Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  Filming on Sunseekers was completed in 1959, and the movie was scheduled to premiere in the town of Schlema, at the very heart of uranium country. Engraved invitations were sent out to Communist Party leaders and ordinary miners. But days before the debut, it was reviewed once more by Soviet censors, who objected to the dismal portrayal of life inside and outside the mines, and especially the insinuation that Russian supervisors were indifferent to the safety of their German comrades. The showing was canceled, and the movie was put on the shelf for twelve years before a more relaxed East German regime permitted its release in 1972.

  This would not be the only unflattering portrayal that party officials tried to suppress. In 1988, a sensational book-length study called Pechblende began creating a stir among reporters and academics in West Germany. It had already been circulating in the East through samizdat— that old Communist method of quietly passing copies of banned material from reader to reader. The author was a twenty-four-year-old university student named Michael Beleites, who had surveyed the human and environmental damage in the Ore Mountains. Beleites published his findings under the cover of the Lutheran Research Institute, which was out of the reach of party censors, but he suffered harassment in the aftermath. His mail was opened, his parents’ telephone was tapped, and he was followed by the Stasi secret police whenever he left his apartment. Beleites later said the only thing that saved him from prison or execution was fear among Stasi officers that his disappearance would only throw more light on the environmental disaster at Wismut.

  Pechblende was written in a calm but relentless voice. It told a grim tale of environmental wreckage in the closed uranium towns, and of people living there seemingly ignorant of the health risks of close contact with what was still euphoniously called ore. Mushrooms growing on some of the toxic waste heaps were frequently picked for salads and cooking. Some of the poured concrete in the newer buildings was made of ground-up radioactive rubble. Radon gas was floating in elevated quantities all over the Ore Mountains.

  The report included a letter from the daughter of a middle-aged miner that put words to one of the realities about uranium mining that many suspected, but few wanted to acknowledge out loud.

  “I can’t forget how he sat there in the bare hospital room, alone, perplexed, and hopeless. He just kept shaking his head. All he wanted was to make his own decision when to die. He had seen too many other friends die. My father jumped out of the window, eleventh floor. He knew nothing, nothing about radiation. Right near the end a doctor finally told my mother it was lung cancer.”

  Uranium is always disintegrating. This is the signature trait that distinguishes it from most of the elements in the periodic table and what gives it its power. During the Jurassic period, when it came to rest inside the dinosaur corpses trapped in the sandstone in America and also mingled with the silver-bearing deposits of Germany, it remained unstable at the core, continuing its spiral downward through the decay sequence. One of the first things spawned is radium, the element prized by Pierre and Marie Curie. Radium, in turn, decays into radon-222, the heaviest known gas in the natural world. It is called a noble gas because, like neon and helium, it cannot bond with any other element. Unlike the other nobles, however, it is constantly throwing off pieces of itself and becoming, yet again, something new. It has a half-life of just under four days.

  Air pockets in the uranium ore house the entirety of the radon decay sequence: from radium-226 to radon-222 to polonium-218 to lead-214 to bismuth-214, and so on until everything comes finally to rest at lead-206. Down the isotopic chain, from instability to instability, a series of “radon daughter” elements are released, radioactive particles with half-lives ranging from twenty-seven minutes to a fraction of a second. They are tasteless, odorless, colorless, and invisible. If these gaseous particles are locked inside the ore, they are harmless. But the uranium inside the Colorado Plateau and the Ore Mountains had settled into porous formations of sandstone and clay. These rocks have countless tiny airholes through which the gas can seep outward. The greater the surface area exposed, the more gas escapes. A long flat surface like the wall of a mine tunnel provides an ideal environment for radioactive gas to respire from the surface. And when the conglomerate ore is chipped or crushed, even more radon daughters escape from spongelike chambers within the rock.

