In an article titled “Campaigner warns against uranium mining” on the Australian ABC news site we get to see the United States - for once - represented in a positive way! Way to go, Kevin Kamps and all the rest of the awesome, hard-working folks at Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS)! Let it never again be said that nothing worthwhile ever happens within the shadow of the internationally infamous “District of Crime”.
Uranium mining has been a deadly-yet-lucrative industry that has benefited both US corporations and government. In all certainty, if it were not for US Uranium mining? The nuclear power industry and the use of Uranium weapons, considered illegal under international law, would be far less financially “attractive” than is currently the case.
In the Australian ABC news article, regarding Uranium, Kamps, representative for NIRS, states, "It's having some of the greatest public health and environmental impacts because of the carelessness with which it's disposed of.” He also goes on to mention that “it's just dumped on the surface and it blows with the wind and it flows with the water and that is unfortunately the state of practice with uranium mining." Kamps is further credited with adding that the traditional inhabitants are often targeted in the search for storage sites for nuclear waste.
Even the EPA admits that it doesn’t have a clue just how much radioactive garbage has been dumped inside the United States! “There is no exact total of these wastes.” On their website they go on to say, “However we do have estimates based on U.S. Geological Survey data. The U.S. G.S. estimated for EPA that the total amount of waste rock generated by the approximately 4,000 open pit and underground mines in their data files to be about three billion metric tons… Given the larger number of mine locations identified by EPA, the amount of waste rock is likely to be higher.
Three billion metric tons of radioactive waste, you say? I know just the place, as a matter of fact, where they can dump it, too. No, scratch that. There are 7 million other people living here around Washington, DC who have certainly done nothing to merit the radiological fallout of such a red-hot, scorching, “Capital” punishment treatment.
Also according to the EPA, there are approximately 15,000 Uranium mines inside the United States. Good Lord – 15,000 mines! On average, that averages out to roughly 300 mining sites per each state, if all states did an equal share of Uranium mining (which, of course, they do not). That sure adds up to a whole lot of mighty sick, radioactively-poisoned Americans, wildlife, cattle (consider that fast-food burger lunch), and permanently contaminated soil, water, and vegetation!
Years back, do you remember reading about the high rates of cancers and diabetes in indigenous populations living in the US Southwest? Do you recall how the articles usually discussed the poor "lifestyle choices" of these modern-day Native Americans? We were told that indigenous peoples on these reservations were thusly diseased due to factors such as sedentary lifestyle, increased alcohol consumption, and a more processed “Americanized” diet.
Once again, many of us have since come to realize that the controlled US media was merely performing its customary function of manufacturing propaganda spin and lies. As I recall, the mainstream news articles that discussed the marked increase in diseased indigenous Americans did not typically mention the “dirty” business of Uranium mining and military munitions dropping, live-fire “testing”, exploding, and burning around native tribal lands.
Poor "lifestyle choices", in all likelihood, never was the actual primary factor responsible for causing the disastrous health statistics seen in the past 60 years in our original American populations.
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