Death in the Mines
Though the Mancuso and Hiroshima/Nagasaki studies based their conclusions on data dating to the 1940s, deaths from radiation exposure among workers have occurred for four centuries, since the beginnings of the uranium-mining industry. As early as the sixteenth century, miners in the Erz Mountain region of what is now Czechoslovakia complained of a chest disease they called "mountain sickness." The ore they dug was pitchblende—uranium—which served as a pigment in pottery and lent sparkle to ornaments used by European royalty. The disease it brought caused deep, stabbing pains, difficult breathing, and an early death.
By the 1870s pioneer health researchers had identified the disease as lung cancer. An early epidemiologist named Arnstein recorded a 40 percent cancer death rate among Czech uranium miners. In 1939 a researcher named Peller reported that the lung-cancer death rate among those miners was twenty times higher than that among control subjects in Vienna. J. A. Campbell, an Englishman, found that mice exposed to dust from those mines developed lung tumors at a rate ten times normal.30
The source of the problem was radon gas, which is naturally emitted in small quantities from uranium ore. This gas, in turn, decays into heavy isotopes called "radon daughters," including isotopes of polonium, bismuth, and lead.
Unlike the gas that carries them, some of these isotopes have extremely long half-lives. They emit dangerous alpha particles; minuscule amounts of them can cause cancer when they are introduced into the body. Underground, the radon gas from uranium ore is trapped long enough for its "daughters" to be deposited as solids in the earth. But when the ore is exposed to air, as it is when mined, the gas escapes. Miners without adequate protection inevitably inhale that gas—and its lethal alpha-emitting "daughters."31
Such dangers were already well known in the 1940s and 1950s, when the pressure to build atomic bombs and fuel reactors sent prospectors into the western hills to find uranium. Much of it was discovered on Indian land. Soon hundreds of miners—many of them Native Americans—were at work digging out the radioactive ore.
But precious few of them were warned of any special dangers in the mines. Working conditions were, as one researcher put it, "medieval," probably not significantly better than in the Czech mines of the 1500s. One particular problem arose when mine owners used explosives to loosen ore. "When the blast was made it got all smoky," miner James Bennally told a crew from the New York-based Eleventh Hour Films. "We would enter the mines while the smoke was still in the air and take out the ore. They never told us about protective equipment. We went in in our own clothes." The miners were paid seventy-five cents an hour; they drank water that seeped through the radioactive ore they dug. They were sometimes given masks to wear, but even at that, said Bennally, "we still got dust through the nose. There was a bitterness in it which we breathed and tasted. We were not aware of the grave illness that might occur." The effects, however, were real enough. "Across my rib-cage it is constantly hurting," said Bennally. "The doctors do not tell me what is happening. But I know the hurt is there."32
The dust Bennally and his fellow miners breathed was laced with radon. Ventilation systems that had been installed in Czech mines as early as the 1930s, and that were being operated at a relatively low cost in France, were nowhere to be found in the U.S.33 In fact the National Council on Radiation Protection had recommended mineworker exposure standards as early as 1941. At that time the Atomic Energy Commission was the sole purchaser of uranium in the U.S. It also operated some of the mines directly. Under federal law it was responsible for working conditions in those mines. And at the end of the 1940s, as the nuclear arms race accelerated demand, the AEC’s Office of Raw Materials Operations recommended taking control of exposure levels underground. "Since we were the only customer for the ore," said Dr. Merrill Eisenbud, who was head of that office at that time, "we should see to it that the standards that already existed could be met." Soon after issuing that recommendation, the functions of Eisenbud’s office were inexplicably removed from his department in New York to Washington.
Then, despite the billions of government dollars spent to develop atomic weaponry, the AEC claimed it lacked the funding to enforce mine safety, and turned the job over to the states and the mining companies.34 The companies did little. And when the states tried to intervene, they were charged with bureaucratic meddling and endangering the national security. One Colorado inspector commented that in the 1950s "anybody that said a thing against uranium mining was suspected of being a communist."35
In 1967 Eisenbud helped develop a machine that could identify miners who had already suffered heavy radon exposures, thus aiding them in getting early treatment. The machines were available for use in both Denver and Salt Lake City. But the AEC and the Public Health Service declined to use them, claiming that funds for a testing program were not available. Eisenbud found that "hard to believe . . . because we were talking about a very small amount of money."36
And by that time evidence was beginning to pile up that the mines were creating an epidemic of lung cancer.
