Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  I went to see Yvonne Margarula, a senior member of the Mirrar, known for her willingness to talk to outsiders about the uranium mining. We sat at a picnic table outside the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, a trailer office next to a mobile home resort, while some of her relatives’ children played in the yard.

  She was in her late forties, old enough to remember the time before the Ranger deposit had been discovered, and was of the last generation of Mirrar to have lived and hunted “bush tucker”—kangaroo, emu, grubs, and fruits—in the country near Mount Brockman. Fishing had consisted of throwing a sizable amount of eucalyptus bark into a pond, which temporarily deoxygenated the water. The suffocating fish floated to the surface and could be harvested with sticks. But this is not widely practiced today.

  The number of full-blooded Mirrar has dwindled to twenty-six. They have taken on a seminomadic life at the fringes of Jabiru town; Yvonne’s father, Toby, was said to have been mercilessly harassed, offered cars and booze in exchange for his signatures on various leases. The remaining members each receive $2,500 a month as a per capita payment for their bloodlines. None of them works at Ranger, despite multiple job offers. “They don’t like it out there,” one resident of Jabiru told me. “It’s aesthetically unpleasant. There’s acrimony. And they are unskilled.”

  My conversation with Yvonne Margarula was halting. What did she think of the uranium mining? She looked away from my eyes, the polite thing to do.

  “Bad,” she told me. “Mining is bad. We don’t like it.”

  What about the leases? I asked.

  “They gave us poisoned money,” she said. “What is going to happen when they finish? They are gone, but we have to live here for life.”

  Why is the mining bad?

  “Too many balanda around here.”

  This word, as it happens, is the nickname Aboriginals use to describe “whitefellows.” The term is hundreds of years old and is not considered pejorative. It derives from the days when Makassarese fishermen from Dutch-controlled Indonesia visited and traded on the shores of northern Australia several generations before the British arrived in the eighteenth century. Balanda is a corruption of the word Hollander, but has become shorthand to describe anybody with white skin.

  The term may not be racist, but what about the sentiment? “Too many balanda around here.” If a white person started to complain about “too many blackfellows around here,” wouldn’t he be hounded out of the territory? I put this question to Graham Dewar, the director of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation. He lit up a cigarette and offered the following exegesis.

  “They were living an isolated life up until very recently. Thirty years of uranium mining is not that long. And so you have to remember the traditional view. The Western rational mind is in contrast to the blackfellows’ way of thinking. Turning up in your neighbor’s part of the country was always seen as an act of war. You were most likely there to steal wives or conduct sorcery or burn down the forest or other mischief. Unless you asked permission from the leaders to be there. In their minds, the uranium companies were invaders who never asked permission.”

  So, he said, when Margarula talks about “too many balanda,” she is not talking about skin color, but about intruders who are trespassing.

  “Whether they’re here for uranium or coffee or beans, it doesn’t make a difference at all,” Dewar went on. “It just happened to be uranium. These are a bunch of assholes who don’t care a bit about the people here and just wanted the pay dirt in the ground.”

  The Ranger Mine is scheduled to end its run by 2020. A large remediation plan is already being drafted, and ERA has promised to restore the countryside to an appearance similar to what was there when the first gamma rays were detected coming from the barge-shaped mesa.

  “A lot of people say that when the mine closes down, the Mirrar will go back to living just as their grandparents did,” Dewar told me. “Well, I can tell you that that’s not going to happen. They have been too dependent on their incomes.” Modernity, like uranium, had come to the jungle for good.

  In addition to more than a dozen uranium sites left abandoned, there is a monument of sorts to Joe Fisher. A boulder affixed with a plaque was rolled next to a two-lane-highway bridge built over the Mary River in 1993. On September 1 of that year, a small party gathered around the boulder to dedicate the Joe Fisher Bridge. Fisher was there in the audience himself, a bit stooped, but his Walt Disney mustache was as black as ever.

