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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-07-07 02:27 PM
Original message
Radioactive minerals dumped in Congo
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL0762624220071107

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo have launched an inquiry into the suspected dumping of 18 tons of highly radioactive minerals into a river in southeast Katanga province, officials said on Wednesday.

The minerals, including 17 tons of copper ore with a level of radioactivity 50 times the tolerable limit, were seized last month in the southern Katanga mining town of Likasi en route for export.

<snip>

According to an initial report by the Likasi mayor's office, the 17 tons of ore belonged to Chinese firm Magma-Lubumbashi. Another 1.4 tons of copper and cobalt earmarked for disposal belonged to Chemaf, a Congolese mining company, and Louis Kiyombo, a Lubumbashi-based mineral broker.

Katanga's provincial environment minister last week ordered the minerals to be dumped at the closed Shinkolobwe uranium mine. Congo has been banned from mining and exporting uranium.

<more>
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Bobbieo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-07-07 03:27 PM
Response to Original message
1. The same thing was done to the American West for 20 years!
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OKIsItJustMe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-07-07 05:42 PM
Response to Original message
2. But, but, but...
Nuclear power is clean and safe!
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NNadir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-07-07 08:52 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. Compare to the stuff sold by coal apologists, it is.
Edited on Wed Nov-07-07 08:55 PM by NNadir
Can you produce one person injured by this so called "tragedy?"

You can't?

Why am I not surprised?

Do you give a rat's ass about all the people who died in the last 20 minutes from coal pollution?

You couldn't care less?

Why am I not surprised?

The fact is that the anti-nuke religion needs to view nuclear energy in isolation from it's alternatives to engage in scare the scare mongering that KILLS.

When you can come here and show that there are zero deaths from coal - and I'm including the millions of deaths about which you couldn't care less - you'll have something to talk about.

When you have a fucking clue - not that you ever will - what "life cycle analysis" is, you'll have less of a moral stain on your little anti-nuke head. As it is now though, you're doing no more than committing murder.

Once again, ignorance KILLS.
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OKIsItJustMe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-08-07 07:04 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. Navajos: Old uranium tailings leave land radioactive, people sick
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7264690

Navajos: Old uranium tailings leave land radioactive, people sick

By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 10/24/2007 06:52:39 AM MDT

WASHINGTON - The Navajo Nation representative waved an instrument over the small pile of dirt. Beep, beep, beep it went, in a radioactive crescendo.

The bit of soil - shipped from the Four Corners region to the Capitol - underscored Stephen Etsitty's point: This was only a minuscule sample of the tailings left behind from decades of uranium mining.

Much larger pieces, he said, can be found in the homes of American Indians, in watering holes for grazing animals, even pressed into a public highway.

"The sounds that you have heard come from an instrument called a Ludlum 19 and show that Navajo families are living within a few hundred yards of materials that we're told we shouldn't be exposed to for longer than an hour," said Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency.

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee stared at the small tub of dirt, which was then sealed off and escorted out of the building by Capitol Police.

The demonstration on Tuesday came during testimony on the problems faced by those living in the Navajo Nation - 27,000 square miles across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico - where more than 500 former uranium mines were abandoned after the rush to find nuclear material during the 1940s to the 1970s.

...

Because of the health and environmental problems that have plagued tribal members since the last boom, the Navajo Nation has passed a resolution prohibiting new uranium mining on the reservation.

In 2001, the EPA razed Mary Holiday's hogan in Monument Valley because of gamma radiation readings 25 times higher than the level considered safe and radon 44 times above the "safe" level. Exposure to high radiation sometimes causes lung cancer, the disease that killed Holiday's nephew, Leonard Begay, a non-smoker who had lived in the hogan for many years. He died in 2003 at age 38.

...
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NNadir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-07-07 08:43 PM
Response to Original message
3. Um, highly radioactive?
Edited on Wed Nov-07-07 08:46 PM by NNadir
Um, could you be a little more specific?

Is it highly radioactive in the same sense as the "highly radioactive" vastly fatal reactor leak during the earthquake that wiped out Japan. You remember that one, don't you, the one that the entire anti-nuke community was crying about at the same time they ignored the 181 Chinese coal miners and demonstrated that they couldn't care less about the 8 Utah miners?

In fact, there are a lot of turkeys running around as if there heads were cut off - and let's be sure that they're organic turkeys that cost less than $4, Allen's Coffee Brandy aperitif included - over that Japanese spill of a little water.