  This effect is relatively harmless in outdoor spaces because the radon daughters almost instantly dilute into an ocean of fresh air. But inside a confined space such as a crushing mill or an underground mine, the radon daughters fasten themselves to motes suspended in the air: dust, particulate, and water droplets. These can be breathed deep inside the lungs. Most of them are harmlessly exhaled. But a few remain trapped in the soft pink tissue and alveoli that form the interior surface of the lungs. These pieces of radioactivity then literally become part of the body, often lodging into bone marrow. The body absorbs them like calcium, and the particles keep irradiating the body from the inside. They fire their protons and neutrons into neighboring cells, ripping through them like machine-gun bullets. The cells struggle to repair themselves, and a few mutations are eventually created. These mutations replicate and eventually become cancer. A day-after-day exposure to radon dust poses a risk for lung cancer that is four times above the average. The usual incubation period is fifteen years.

  The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission knew of these dangers even before Hiroshima. An agency health official based in Grand Junction, Colorado, named Ralph Batie had read about the mysterious “mountain sickness” of the radium miners in the Ore Mountains. He also knew of the high cancer rates in some of the New Jersey factories where workers, mostly female, had painted luminescent dials for submarines and aircraft during the buildup to World War II. Many of the women were in the habit of licking their paintbrushes to straighten the bristles; their teeth fell out as a result. Some were also in the habit of dabbing their lips with the glow-in-the-dark paint for a showstopping effect in dark nightclubs.

  Growing suspicious, Ralph Batie took air samples in several mines on the Colorado Plateau in the late 1940s and found alarmingly high concentrations of radon gas and other alpha ray-emitting airborne material. These were at levels thousands of times higher than the AEC’s own regulations would have permitted in an enrichment plant or a bomb assembly factory. Furthermore, the uranium miners often practiced “dry drilling,” which meant hammering away at a wall with a pneumatic hammer and no lubricating water to keep down the dust, which was loaded with alpha-emitting radon. After these findings were forwarded to Washington, the AEC did an about-face and said it was outside their jurisdiction to tell a private mining enterprise how to regulate its air quality. That, they said, was the responsibility of the state health agencies of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. But those authorities lacked the staff or the political muscle to accomplish anything meaningful.

  “They weren’t getting paid much and they weren’t very diligent,” recalled the miner John Black. “The mine inspector was looking to see if there were some loose rocks or if you were using a short fuse. . . . Ventilation was the last thing on their minds. By the time they showed up again, we might be thirty miles away in another mine.”

  The inertia continued for almost twenty years. Batie was hounded out of his job and forced to transfer to a different office. Other officials who tried to sound an alarm were also treated like pariahs and troublemakers. When Duncan Holaday, a radiation expert with the U.S. Public Health Service, warned in a 1952 report that air samples taken from Utah uranium mines contained deadly amounts of radon gas, he was told that he should continue to “study” the problem on a long-term basis and make no public statements. No action was taken, even though the evidence was damning and almost painfully obvious. Holaday had reported seeing a “yellow coating on tongue and teeth” among the miners. Holaday’s report was not widely circulated, and his work was carefully edited by AEC officials thereafter. Going public was not a realistic option; challenging the government’s national security prerogatives w
ould have been viewed as treachery at that point in the cold war. The only worry about radioactivity was that negative publicity might slow down production.

  “There is no doubt that we are faced with a problem which, if not handled properly, could be made public,” wrote the AEC official Jesse Johnson in a 1952 memo. Widespread awareness of dangerous mine conditions “could adversely affect uranium production in this country and abroad.” More alarming for Johnson: “Communist propagandists may utilize any sensational statements or news reports to hamper or restrict uranium production in foreign fields, particularly at Shinkolobwe.”

  This attitude was shared by many in the Southwestern uranium fields, where the workers saw themselves as soldiers of the cold war. “Finding and processing fuel for atomic bombs was the patriotic thing to do,” wrote Tom McCourt, who lived near a leaking and dangerous mill in the town of White Canyon, Utah. “The Soviet menace could be kept in check only by recruiting the help of the Atomic Monster. It was a pact with the Devil, but considered to be worth the risks.”