  Minister of Works Daryl Manzie made a brief speech. “In many respects, there are parallels between this bridge and responsible development, and the life and work of its namesake, Joe Fisher,” he said. “Many would say that in Joe’s case, mining and the environment seem an incompatible pair. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Joe Fisher is living proof that you don’t need to be an environmental vandal to champion the cause of the mining industry and, at the same time, promote sustainable development in the Territory.”

  Joe Fisher’s marker stone has since been vandalized. Somebody pried off and stole the metal plaque, which had not been replaced as of the summer of 2007.

  Australia continues to export nearly nine thousand tons of yellowcake every year, with nearly half that total coming from the Ranger Mine. This represents about 16 percent of world production. But there is plenty more for the taking. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s untapped reserves of uranium are known to be located in Australia.

  A leaching project called Honeymoon was on track to start operations in May 2008, adding a fourth uranium mine to the nation’s roster. The then prime minister John Howard had signed an agreement with the Chinese government two years prior to supply twenty-two thousand tons of yellowcake per year to feed at least three dozen new nuclear power plants in mainland China. The Labour Party signaled its acquiescence by dropping the Three Mines policy. In the summer of 2007, when the spot price of yellowcake topped $120 per pound (more than four times what it had been in the days of the Uranium Club, after inflation adjustment), the hunt for new reserves was spreading across parts of the continent that had not been examined for decades, such as New South Wales, whose state government still categorizes uranium as a “contaminant” rather than a commodity.

  “Australia has a clear responsibility to develop its uranium resources in a sustainable way,” said Howard, “irrespective of whether or not we end up using nuclear power.”

  In many ways, the outlook for Australian uranium today is even brighter than it was in the frenzied years after Hiroshima, when Joe Fisher and thousands of others like him started combing the obscurity of the Dreamtime country, watching for the telltale jig of a needle.

  Near the end of my afternoon visit with Fisher, I asked if he had any regrets about his long career.

  “My only regret,” he told me from his easy chair, “is that I didn’t grab enough of the country. I would have claimed a lot more, if I could have.”

  7

  INSTABILITY

  To see the uranium in the African nation of Niger, you must take a bus from the capital city and ride more than twenty-four hours down a tattered ribbon of road that takes you to the edge of the Sahara Desert. The way is dotted with crumbling boulders and the occasional mud-walled village with sand piling up around low doorways and a few flayed goat carcasses hanging from poles, flies speckling the meat. Women with baskets full of onions walk barefoot alongside the fragments of asphalt that define the road, and men cover their noses and mouths with the tails of their head cloths as the bus chugs by. The houses have granaries to one side, constructed of mud and weeds and looking like swollen oriental teapots. Scattered acacia trees pockmark the desert, among patches of fibrous grass gnawed nearly to the roots by the camels and the sharp-boned goats.

  Eventually the asphalt disappears, and the bus must find its way by following one of the multiple dirt tracks of the vehicles that have previously passed. When the bus bangs over a sinkhole or a rut, which is frequent, the coach rattles to its axles.
Especially hard shocks tilt the bus to one side for a precarious second, lending the illusion, if not possibility, that it might capsize into the sand.

  I had been on this ride for almost the entire day on March 1, 2007, sharing the bus with the members of a soccer team on their way to a tournament. The land had changed, from the dry to the drier, and now we were on a plateau, near the Air Massif Mountains, that looked like the surface of the moon. The road was somewhat better here, and it wound in lazy curves toward a high volcanic plain. The light was sunset-mild on the western hills, and the bus’s long shadow slipped over the black rocks and sand on the edges of the roadbed. We were nearing a cluster of mud homes that a sign identified as Tagaza when the hijackers appeared.

  A man stepped into the road brandishing a rifle and waved for our bus to pull over. Two other armed men were behind him, and three others, who had no visible weaponry, stood near a battered car that they seemed to be searching. They were apparently carrying out an ambush. I had my head down in a book and did not see these gunmen.