There is NOT ONE religious anti-nuke spouting "selective attention" mantras who gave a rat's ass when 300 million tons of dangerous coal waste fell into the Big Sandy River in the year 2000. In fact, the anti-nuke industry is so cozy with coal, that they set out to destroy the largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy - that would be nuclear energy - to help South African coal companies sell their filth to Germany.

And mark my words. There will be ZERO religious anti-nukes who will give a rat's ass for the South African and German dead from this sick enterprise.

Instead, they'll just sit in front of the fire, sipping brandy with the 40 people hanging out in their Mommy and Daddy's McMansion, talking smugly about their nobility. And they'll be no talk of little brown people with incomes of less than 50 cents a day.

The anti-nuke community couldn't care less about Africa. It never has and it never will, and the South African/German coal mess demonstrates as much.

In fact, all this "highly radioactive" stuff is just equilibrium products from radioactive decay. They are thus naturally occurring, and as usual, a big scare hit is being put out by the anti-nukes. You cannot show a single death from this "highly radioactive" material, any more than your fellow nuke paranoid Cheney could demonstrate a nuclear weapon from the famous "Niger Uranium" fraud.

In fact, natural nuclear reactors operated in Africa more than 1.8 billion years ago, at Oklo. In nearly 2 billion years, the actinides and fission products travelled less than 100 meters in a rain forest.

In fact, the anti-nuke business - the one that pays dopes like Amory Lovins, Gerhard Schroeder and Helen "my 'honorarium price is posted on the internet'" Caldicott - has elevated nuclear paranoia and radiological ignorance to an art form. I note with disgust that 4 years after the last orgy of nuke paranoia was used to kill overtly, the same game is replayed.

In the very next breath the Maine Turkey Co-operative or should we call that "Let's have a war" co-operative will be applauding the war in Iran, a festival of murder (no Allen's Coffee Brandy served), replete with bombing runs by weapons using dangerous fossil fuel. And let's be clear, the purpose of the war will have nothing at all to do with nuclear issues or nuclear power. It will be all about keeping the dangerous fossil fuels flowing to the gas tanks of little Yuppie brats driving to holy organic "look at me! I'm so environmental!" yuppie brat religious services.

In fact, the yuppie brat anti-nuke religion has no more right to talk about Africa than the Dutch have to speak about Indonesia.
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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-08-07 07:22 PM
Response to Reply #3
6. If Dick Cheney (darling of hypocrite NEI shills that heat their NJ McMainsions with natural gas)
bombs Iran, he will be bombing Iran's civilian nuclear power infrastructure.

Nuclear power and nuclear power advocates are responsible for this crisis.

If Iran was building wind farms and PV arrays - no one would care.

Something the hypocrite shills of the NEI who consume mass quantities of dangerous fossil fuels to heat their "upscale" NJ McMansions and keep their Freeptard NEI Stepford wives (who never read DU) warm want you to forget.
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Systematic Chaos Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-09-07 09:23 AM
Response to Reply #6
7. Oh for crying the fuck out loud.
"Nuclear power and nuclear power advocates are responsible for this crisis"?

Let me see if I get this straight.

People like myself, who have come to understand that we must harness nuclear energy to save civilization and the planet, are responsible for the situation in Iran?

How much oil is under the ground in Iran?

Now, on the other hand we have North Korea, which is right now building nuclear weapons, and we're not sabre-rattling with them and talking about invading!

How much oil is under the ground in North Korea?

I don't have the benefit of having researched these issues for 30 years or so. I have just had to settle for the copious amounts of information (and misinformation) available here and have had to make my own decisions based on that.

Yet it took me all of about 3 seconds to roll my eyes and then start :rofl: at your gem of a post.

_____________________(insert coffee brandy joke here)_________________________

Jesus H. Christ on a fucking pogo stick is that the best you can do?
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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-09-07 09:37 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. Dick Cheney - nuclear power advocate. Dick Cheney - neocon anti-Iranian nuclear power warmonger
George W. Bush - nuclear power advocate. George W. Bush - neocon anti-Iranian nuclear power warmonger

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - nuclear power advocate. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - saber rattling nuclear weapons wannabe

Kim Jong-il - nuclear power advocate. Kim Jong-il - saber rattling nuclear weapons wannabe

See how this works?

Nuclear power doth sucketh large...
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Systematic Chaos Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-09-07 02:33 PM
Response to Reply #8
9. Sorry, not at all in this case.
I still think you're completely off the mark. :shrug:
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