  The first lung cancers appeared five years after the AEC’s bonus program was announced. By 1966, nearly one hundred miners were dead. In the face of overwhelming evidence, and with families beginning to protest, the U.S. Department of Labor was persuaded to force mines to maintain air quality with a fixed limit on radon. Companies were required either to drill airholes from above or to blow radioactive dust out with electric fans. Some companies protested the rule as being cost prohibitive, and one even tried to make the novel claim that the blowing dust particles would create eye injuries.

  The retrofitting turned out to be cheap, though, as production had slowed to a crawl. The U.S. military had stockpiled more than thirty thousand strategic nuclear warheads, enough to obliterate most of the cities in the Soviet Union and its satellite states many times over. Oversupply of uranium had become a serious problem. In the mid-1960s, the government phased out the buying policies that had encouraged so many prospectors to roam the deserts. The latest mineral rush in the United States had come to a close.

  The AEC retained its status as the sole buyer of domestic uranium with an eye toward serving nuclear power plants. Most of the shallow deposits had already been found and exploited. Deep-drilling equipment was needed to get at what was left, and well-established companies such as Sohio, Exxon, Union Carbide, Kerr-McGee, and Getty Oil were largely dominating the game. With deep budgets, they installed fans to blow out dusty mines.

  But it was too late for those who had worked at the peak of the boom. The mortality rate kept creeping upward. Especially hard hit was the Navajo Indian reservation, where lung cancer was a rarity until uranium came along.

  The Navajo are the largest Indian tribe in America, occupying a reservation covering an impasto of canyons and mountains in northern Arizona, and smaller parts of Utah and New Mexico. They had migrated here from present-day Alaska in the early sixteenth century, about the same period in history when the first silver trenches at St. Joachimsthal were being dug. The Navajo call themselves Diné, which means “the People,” and many keep a ceremonial dome of mud and wood called a hogan; its small door always faces east toward dawn. Sheep are a staple food and a primary measurement of wealth; blanket weaving from sheep’s wool is a signature craft. Navajo country is home to four mountain peaks considered sacred, and also a substantial amount of uranium. The bright yellow surface ore was a common additive to religious-themed sandpaintings. When the race to build an atomic bomb geared up in the 1940s, this became a hot place to mine. Outsiders could not obtain a mining lease, but companies typically skirted this by recruiting a Navajo “foreman” (ideally with political connections on the tribal council) to get the license and enlist a few dozen friends and relatives to do the labor inside the sweltering dog holes. Drinking water was sometimes from runoff tainted by uranium dust. Workers were also in the habit of sucking water from the trickles on the sandstone walls. Pay was often as low as a dollar per day, and the foreman would sell the ore to the sponsoring company for a 2 percent royalty. It was an exploitative arrangement, but jobs were scarce on the dirt-poor reservation and the patriotic fervor surrounding uranium made it a hard bargain to refuse. By the end of the boom, the Navajo cancer rate had doubled, and the land was scarred with more than thirteen hundred abandoned mines, as well as with slag heaps that still emit clouds of gaseous radon. Kept in the dark about radioactivity, some Navajo used the tailings to make concrete for their houses. Others kept their sheep penned in the crevasses of mines, then ate their radioactive meat.

  One of the many sickened was Willie Johnson, a Navajo who worked summers at a small uranium mine to put himself through school. “We’d dig out the uranium with a shovel and a pick, dump it in the car, and send it out,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “No one told us that mining was dangerous. We wore hard hats and steel-toed shoes, no protective clothing. There was never enough ventilation down there, and lots of dust.” Said Ben Jones, another Navajo miner, “When you blew your nose, it was yellow dust.” A doctor would later testify that working in a mine such as this was the equivalent of receiving a daily chest X-ray for six months straight.