  Our driver had the presence of mind to slam on his brakes and immediately throw the engine into reverse. The bus whined backward down the road for approximately half a mile. Out the window, I saw a group of children standing in the shade of a concrete hut, frantically waving their arms at us. Get away, get away, they seemed to be saying.

  I was the only foreigner on the bus, but a member of the soccer team had spent some time in Nigeria and spoke a little English.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “Didn’t you see that?” he said. “We have to go back.” He then described to me the scene that I had missed.

  At this point, I was more annoyed than frightened. We had only a few more hours to go before we reached our destination—the uranium town of Arlit—and the ride had been tiring. I was eager to be done with it. The prospect of waiting several hours for the road to clear of bandits was not attractive. But I had no choice. The fifteen members of the soccer team, who had spent the last several hours laughing and joking, had gone silent. A few were ducked below their seats. I decided to keep my head down as well.

  The driver continued his full-throttle reverse until he found a place in the sand sturdy enough to support a three-point turn. Then we were heading back down the way we came, following a line of power poles that marched toward a giant electrical plant. Lights winked midway on its smokestacks.

  The sun had disappeared, and it was dark when we pulled up to a walled house in the town of Tchirozerine. This was one of the only villages in rural Niger to have electricity, and it was for the simple reason that it sat outside the gates of the French power plant that fed the nearby mines. Coal was burned here in order that uranium could be mined.

  I stood outside the bus with the soccer team, kicking the dirt in a pool of blue security light, and we all watched as a jeep full of men in military fatigues pulled up and had a conversation with the driver. Then they pulled away.

  I was made to understand that the soldiers were going to see if the road to Arlit was clear of the gang of bandits or terrorists—nobody was yet sure who they were—and that I, as a white man and an American, ought to have been especially grateful the driver did not attempt to plow on through as the armed men surely would have shot out the tires and boarded the bus. I then would have had special value as a hostage.

  We were taken to the home of the mayor of Tchirozerine, a man who wore flowing purple robes and fed us three giant dishes of food that looked like spaghetti. The soccer team ate with their hands, squatting in front of the plates. They wore yellow and green jerseys with the legend AS. DOUANE and had been on their way to the biggest game of the year. But nobody seemed concerned about making it there on schedule. They had heard stories about people recently being kidnapped or killed in the desert. A rebel group had supposedly been active in the area, murdering soldiers before melting back into the desert, or over the border into nearby Algeria.

  The mayor rolled out a carpet for us that seemed to be as big as a tennis court. We lay down on it in rows, breathing slowly, while mosquitoes feasted on us in the stale hot air. A few men snored, others murmured quietly in little groups. I tossed and dozed until dawn, when I crept out of the house to walk in circles around the mud-walled streets of the town until it was time to board the bus again at 8 a.m.

  The mayor gave us all a little speech in French and waved at us with a smile.

  “Bon chance,” I heard him say. “Good luck.”

  We drove north for half an hour before coming up again on the culvert at Tagaza where we had nearly been hijacked. The soccer players sat upright and alert. Nobody spoke. From my seat in the middle of the bus, I looked down the culvert where the men had apparently been lying in wait the evening before. There was no sign of anyone, only a braided series of cattle paths that wound through the acacia trees and out of sight. Then we were back on the wide plain.

  The city of Arlit announced itself with a huge mound of waste rock on the horizon. The terraced orange heap had been disgorged from an underground uranium mine called Akouta, which is the largest of its kind in the world and has been in production for nearly thirty years. Another mine nearby is a giant open pit. Both are controlled by a company based in Paris called Areva, and together they produce about 8 percent of the world’s uranium. This is Niger’s top export. The second is onions. There isn’t much else.

  As a consequence, Arlit is one of the only places where there seems to be a bit of money. There are wide dirt avenues, a few satellite dishes poking out from the roofs, young men clustering around parked Yamaha motorcycles, a few skeletal cell phone towers, and—exotic in this Muslim country—a small Catholic church tucked away on a side road. I talked with a thirty-one-year-old man named Abdoussalam who proudly showed me a picture of the 992G Caterpillar front-end loader he drove at the open-pit mine. It was the background picture on his cell phone screen.

