DON'T DRINK THE RADIOACTIVE WATER

DON'T DRINK THE RADIOACTIVE WATER

In South Africa, CEO Neal Froneman has boasted that his uranium mine in Klerksdorp could rival BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam mine in Australia. Does he mean "rival" Olympic Dam as a water waster? Or poisoner? Since uranium mines are highly effective at both. This is unfortunate for the people of Klerksdorp and for the people of Beaufort West, since Brinkley Mining acquired rights to five farms with uranium prospects there.

Beaufort West is only 40km away from Brinkley's uranium mining project and this company says: "There is plenty of water if you drill for it, as the water table is close to the surface".

Australians have found to their cost that the whole uranium process uses a great deal of water. Water is used with sulphuric acid to dissolve out the uranium. This process also extracts other contaminants including arsenic and lead.

In 2005, BHPB demanded 120 million litres of free water in addition to their daily extraction of 33 million litres. David Noonan from the Australian Conservation Foundation said the Olympic Dam mine was the largest single-site industrial user of ground water in the southern hemisphere.

Uranium dams kill wildlife that drink or swim in them. In 2004 hundreds of birds and other wildlife were killed at Olympic Dam in one mass poisoning incident. Tailings dams also contaminate local ground and surface water through leaks and overflows during rain and dam failure, as has been seen in Wonderfonteinspruit's sad story in South Africa where children have suffered the consequences of contamination.
Other examples of uranium contamination include a tailings dam at Church Rock in Arizona that collapsed and spilled 370 000 m3 of radioactive water, and 1 000 tonnes of contaminated sediment in the local river and 110m downstream. To this day it is too dangerous to use the water. At Stava in Italy, 200 000 m3 of tailings flowed 4.2 km downstream at a speed of up to 90 kmh, killing 268 people and destroying 62 buildings. The total surface area affected was 43.5 hectares.

Slow leaks are more common - and there have been many. Olympic Dam uranium mine tailings dams were discovered to have been leaking, for as long as two years, releasing five million m3 of contaminated water into subsoil. More than 10 million tonnes of tailings are dumped in ponds near the mine each year.

Nuclear power plants also contaminate water sources and put health and food sources at risk. In January 2006 the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) petitioned the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do something about thousands of millions of litres of radioactive water leaking from the nations' nuclear power plants. In South Africa, the NNR has also been petitioned by local communities to clean up radioactive contamination after a Water Research Commission report revealed the problem. They have yet to respond to this emergency.
In South Africa, Eskom is proposing to build a 4000MW nuclear plant with provisions to expand to 8000MW. This is five times the size of Chernobyl which was a 1600MW nuclear power station. Since Koeberg needs 8 000 m3 of water per day, the new plant's water requirements would be 16 000m3 per day.

In Connecticut (US) three nuclear power plants were shut down after 29 years of unreported and underestimated contamination of local water. The Connecticut Attorney General said the local pollution from the plants was so severe that, "The goal is no longer to decommission a nuclear power plant, but rather to decontaminate a nuclear waste dump".

In Mississippi, a nuclear reactor accidentally dumped 190 thousand litres of radioactive waste water into the Mississippi River that feeds the drinking water system. In Normandy, the dairy industry and Champagne's wine industry were both put at risk by leaks from French nuclear reactors. A nuclear dumpsite in the Champagne region of France had leaked radioactivity into groundwater.

In 1978, Dr William Lochstet of Pennsylvania State University stated that the operation of a single uranium mine could result in 8.5 million deaths over time through local water contamination. This was substantiated by US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Birth defects in Shiprock, New Mexico were also linked to tailings piles.

For the sake of the children of South Africa and a healthy nation, communities must protest uranium mining in South Africa and plans to build up to 30 nuclear reactors by the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa). There are other, healthier alternatives for this country.

Yours sincerely
INGELA RICHARDSON