This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Cold War recklessness is such an underdiscussed topic. I happen to have grown up on a steady diet of TCE and perchlorate in our contaminated ground water. We lived a couple miles downstream from Aerojet east of Sacramento. They made most of the solid fuel propulsion systems for various missiles in our arsenal. It was typical that they put fuel waste in unlined pits which obviously leeched below. The area is now a superfund site. Lost my mother to lung cancer, lost childhood friends to leukemia.
Painful to read. I’m so sorry.
Excellent report. There’s a lot there.
My first take is that digging up this stuff – uranium, and other radioactive things – must be very, very profitable, or profitable to maintain decades of decommissioning after they’ve stopped producing.
Whats the cost of a pound of uranium? Do they deliver?? Perhaps if they put it on Amazon they could sell more ; - )
i used to live in EAST TENN… There is plant/business there that processes uranium fuel rods. there was always gossip about uranium being lost’ in the creek that ran nearby,the company was/is ’ NUCLEAR FUELS’ owned by a company from Boston. i don’t know if it is still there, i know the creek was polluted and they could not eat the fish that were caught anywhere near there.
If it’s bad here, imagine how much worse groundwater contamination must be in Russia. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets produced more nuclear warheads than the US. Around 39,000 warheads compared to 27,000 here. They were on the same crash course of mining at any cost to support the nuclear standoff that the US was. I doubt the current government is making cleanup a priority.
The uranium mines weren’t just inside Russia, but also in the current countries of Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic who are now having to deal with it:
Yet there is a push to consider nuclear energy green simply because it doesn’t release carbon emissions from smokestacks. Forget about what it does to the earth to mine it, process it, then store the deadly contaminants for the next 6,000 yrs, plus guarding it from terrorists.
If you were in the military you would know it was not just uranium it was just take it out back and dump it.
It is doubtful that any Base is not contaminated with something.
Yes. Good point. It’s worth noting as well that U.S. sanctions against Russia did not include Uranium. Among her natural resource wealth, uranium is high in the list and the U.S. depends on both Russian uranium and Russia’s uranium enrichment plants
Socialize the costs, privatize the profits. Rinse, repeat.
Just a great visual representation on how workers are treated in the US.
Yep, I’m not in favor of nuclear power as a green alternative not just for the waste problem, but because it’s “economically unappealing,” as Sabine Hossenfelder points out in this reasonably even-handed look at the question:
Like every other environmental issue, hard decisions that needed to be made forty years ago were kicked down the road for future generations to solve with marvelous technical solutions they would pull out of thin air. The only decisions that were made was to keep the profits and pretend there was no problem.
west side of Toronto, were surprised to learn a few weeks ago that we have a uranium processing facility down the street.
The GE-Hitachi plant at 1025 Lansdowne is an innocuous-looking brick building, just north of the CP rail tracks, which blends into an industrial landscape rapidly being converted to residential. Until 1980 the entire area south of Davenport and north of the tracks was occupied by a massive Canadian General Electric plant. It has been rezoned residential, and is being redeveloped into hundreds of townhouses, lofts, etc.
GE, one of the oldest and largest U.S. companies, was founded in 1890 by financier J.P Morgan, using patents of inventor Thomas Edison. It has 300,000 employees in 150 countries, with $4.2 billion in profits last year. Though historically a manufacturing company, its financial services division now accounts for over half its profits.
GE is the largest designer and manufacturer of nuclear components in the world (including the six Fukushima reactors.) Since 1955 GE has partnered in the development of the CANDU reactor, and currently fuels all CANDU reactors. Since 1965 its Lansdowne plant has been processing uranium oxide into nuclear pellets, which are then shipped to Peterborough for insertion into nuclear fuel rods. Years ago there used to be a nuclear symbol outside the Lansdowne plant, indicating danger of radiation, but the symbol is no longer to be seen.
Nowadays the plant, which employs 53, is operated by GE Hitachi, a joint venture of the two giant engineering firms begun in 2007. GE Hitachi describes itself as a provider of advanced reactors and nuclear services.
The Lansdowne plant is inspected by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which has always given it a pass. The company maintains that all its radioactive emissions, whether airborne or through the sewer system, are well within allowable limits. In 2010 the company applied for and received a 10-year renewal of its license to operate its Lansdowne and Peterborough plants.
Secret and unsafe
Flags were raised about the Toronto plant by Peterborough activists, who noted that while 50 people from their community attended the licensing hearings, there was no one from Toronto. An enquiry among neighbours of the Toronto plant revealed that nobody knew 1,800 tons of radioactive material is being processed each year in our community.
This in spite of the fact that GE Hitachi was supposed to make people in the neighbourhood aware of their renewal application. Only after residents organized their own community forum did GE hold public events, and these are designed to dismiss safety concerns.
“Frankly, nothing has gone wrong in 50 years,” said a spokesperson, while the plant’s manager of environment, health and safety said “it’s a similar technology that goes into making pharmaceuticals, like Aspirin.”
But past safety doesn’t safeguard the future, and unlike spilling aspirin a nuclear disaster has catastrophic consequences. The same safety claims were about Japan’s nuclear reactor, before Fukushima was flooded with radioactive waste. Renowned physician Dr. Helen Caldicott says such a plant should not be located in a residential area, and the least a highly profitable company could do would be to relocate its plant.
Not ‘green’
The nuclear industry claims it’s a “green” technology that provides an alternative to fossil fuels. But as Caldicot points out: “Nuclear power is not ‘clean and green,’ as the industry claims, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process. Burning of this fossil fuel emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide.”
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The facility they are writing about is in my neighbourhood. I used to work at a wood shop that was in a building that was also part of the old GE facility. In the space we occupied we know they conducted some kind of experiments. The walls were about two feet thick. There was an observation window from one room to ours. We eventually expanded and removed that windows. We always wondered what GE experimented there.
One day I notice some people with hazmat suits with oxygen tanks etc leaving one of the buildings. That building was a distance from us and completely boarded up. We obviously wondered about it but found out nothing. That article was published about ten years after I left the company I was working for. You can imagine my surprise.
It’s still there and has a license until 2030.
Sabine (Bee) is great. She really does her homework. Highly recommend her channel to anyone interested in learning more about scientific topics while being entertained by her very dry sense of humor.
Awwww…
O/T I guess its not just dump that needs a full time babysitter
Republicans Deploy The Buddy System To Save Herschel Walker (msn.com)
MACON, Ga. ― When Herschel Walker participates in nationally televised interviews, he’s often joined by one or two Republican senators who get as much ― and occasionally even more ― speaking time as the candidate who’s actually running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia.
Sometimes it seems like Walker can barely get a word in as loquacious GOP senators like Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rick Scott (Fla.) dominate the interview, which is almost always conducted by friendly hosts on Fox News, about the latest in the Georgia Senate race, which is facing a Tuesday runoff.
First it was Kari Lake he wanted installed, now it is him
I saw one of his stooges today, trying to convince viewers that Herschel is only about listening to people and their concerns.
Fine.
If the man is competent then he’s incapable, lacking basic communication skills.
I thought Republicans were about establishing English as the official language