  “I have what I want, I have money,” he said. “There is no sensation of danger.”

  There is a popular song here, a bouncy tune the lyrics of which are in the indigenous language of Hausa.

  Miners, you struggle every day

  Miners, we should respect your money

  You earn it hard

  Miners, we salute you

  I talked on the phone with Abdoulaye Issa, the manager of the open-pit mine. He told me he was sorry to hear of the incident on the road. All of Niger’s uranium production moves down the same route in convoys, about once a week. I asked him if there was any danger that a shipment might be stolen.

  “It is well guarded and surveyed along the route,” he told me. “We have been doing this for forty years. You can never be totally secure, but we take precautions to make sure that it gets to port in a safe way.”

  There is a mill at Arlit, and so the uranium leaves the city in the form of yellowcake, the pale grit also known as U3O8, which is the standard form for transporting the stuff over long distances. Anybody who stole a barrel would have a very difficult time using it for anything but decorative gravel. Less than 1 percent of it consists of U-235, the isotope that creates the blossoming chain reaction that makes fission and destruction possible. Yellowcake must be converted into uranium hexafluoride gas and run through an enrichment plant the size of a big-city airport before it can do any real damage. It is loosely packed in drums, loaded onto trucks, and hauled five hundred miles down a crumbling road known as the Uranium Highway. Despite its condition, this is regarded as one of the best roads in Niger. It terminates at the port of Cotonou in the neighboring country of Benin, where the ore is transferred to freighters and shipped to France. There it is stripped of useless U-238 and molded into fuel pellets to serve 80 percent of the electrical demands of the colonizing power. The street lamps in the old quarter of Rouen and the floodlights that bathe the Eiffel Tower are lit by uranium from Africa.

  Though Niger is the fourth-largest producer of uranium in the world, it sees almost none of the wealth. Because of a long-standing
contract, the French12 consortium pays only 5.5 percent of its revenues in taxes, and most of it goes to subsidize elites in the dusty capital of Niamey. Almost three-quarters of the people cannot read, and those who survive to the age of forty-five are living on statistically borrowed time. Niger was recently named the most deprived country on earth by the United Nations, ranked dead last among the world’s sovereign nations on a comprehensive scale called the Human Development Index, which charts life expectancy, education, and standard of living. Most people live in agricultural settlements and scratch out a meager income from onions, millet grasses, and goats. Irrigation projects are scarce, and so if the rains don’t come, the people do not eat. A drought and an abundance of locusts ruined crops and killed livestock in 2005, causing a near-famine in the countryside. President Mamadou Tandja later complained that Western aid agencies had been exaggerating the drought, as well as Niger’s dismal social rankings.

  Unhappiness over hunger and the bleak future helped spark a rebellion called the Niger Movement for Justice, which started murdering soldiers near Arlit one month before I visited the country. The rebels are mainly Tuareg, a desert-roaming people descended from Berbers, who used to ferry salt by camel to the coast of the Mediterranean, and who had fought against French colonization. The Tuareg are proud and fierce fighters, sometimes called the blue men for the indigo-dyed scarves and turbans they wear for protection against the blowing sand. Never truly integrated into Nigerien society, they have traditionally been considered—and consider themselves—a people apart.

  The Tuareg agitators were making themselves an embodiment of what the uranium business euphemistically calls geopolitical risk. On April 20, 2007, the movement raided a camp of uranium miners. They killed a guard and wounded three others before disappearing with six stolen vehicles and a number of cell phones. In June, they hijacked another bus on its way to Arlit and slaughtered three passengers. One of them was a two-year-old child. In July, a Chinese uranium geologist was kidnapped. The rebels released him after several days, but told all foreign mining interests to leave the area “for their own safety.” For good measure, they sent twenty of their men to make an unsuccessful raid on the airport in the nearby city of Agadez and buried land mines along the Uranium Highway. A bus hit one of these mines in November and five passengers were wounded.