  At least six hundred Americans—Navajo and white alike—would eventually die from illnesses linked to the radioactive dust. After a lengthy lobbying effort from widows and family members, Congress passed the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which granted $100,000 “compassion payments” to miners diagnosed with cancer or other respiratory ailments. The law was amended ten years later to allow payments for mill workers as well. Part of the argument was that miners and mill employees had been working in the name of war, building up the American arsenal, so it was proper that they should be treated as if they were veterans. A U.S. Public Health Service physician would admit that the government had “largely ignored” the risks of radon gas. Former interior secretary Stewart Udall sued on behalf of cancer-stricken Navajo miners, but lost after a federal judge ruled that the AEC had been acting in the name of “national security.”10

  The death toll was far greater in the Ore Mountains, where the work shifts were longer and many more people were employed over the years.

  Dry drilling was halted and ventilation equipment was installed in 1970, on about the same schedule as the American retrofitting, but the health damage was widespread and permanent. The reunified German government ended up paying compensation to 7,695 miners who developed lung cancer. A British medical study later found that the average lung cancer risk for employees of Wismut, in jobs both in and out of the shafts—miners, clerks, supervisors, cooks, and guards—was slightly over 4 percent. There is no authoritative death count, but it has been estimated at 16,000.

  Wismut officially went out of the uranium business when the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990. The remnants of the company were quickly reconstituted as a quasistate agency called Wismut GmbH and given the task of cleaning up the massive environmental damage its predecessor had created. Dozens of open pits had to be filled in. Many required filler in addition to their tailings because of the effect (well known to grave diggers) of soil compacting as it is repacked. Underground shafts had to be sealed with concrete, and ponds had to be drained of radioactive water. Those ore piles not pushed back into pits were covered with grass and trees. One pit is now a golf course. The entire project is expected to cost the equivalent of $8 billion, almost all of it coming from the federal government.

  “We have to make the countryside livable again,” a Wismut engineer told me. “The most important part is to give it back to the public.”

  The valley ground where Schlema’s central district used to stand has dropped about forty feet lower than its elevation before World War II. The web of uranium tunnels underneath the city created a subsidence effect. There is now a giant grassy park where the shafts and barracks and ore piles marked the heart of Germany’s uranium country. A sculpture of a wind sail now sits at the middle of the grassy area, which is called a health park. Granite slabs mark
the places where each headframe once pulled the innards of the earth onto the surface. The city’s new motto is “Natural Schlema,” and a handful of new resorts have opened for business, hoping to recapture some of the Weimar-era fad associated with the dubious health benefits from drinking and bathing in radium-heated water.

  I went to see Michael Beleites, the environmental researcher whose samizdat report on Wismut had embarrassed the authorities and nearly got him thrown in prison two decades ago. He now works for the government of the state of Saxony as curator of declassified files from the Stasi. Beleites wore a navy blue sweater underneath a tweed jacket. He had the bearing of a modish professor of Elizabethan literature at a small liberal arts college. On his desk in his office in Dresden were a laptop computer and a metal lamp with a curved neck as slim as a crane’s. He told me he felt that southeast Germany was still refusing to face its heritage as a uranium colony.

  “The story most people believe around here is that Stalin had to break the West’s atomic monopoly and that Germany helped secure the peace,” he said. “I see it differently. It did not secure peace. That uranium helped ensure a continuation of more and more oppression. Even though it was never used in war, it created fear and dread all over the world. And we got nothing except these huge rehabilitation projects and a lot of dead miners. ‘Ore for peace’? What a stupid idea!”

  On the other side of the mountains in St. Joachimsthal, the marble-sheathed Radium Palace Hotel reopened in the sixties as a getaway for Communist Party officials who hoped that a good soak would bring them relief from their arthritis and gout. In 1981, the French atomic scientist Bernard Goldschmidt managed to secure a visa and paid a visit to St. Joachimsthal, where so many people had been forced to mine uranium for the Soviet nuclear program. The camps had closed down several years before, and the mines were operating at a fraction of their capacity, but Goldschmidt had still been curious to see the birthplace of the mineral that had so profoundly affected the course of world history.