Navajo Nation Slams Door on Deal That Would Have Allowed Uranium Mining

[hunter]

12. Good. The history of uranium mining in the Indian nations is horrible.

Bad enough for the miners, but then many also lived in concrete block housing, the concrete made from radioactive mill tailings, and their homes further contaminated by the dust that came home with them on their clothing and the dust blowing in the wind.

We don't need more uranium. There's more than a million tonnes of depleted uranium stockpiled around the world. The current generation of nuclear reactors can't use it as fuel, so it accumulates.

The most common use of depleted uranium is for ammunition. It's denser than lead and typically used for armor piercing weapons. The U.S.A. shot up Iraq with hundreds of tonnes of the stuff. It's a toxic heavy metal, in some ways worse than lead or mercury, damaging to the nervous system, causing birth defects, and many other health horrors.

It can be "burned" in the current generation of nuclear reactors if it is mixed with plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. This already mined uranium could even be "burned" specialized reactors.

Maybe someday, if we humans are truly intelligent, we'll be satisfied re-purposing and reusing all the metals we dug out of the ground when we were fools, and dig no more.