A New Report commissioned by the Nuclear Truth Project by Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).

Activities related to nuclear weapons and nuclear power have created a vast archipelago of contamination. 

Can it be remediated? With what effect?

Nuclear weapons and nuclear power production have created a vast, global archipelago of contaminated sites that have endangered health and the environment and will continue to do so.

 The sources of risk include 10 to 20 billion metric tons of radioactive uranium mine waste, on the order of a billion tons of radioactive mill tailings, over 150 metric tons of separated plutonium (enough for roughly twenty thousand Nagasaki-type bombs) that is now waste, and millions of terabecquerels of fission and activation products dispersed in air, soil, and water bodies due to nuclear weapons testing.

Remediation can mitigate the risks in the short- and medium-term in many cases. The other side of the remediation coin is radioactive waste and its disposal. That too can reduce risk relative to no remediation. However, waste disposal also creates new risks, especially from long-lived radionuclides. As a result, some safety, health, and proliferation risks will remain essentially forever.

This is the finding at the center of a new report the Nuclear Truth Project commissioned from Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).

Whilst the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) addresses harm from the use and testing of nuclear weapons, as the report clearly states in its preface, the Treaty "does not deal with the upstream harms from nuclear weapons production, which start with uranium mining and milling." 

Those harms "have been inflicted on many countries, starting with Congo, whose mines, exploited by its Belgian rulers of the time, were the source of most of the uranium for the Manhattan Project."

The chain begins in Congo

Shinkolobwe was the richest mine in the world– with over 60 percent uranium in its ore. This extremely rich ore was shipped to the United States by the Belgian imperialists who colonised Congo; it became the material foundation of the Manhattan Project, including the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bomb tested in New Mexico, on 16 July 1945.

Congo, like many other countries that have supplied uranium to nuclear weapons or power states, has never had nuclear weapons or nuclear power. Yet, they are all left with the radioactive mine waste from uranium mining.

The scale of the wast

“Each step starting with mining, creates radioactive waste and radioactive contamination.”

The report shows that global uranium mine waste is likely to be between 10 billion and 20 billion metric tons, this is enough to “cover 1.4 million to 2.8 million soccer (football) pitches to a depth of one meter, or fill four million to eight million two-meter deep Olympic-size swimming pools”.

In addition to this, there are about one billion metric tons of mill tailings and over 150 metric tons of excess separated plutonium –  enough for "roughly twenty thousand Nagasaki-type bombs."

The globally dispersed pollution includes "millions of terabecquerels of fission and activation products dispersed in air, soil, and water bodies due to nuclear weapons testing."

The report is blunt about the limits of any remediation fix: "No solution exists for very long term risks, which extend out to hundreds of thousands of years and beyond."

Nuclear Injustice: The case of the Marshall Islands

A member of a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission advisory committee described the Marshallese, in 1956, as people the U.S. could study "closer to us than the [experimental] mice." This decision to study them as experimental subjects arose from the contamination of their land and waters due to the 67 nuclear weapons that the United States tested on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands.

Despite the U.S. government undertaking  a ‘cleanup’ at Enewetak Atoll that resulted in over 70,000 cubic meters of waste, the operation only recovered 0.25 kilograms of plutonium, less than 1% of the estimated 30 kilograms on Enewetak Atoll and its lagoon. Other radionuclides were not part of the remediation plan.

Remediation standard

Setting remediation standards requires setting dose limits for people far into the future. Enforcement is not practical to ensure the standard will be met. Modeling is therefore required, which in turn necessitates a choice of who will be exposed at at the remediated site far into the future. A resident farmer family has been a traditional, and reasonable choice. But this is not enough. Diets need to be modeled too.  For adults, the default has been ‘Reference Man’ who is defined as a young, male Caucasian who is "Western European or North American in habitat and custom."

The report notes that this is "an unsatisfactory generalization"; for instance the ‘Reference Man’ diet would not reflect the traditional diet of the people of the Marshall Islands, besides not taking into account the differences between men and women’s diets.

Moreover, as the report notes, No radiation standard explicitly protects the embryo and fetus of pregnant members of the public, present or future."

Uranium mine remediation

Large numbers of uranium mine sites remain unremediated. Some remediation proposals, like the ablation of mine wastes to concentrate uranium proposed in the United States would make contamination worse. Some sites in France have been remediated; many await remediation. The report also notes that

“Remediation in Australia is largely similar to that in France. In the United States, plans for the remediation of the Quivira mine site in the Navajo Nation mine site involved their removal from the Nation’s land and disposal in a special cell in a New Mexico State landfill used for municipal waste.”

and that

“The best examples of remediation among those reviewed in this report (which is not a comprehensive review) are the remediation of the Ranger mine in Australia and the remediation after German reunification of various mines in the former East Germany.” In the case of the Ranger mine, it was the resistance of the Mirarr people that led to stringent remediation standards and a commitment to end mining in the area.

Why this matters for the TPNW

"Remediation should be understood as risk reduction because there is always a residual risk… Much of the process is a transfer of some of the risk from future generations who would suffer harm from unremediated places to the present and near future."

The TPNW's Articles 6 and 7 commit states parties to victim assistance and environmental remediation. Importantly this report makes the case for extending that same accountability upstream: to the mines and mills, and to the countries and communities that have carried this burden since long before any weapon was tested.

The report’s preface notes that “A part of the reluctance to address upstream issues may stem from the fact that is that there is a large overlap in upstream processes with nuclear power, which needs the same source material – uranium.” It also notes that that the costs can and should be parsed between the two, enabling the proper assignment of responsibility for the harm.