India’s nuclear nightmare: The village of birth defects

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/09/15/indias_nuclear_nightmare_the_village_of_birth_defects.html

By: Raveena Aulakh Environment, Published on Mon Sep 15 2014

•••••

Children with birth deformities like Alowati and Duniya live on almost every street in Jadugora, a leafy town surrounded by hills and rivers in eastern India, as well as in neighbouring villages. There are young women who have had multiple miscarriages, and men and women who have died of cancer.

No one knows why.

Now, an Indian court wants to unravel the mystery of what is happening in Jadugora, the hub of India’s uranium mining industry since the late 1960s.

•••••

When mining started in Jadugora, workers went into the bowels of the earth and came up with uranium ore. They dug with shovels, hauled the ore back to the surface in pails. Despite new technologies, hundreds of workers still do that.

Until a decade ago, miners took their uniforms home to be washed by their wives or daughters, says Xavier Dias, a political activist who has worked for decades with the indigenous people who made up the majority of the mine’s workforce.

“They never wore masks then ... or boots. Or even gloves.”

The workers were free to take building materials from the mine and even waste material, which they used to build their homes, he says.

When people began to notice that young women were having miscarriages, witches and spirits were blamed. Prayers were said to ward off the “evil eye.” But people had lesions, children were born with deformities, hair loss was common. Cows couldn’t give birth, hens laid fewer eggs, fish had skin diseases.

“If you ask the tribals (as the indigenous people are known) who have lived there for decades, long before uranium was discovered, they will tell you that they lived healthy lives, drank from the rivers, ate fruits and vegetables ... and they never saw the inside of a hospital,” says Dias.

“The difficulty is that you can’t get uranium without bringing up two dozen other radioactive materials, which are far more dangerous than uranium itself,” says Gordon Edwards. He is a professor of mathematics at Vanier College in Montreal, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and one of the best-known opponents of uranium mining.

When the ore is crushed and the uranium is extracted with acid, the waste — and 85 per cent of the radioactivity that was in the ore — ends up in tailing ponds, says Edwards.

Each particle of radioactive tailing “remains toxic for hundreds or thousands of years.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that high intakes of uranium “can lead to increased cancer risk, liver damage, or both. Long-term chronic intakes of uranium isotopes in food, water, or air can lead to internal irradiation and/or chemical toxicity.”

Pregnant women and their fetuses are at particularly high risk from consuming contaminated food and water, says Edwards. Long-term exposure can cause genetic damage so that “even future grandchildren or great-grandchildren can suffer the effects.”

•••••

A 2007 report by the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development, a non-profit, found a far greater incidence of congenital deformity, sterility and cancer among those living within 2.5 kilometres of the mines than those living 35 kilometres away.

Young women in villages close to the mine sites

•••••