THE
DEADLY
POTENTIAL
by
Robert A. Ginskey
In Durango, Colorado, dust blown
from a 230-foot-high uranium tailing
piJe located near the town has covered
rooftops of bornes and blanketed the
countryside.
Contractors in Grand Junction,
Colorado, avai1ed themselves of free
tailings and used them in the construc–
tion of over 700 homes, businesses,
schools, and churches, plus sidewalks
a nd city streets. From 1950 through
1966 sorne 300,000 tons of tailings
were incorporated into various build–
ing sites. Now, Colorado Health De–
partment studies show that Mesa
County, where Grand J unction is Jo–
cated, has an acute leukemia ra te
twice the state average. (Cancer often
does not manifest itself for 15 to 20
years after exposure toa carcinogenic
substance, and uranium miners in Eu–
rope and the U.S. have a notoriously
high incidence of cancer, especially
lung cancer, from breathing in ra–
dioactive elements.)
Perhaps equally dislurbing is that
the now defunct A tomic Energy
Commission was unaccountably (and
irresponsibly?) ignorant of the poten–
tia! dangers of the tailings. As late as
1959, the AEC authorized the selling
of tai1ings for the construction of
buildings in Salt Lake City and else–
where.
Alarming Radiatlon Exposure
Víctor Gilinsky, a nuclear physicist
and memberofthe Nuclear Regulato–
ry Commission, points out that the
exposed tailings will continue to re–
lease deadly radon for more than
100,000 years, becoming "the domi–
nant contribution to radiation expo–
sure from the nuclear fue! cycle." A
recent American Physical Society re–
port states that the ingestion hazard
from tai1ings becomes greater than
that from high-level wastes from nu–
clear reactors within the first 1,000
years!
In light of such deadly rea1ities,
people are becoming increasing1y
alarmed.
The fact is, millions of people are
now living with a dangerous legacy of
the atomic age: the nuclear garbage
of uranium mines which has been
distributed and scattered over thou–
sands of 1ocations throughout the
western United States.
'What can be done? T he piles of
tailings could be buried under 20 to
30 feet of soil or a n 8-foot !ayer of
concrete. But to bury these millions
of tons of radioactive remains will be
equivalent to moving and burying a
small mountain. To decontaminate
a
JI
the bornes and buildings that have
incorporated the tailings may be vir–
tually impossible, short of tearing
them down and burying them. At–
tempts are being made to remove
sorne of the tailing fill from buildings
with radiation levels exceeding limits
set by the U.S. Surgeon General, but
remedia! work is going slowly.
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