American television tends to make light of nuclear radiation. But the reality is far more dangerous. Consider the superheroes. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles come to mind. A group of baby turtles are thrown into an irradiated sewer and magically transform into giant warrior Renaissance men in shells, ready to defend their city, under the tutelage of a giant kung-fu rat who ingested the same nuclear waste. In reality, this story goes differently: Four baby turtles and a sewer rat ingest large amounts of radioactive waste. They die. That doesn't make a very good television show. Sometimes the truth burns. Radiation doesn't grant super powers. It kills. Bruce Banner would never have become the hulk. He would have been burned to a crisp.
The popular television show "The Simpsons" features the bumbling fool Homer Simpson, a safety inspector at the Springfield nuclear reactor plant. Under his watch, meltdowns are a frequent threat and nuclear waste tends to be disposed of in the sewer, which results in the famed three-eyed orange fish - and possibly the aforementioned turtles. "The Simpsons" adds humor to the situation, but they got one thing right: Most nuclear accidents are the result of negligence or human error. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Church Rock Dam stand as tragic examples of this fact.
Church Rock Dam, which held all of the waste from open-pit uranium mining called "tailings" or "filings" (more radioactive than the ore itself) burst in 1979. The spill released 1,100 tons of filings into the Rio Puerco River in New Mexico, which feeds Colorado, Arizona, and Texas water supplies as well. The disaster has yet to be effectively cleaned up, even after being declared an EPA "superfund site" in 1983. The reason is simple. They can't. The tailings and water have spread too far.
The end of the Cold War crashed the uranium market. Many mines were simply abandoned, a health problem in its own right. Now another "Nuclear Renaissance" is on the horizon. Companies are scrambling to begin digging. One example is Cameco, a Canada-based company that operates uranium mines all over the world. At one mine alone in Crawford, Nebraska, the company has had 23 recorded spills since its inception. One spill released 300,000 gallons of radioactive water into the surface water supply in the White River, 100,000 gallons of which were never cleaned. Another contaminated 25,000 square feet of the Brule aquifer over a period of years that went unnoticed. Now their permit is expired. In addition to asking for it to be reinstated, Cameco is introducing an application for expansion.
I lived on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota this past summer and studied the White River, the final prison of the people of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. I went undercover to the mine, as well as to the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality. What I found horrified me. Now the White River is a dead river. Fish are all but gone, and those that still swim have turned white and are covered in sores. Locals told me of deer reported around the river with Coke can-sized tumors on their necks, and I heard stories about dogs born with six toes and significant health defects. At a nearby river called the Cheyenne - another uranium mine-contaminated water supply - one man claimed that he fed fish caught in the river to a nest of baby red tailed hawks that had been abandoned by their mother after the nest fell. The birds died the next day after surviving for weeks on worms and crickets, the man said. This water supply has been unsafe for irrigation of crops, but many children still swim there. Water analysis shows levels of thorium, arsenic, lead, uranium and radium that are all above EPA safety standards - all products of uranium mining.
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Will Shira is a senior majoring in peace and justice studies. He can be reached at William.Shira@tufts.edu.
