BTW, regarding "problems from stuff" you hear about that over the long haul. It took a while but one day somebody woke up to the fact that smokers who mined uranium were all dying off pretty quick.
People who mined uranium and didn't smoke didn't have that problem. Smokers who didn't mine had a problem but not that bad.
Sometimes two minor problems can combine to create a really unhealthy situation.
True. But I have to have a radon evac system in my basement, and I’m hardly living in a mine, so I’m rather more sanguine about the issues. Radon just comes out of the ground in some areas of the US, just as there is uranium laying on the surface in some areas of the US, there’s arsenic and other heavy metals in the water in some areas of the US (naturally).
In the “long haul,” we’re all dead. Doesn’t matter how polly-pure-bred a life we’ve lived, everyone kicks the bucket at some point. The minerals in question are rather useful in modern technology, and we might go so far as to say that they’re economically as necessary as coal. Synergistic effects are absolutely true. Look at the rates of cancer in women who both smoke and take birth control pills. There’s a statistical indication of a synergistic effect. We could save a whole lot more lives by telling women to either quit smoking or quit birth control pills.
I seriously doubt we’re going to tho.
About 70 guys die per year in mining. I really doubt we’re going to get that number much lower at this point. That’s a huge improvement from the past, just as the deaths in farm related accidents has had a serious decline in the last 40 years.