Colorado and other states began to fear a landslide of compensation claims that could cost taxpayers and industry millions. Their fears were substantiated by a PHS study that had begun in 1950, when the service began collecting data on uranium miners and how they were dying. In 1960 the PHS handed the figures to Joseph Wagoner, a recent doctoral graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health. Wagoner told us in an extensive Washington interview that by 1964 "we showed twelve lung cancers in this group where just 2.8 were expected. We then updated the analysis one more year, and showed twenty-two lung cancers where there should have been only 5.7. When we went through 1965 we found thirty-seven lung cancers where there should have been just seven. And through 1978, with that same group, we now show 205 lung cancers where there should have been only forty. In other words there has been a consistent fivefold increase in lung cancer among this group right down the line."37
Still, however, the AEC refused to take responsibility for the enforcement of mine-safety regulations. Backed by the pronuclear Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which had effectively blocked any congressional attempts to regulate the mining industry, the AEC sailed along with little regard for the health of its miners—until 1967. Then, at a stormy JCAE hearing session, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz charged that "the best available evidence is that over two-thirds of the approximately 2,500 underground miners are working under conditions which at least triple their prospects for dying from lung cancer if they continue this work and these conditions remain unchanged." Year after year of "debate and discussion had produced nothing."38
The JCAE continued to insist that more study was needed. But one of its members complained that people were now "saying that the Joint Committee was for love, motherhood, apple pie and lung cancer."39 During the Nixon administration it tried to recapture lost ground by staging more hearings, hoping to restore its public image and forestall enactment of new regulations. This time the JCAE focused on the possibility that cigarette smoking rather than radon was at fault. But the PHS statistics indicated otherwise. Robert Finch, Nixon’s secretary of health, education, and welfare found the thesis "not persuasive." Undersecretary of Labor James Hodgson noted that "European pitchblende miners were dying of lung cancer before the introduction of tobacco to Europe."40
By 1971, despite continued resistance by the JCAE, federal standards for radon gas levels in uranium mines were created. But for many they were too little, too late. In 1979 Merrill Eisenbud, long a nuclear supporter, told a Senate hearing that the plague of lung cancer among American uranium miners was "totally avoidable." There was, he said, "a total failure of initiative with respect to the radon exposure problem, and I believe the fact that the Atomic Energy Commission did not take the steps it took everywhere else in this program to safeguard the employees, is uniquely responsible for the death of many men who developed lung cancer as a result of the failure of the mine operators, who must also bear the blame, because they too had the information, and the Government should not have had to club them into ventilating their mines."41
Dr. Joseph Wagoner, however, felt even the new standards were far from adequate. And enforcing them was yet another story. Mine owners were deliberately deceiving the government about the levels of exposure, and they were getting away with it. The radon levels were being measured by setting collection bags on ventilation shafts. The air in the bags would then be tested for radon. "But," Wagoner told us, "the government had only a single inspector [per mine]. So all the companies had to do was find out when the inspector was coming and have somebody run in front of the guy and get to the bags and reduce the concentration."
Wagoner also told us that the companies would time their blasting schedules to circumvent the measurements. The government would often monitor mine air in the morning and evening. So the companies "were sending the workers out of the mines at lunch break, shutting off the ventilation and blasting inside the mine to loosen the ore. When the workers came back at one o’clock in the afternoon, they were getting walloped with seventeen working levels," which was seventeen times the legal standard. The miners left work having been hit with extreme doses, which were never recorded in company files. It was "false bookkeeping, pure and simple."
In 1980 Wagoner quit the Public Health Service after twenty years. He told us that fall that uranium mining as practiced in the U.S. remained the moral equivalent of "genocide." His last official act, he said, "was to recommend that the current standards in the mines are so totally inadequate that they are causing a doubling of lung cancer among miners. Fully 40 percent of the mines are working in violation of those standards, which are inadequate anyway."42
Conditions in the uranium mills—where the raw ore is crushed and treated to extract the uranium—may not be any better. In the late 1970s two mill workers joined a major suit by sixty-five miners, charging working conditions had destroyed their health. The men reported regularly eating lunch in areas thick with uranium dust. Some were given cloth respirators, but they became caked with dust and were so rarely cleaned by the company that many workers simply stopped wearing them. Dust was so pervasive that a cleanup operation at one abandoned mill recovered $100,000 worth of uranium dust between two layers of roofing.43 In another case the Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirmed that a mill owner—the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago—had regularly falsified exposure levels to avoid cleaning up their operations or paying compensation to workers.44
Neither the miners nor the mill workers were generally informed of the special dangers of radiation. Again that policy had tragic costs. In 1979 a Utah miner named George Val Snow told hearings on low-level radiation chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy that of the forty-two miners with whom he had worked, twenty-two were already dead of various causes. He had worked in the Marysvale mine from 1950 to 1960; his father and brother, both victims of lung cancer, were among the dead. Snow told of a game the workers would play to see whose breath was most radioactive. The company, Snow said, "had a Geiger counter out to measure the ore to see whether it was ore or waste. As we would come out at night we would blow on it to see who could put it furthest up on the scale. Sometimes we could put it clear off scale."
But despite four centuries of experience with death in the mines, and decades of knowledge that radon gas caused lung cancer, no one had told George Snow or his coworkers there was ever a danger. Said Snow: "We were not concerned that there was anything wrong."45
28. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, Hiroshima and Nagasaki The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York: Basic Books, 1981). See also, Herbert Mitgang, "Study of Atom Bomb Victims Stresses Long-Term Damage," New York Times, August 6, 1981, p. A8. 29. "New Studies Alter Estimates."
