If there’s one thing that Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility wants you to know about uranium mining, it’s that a single mistake can last 100,000 years.
Invited to Mistissini on Tuesday, May 15, by the Association of Employees of Northern Quebec, Edwards gave a speech at the local school and was interviewed by several radio stations. His message was overwhelming: uranium mining is a clear and present danger to the Eeyou Istchee, and a danger to all of Quebec.
While he outlined a huge array of details to support his case, perhaps the most important is this: uranium can’t be mined alone. When it’s brought out of the ground, it is part of a body of rock that contains many other extremely dangerous radioactive materials. These other radioactive materials, however, have no market value. After the rock has been ground down into a fine dust to allow the miners to extract the uranium, 80% of the radioactive dust is left over. The problem only starts there – for the next 100,000 years, it remains extremely dangerous to human beings.
“It behaves like calcium in the body,” said Edwards, “which means it goes toward the bones, the teeth and the milk. This causes blood diseases, bone cancer and head cancers involving the jaw bones and teeth.”
One of the most toxic by-products left behind by uranium mining is radium, the element that Marie Curie discovered – which killed her. As it disintegrates, it changes into toxic radon gas, which has been responsible for the deaths of many uranium miners over the years.
“It turns out that radon is produced internally when you have radium in your diet,” Edwards explained. “It’s transported to your brain and released as radon gas. All of this was documented even before the first nuclear reactor was built.”
Edwards cautioned that the Otish Mountains is an exceptionally dangerous place for such mining to occur, because the site contains rivers flowing away in several different directions.
He said, “This is the worst possible place to have a repository of dangerous material – in a fine sand! We’re asking for trouble. It’s a transport mechanism that can get this material into the food chain. The human race hasn’t been successful of disposing of anything, and now what we’re trying to do is to use technology to prevent nature from recycling what it wants to recycle. Nature is the great recycler, everything makes the rounds. Bringing this stuff to the surface as a hard rock, grinding it into sand, then expecting nature is not going to be able to get at it, that seems like an empty promise.”
While regulators argue that our technology is sufficient to safely contain this material, Edwards asked the public to consider the Great Pyramids of Egypt, which have been standing only 5,000 years. They are not a great example of humanity’s ability to take care of structures over long periods of time, and the results of uranium mining will be around 20 times longer.
“Any failure of containment in the thousands of years to come means this stuff will get scattered into the environment and enter the food chain,” he said. “It would be catastrophic. So we have to weigh these facts against the short-term advantages. People want jobs and economic growth, which makes sense, but with mining, those things are temporary. The consequences last far longer. Are the resources we have adequate to compensate for those consequences?”
There has never been uranium mining in Quebec, and in fact the government of British Columbia declared a permanent moratorium on the practice recently, while the government of Nova Scotia has banned all uranium mining and uranium exploration for safety reasons. That law goes so far as to mandate that anyone exploring for any other mineral, who discovers uranium in the process, must stop immediately.
“That radioactive material is well-protected under the Canadian shield,” said Edwards, “and very little of it ever comes to the surface. But even opening up the ore body – not mining it – is asking for trouble by creating pathways that weren’t there before.”
Unfortunately, he said, what Strateco Resources is seeking is to do exactly that in the Eeyou Istchee.
“They want to build an elaborate excavation project, which they call ‘Advanced Exploration’,” Edwards said. “It will be a ramp that winds down through the rock, closer to the ore body. The purpose is that it will allow them to open up the ore body, to drill into it and determine how potentially profitable the ore body could be. Once they do that, there’s no way they can ever restore the integrity of the rock vault that was already there, protecting us from that radioactive material. In Nova Scotia, it would be illegal.”
There is a genuine controversy here, Edwards said, and people are not getting the resources they need to educate themselves about it. In 2010, the international group Physicians for Global Survival passed a unanimous resolution calling for a worldwide ban on uranium mining.
“To put it in perspective,” explained Edwards, “if uranium was an element essential for survival, you’d cope with the danger as best you could. But the only commodity for which uranium is absolutely essential is nuclear weapons. When you look at methods of energy production, nuclear energy is only one of many. Similarly, when it comes to medical isotopes, we don’t need to have uranium for that. They can be produced with laboratory devices. Nuclear medicine was in existence long before there were any reactors.”
Nicholas Bégin, a media-relations officer with Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNRF), was predictably more measured in his statements about uranium mining.
“The choice of whether or not to impose a moratorium on the exploration and mining of uranium is an important question,” he said, “which the government of Quebec does not take lightly. It’s still too soon to talk about a moratorium on uranium exploration and mining in Quebec. The working group set up by the Côte-Nord’s Health Services Agency is gathering together all available information with which to evaluate potential risks related to uranium exploration and mining. The MRNF awaits recommendations from this working group in order to make an informed decision.”
However, Bégin said his ministry is relatively confident about the safety of uranium exploration.
Until they receive the recommendations of the Côte-Nord’s Health Service, he said, “The MRNF’s position is based on the response of [the Ministry of Health and Social Services] given in a briefing paper produced in collaboration with [the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Environment, and Parks] and MRNF: the exploration of uranium poses no risk to public health. This position is reinforced by the Canadian Nuclear Security Commission, the independent federal organization that rigorously regulates the uranium industry in Canada.”
This position caused Edwards to bristle.
“The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission,” he said, “their job by law is to educate people. They have a legal duty, according to their charter, to disseminate objective scientific information about the regulation process and the potential hazards associated with the materials. They’re supposed to take a proactive role in educating people, but they don’t. On the front cover of their annual report a year ago, they ran the headline: ‘Fact: Nuclear in Canada is Safe’. This sentiment was repeated several times through that report. Their website has an almost patronizing tone. Instead of educating people about potential dangers, they simply say ‘we make it safe’. This is not education.”
It is not surprising, then, that Edwards was not comfortable with the MRNF’s position on uranium exploration and mining. However, Edwards was quick to underline that he does not suspect the mining companies or the regulatory agency of deliberately courting danger or conspiring against the public.
“The mining companies don’t want to hurt anybody,” he said. “The regulatory agency is trying to do a good job. But people have a right to know what this stuff is and what it does.”
