Reply #24: What does this statement mean to you?

[bigtree]

Native Americans Bear the Nuclear Waste Burden

Uranium Industry and Indigenous Peoples of North America
ftp://ftp.halcyon.com/pub/FWDP/Americas/four_dir.txt

"The most common health risk associated with uranium
mining is breathing radon-222 gas, which continues to seep
from the crushed ore and mill tailings for hundreds of
thousands of years. It is therefore essential to contain
this material, and prevent it from either blowing away or
spilling into water supplies. Responding to the widely
publicized discovery that more than 600 homes in Grand
Junction, Colorado, had been built on top of uranium mill
tailings (House Report No. 95-649 <1978>), Congress targeted
22 abandoned uranium mines and mills for remedial action. "

__________________________________

"The potential long-range health and environmental
hazards of uranium mining and milling, especially for
communities still dependent for a major part of their
subsistence on hunting or fishing, need to be fully and
publicly assessed before a project proceeds. Nowhere is
there a stronger case for participation by indigenous
peoples in the planning and supervision of development
activities, or for their right to determine whether such
activities will be permitted in their vicinity at all. In
none of the uranium-mining projects described above was
there a thorough advance assessment of risks, so far as we
can ascertain, and the wishes of the indigenous community
were taken into consideration only in those cases where the
mine was to be physically located on land recognized as
their property. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
much of the human cost of North American uranium production
has been borne, unwittingly and mostly unwillingly, by
indigenous peoples. "