NO you hit it on the head.
Some years ago HUNDREDS or MORE died from whatever gas was released from a factory there.
Maybe it was many years ago but they have certainly built up industrially over the past few decades WITHOUT many of the laws that we have to keep things safe
I think you nailed it
Thank you. I’ll have to read up on it.
When I was admitted for treatment for AML (Acute Myeloid Leukemia) a few years back, the oncologist read off a list of cities. He asked me if I had lived in any of them. AML is caused by environmental factors. Benzene and heavy radiation exposure are the main causes. (Ps. no I did not live in any of the areas he asked about).
From an article
“ It has some of the country’s biggest reserves of coal, iron ore, mica and limestone.
It also has uranium.
Large deposits of the radioactive element were discovered in the late 1950s, leading to the creation of the publicly owned Uranium Corporation of India Limited. Mining started in 1967.
Thousands of tonnes of low-grade uranium ore are mined every year — 1,000 kilograms of ore are needed to extract just 65 grams of usable uranium.
At Jadugora, the ore is mined, milled, refined into yellow cake and sent to the Nuclear Fuel Complex in Hyderabad, a 1,000-kilometre trip south by road and rail. There, the yellow cake is converted into uranium oxide, processed into nuclear fuel and sent to one of India’s almost two dozen reactors.
It sounds simple and precise.
The deformities, the miscarriages and the sickness around the mine are anything but.
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.”
Union Carbide, Bhopal.