30. Joseph Wagoner, interview, October 1981. See also, Wagoner, "Uranium Mining and Milling: The Human Costs," remarks at the University of New Mexico Medical School, Albuquerque, N.M., March 10, 1980; and Wagoner, "Uranium: The United States Experience" (Washington: Environmental Defense Fund, 1525 18th St. NW, 20036); and Glen Peterson, "Lung Cancer Rate Among Uranium Miners Five Times Higher than National Average," National Health Federation Bulletin, March 1980.
31. Radon 222 is a gas found in uranium-containing ores. It has a half-life of 3.9 days. As radon 222 decays, a series of radioactive elements called radon daughters are formed. Radon daughters, including polonium, lead, and bismuth, emit alpha radiation, which can become attached to dust or water particles in the mines and then inhaled by miners. Once inhaled, the alpha radiation is delivered through the respiratory system where the particles are deposited. Lung diseases among uranium miners have been documented since the 1500s. Cancer was first identified in 1879. Since then, studies of German, Czech, Yugoslav, and U.S. miners have demonstrated that exposure to radon daughters is associated with increased risk of lung cancer for workers in underground mines generally and uranium mines specifically.
Studies of miners in the United States began in the early 1960s, nearly twenty years after large-scale uranium mining began for the nuclear weapons program. A review of environmental records shows that many miners were exposed to radon levels greater than one working level (WL) (1.3 X 10ˆ5 MeV of alpha radiation from radon daughters per liter of air). In 1955 health officials and scientists recommended that radon levels in mines be no greater than 1 WL. As late as 1968 nearly 30 percent of underground uranium mines still had radon daughter exposures to higher than 1 WL. Proceedings are currently under way to reduce mining exposures to 0.7 working level month (WLM) from the current 4 WLM (a working level month is 173 hours per month exposure to an air level of 1 WL).
During the 1960s researchers found the U.S. uranium miners suffering from shortness of breath, persistent cough, pneumoconiosis, wheezing, and chest pain. Pulmonary emphysema, fibrosis, and chronic bronchitis were also linked with chronic exposures to airborne radiation in the mines. In 1976 an epidemic of nonmalignant respiratory diseases among U.S. miners was confirmed when 80 such deaths were observed when 24.9 deaths were expected. Excess lung-cancer mortality among U.S. uranium miners with three or more years of underground experience was reported in 1962. One year later 47 cancer deaths (contrasted to 16.1 expected cancer deaths) were reported among miners who received chronic radon daughter exposure in the 1 to 2 WL range. In 1964 a tenfold excess of respiratory cancer surfaced among white miners with five or more years of underground exposures. A 1950-1978 follow-up of white underground U.S. uranium miners found 205 lung-cancer deaths when 40 were expected. Follow-up done on 780 American Indian miners found 11 deaths when 2.6 lung-cancer deaths were expected.
Early epidemiologic studies found that the histologic cell type of lung cancer among U.S. miners was the small cell undifferentiated type, very different from the type found in the general population. Later studies, however, have found three types—epidermoid, small cell undifferentiated, and adenomatus— prevalent among uranium miners. The early studies also indicated that uranium miners who smoked were more apt to develop cancers than nonsmokers. Recent studies of lung cancer among nonsmoking Indian miners and follow-ups of the early epidemiologic studies, however, show that smoking serves only to shorten the lung-cancer latency period—the same types of cancer were found among both smokers and nonsmokers, the nonsmokers’ cancers appearing approximately two to five years after those in smokers were diagnosed.
References: V. E. Archer, J. D. Gillam, and J. Wagoner, "Respiratory Disease Mortality Among Uranium Miners," in Annals, New York Academy of Sciences 271 (1976): 280; D. A. Holaday, et al., Control of Radon and Daughters in Uranium Mines and Calculations on Biological Effects, PHS Publication No. 494 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957); F. E. Lundin, et al., Radon Daughter Exposure and Respiratory Cancer Quantitative and Temporal Aspects, NIOSH and NIEHS Joint Monograph No. 1 (Springfield, Va.; NTIS, 1976); V. E. Archer, et al., "Hazards to Health in Uranium Mining and Milling," Journal of Occupational Medicine 4 (1962): 55-60; J. K. Wagoner, et al., "Cancer Mortality Patterns Among U.S. Uranium Miners and Millers, 1950-1962," Journal of the National Cancer Institute 32 (1964): 787-801; J. K. Wagoner, et al., "Mortality of American Indian Uranium Miners," Proceedings, XI International Cancer Congress, 1975.
32. In Our Own Back Yard, transcripts, Eleventh Hour Films, 29 Jones St., New York City 10014.
33. H. Peter Metzger, The Atomic Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 120.
34. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, and the Committee on the Judiciary, Health Impact of Low-Level Radiation, 1979, 96th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1979, pp. 19-23 (hereafter cited as 1979 Radiation Hearings.)
35. Metzger, Atomic Establishment.
36. 1979 Radiation Hearings, pp. 19-23.
37. Wagoner interview.
38. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, pp. 131-133.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 140.
41. 1979 Radiation Hearings, pp. 19-23.
42. Wagoner interview.
43. High Country News, September 5, 1980.
44. Peggy Strain, "Edison Unit’s Uranium Mill Health Data Falsified: Study," Chicago Sun-Times, September 28, 1980.
45. 1979 Radiation Hearings, pp. 48-50.