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Those four simple words were written across the top of Janet Johnson's
speech before the Mesa County commissioners -- a personal reminder to
her of why it is so important to stop the reopening of an underground
uranium mine there.
"Everything I do, I do it for Madi," Johnson said, referring to her
4-year old granddaughter, who was diagnosed with stage four cancer in
April 2004.
The little girl finished treatment in the
summer of 2005 and is now labeled a "survivor of childhood cancer," but
it is concern for her granddaughter and others like her that drives
Johnson to oppose uranium mining. Johnson has witnessed many people in
her life struggle with cancer and diseases -- her brother, her uncle,
her cousin, her friends, her high school classmates and their children.
Johnson herself has leukemia.
While there is no definitive
link between these diseases and uranium mining, Johnson is convinced
that the mines and their waste played some role. Indeed, studies in the
1970s showed that the incidence of cleft lip and palate was almost
twice as high in the Grand Junction area as for the rest of Colorado,
the birth rate was significantly lower, and the death rate from
congenital anomalies was 50 percent higher.
A lifelong
Colorado resident, Johnson grew up in Grand Junction in the 1950s and
'60s, when uranium ruled the town. Grand Junction even used to have a
Miss Uranium pageant, in which the winner received her very own
truckload of uranium ore.
It was not a culture Johnson
questioned or thought much about at the time, despite the jokes about
the "glowing" girls of Grand Junction.
"It was a really
wonderful thing, as I understood as a child, because they were finding
out that they could use the radioactivity to cure cancer, to shrink
tumors ... so people were really welcoming of it. I grew up with a good
attitude about uranium. It had wonderful possibilities," Johnson said
in an interview with Land Letter yesterday.
But at
her 10th high school reunion, Johnson became concerned when she learned
that many of her former classmates had children with disabilities or
cancer. By her 20th reunion, many of her classmates themselves had
cancer.
"As life went on, it was really more and more
obvious all the time that our class had been really hit by a lot of
cancers. There are to date, a lot of them dead of cancer," Johnson said.
One
possible reason? The dirt beneath Grand Junction High School, like many
other homes and buildings in Grand Junction, included uranium tailings
-- the sandy debris left over from mining operations. Although the
tailings were known to contain low levels of radiation, at the time,
the Atomic Energy Commission believed they didn't pose a public health
or safety hazard.
Contractors used the tailings as a cheap
source of landfill and even mixed it with concrete, using the tailings
in the construction of homes, schools, commercial buildings, a shopping
mall, an airfield and sidewalks.
"They were even allowing
people to go and pick up a load of uranium tailings, bring them home
and they were making patios with them," Johnson said.
This legacy of the last uranium boom is something she doesn't want to see happen again.
"Everybody
lives downwind, everybody lives downstream from something, and I really
feel that morally we have an obligation to that, and I think that
morally we have an obligation to protect our children and not to be
just blatantly putting them at health risk. It's amazing to me how
people have really forgotten what can happen," said Johnson, who works
as a campus minister at Mesa State College.
Renewed interest in uranium mining
The uranium boom has
been driven by renewed interest in nuclear power as a possible answer
to global warming. Prices reached as high as $138 a pound last year and
now stand around $90 a pound.
Toronto, Canada-based Energy
Fuels wants to reopen two underground uranium mines on the Colorado
Plateau and could begin mining later this year. Mesa County has already
given the company the go-ahead to move forward with its plans.
Aside
from her general concerns about the health effects of uranium mining
and uranium waste, Johnson is concerned about the steep, narrow gravel
road the company plans to use to transport uranium ore. John Brown Road
features perilous drop-offs and hairpin turns as it runs alongside the
Dolores River. To Johnson, it is an accident waiting to happen.
While
Energy Fuels has a plan in place to deal with an accident, Johnson
worries that the company will not be able to clean up all the hazardous
material before it falls into the river below or drifts into the air.
"They're
taking great pains to try to comply, but my feeling is that our county
commissioners and we as citizens have to take great pains to protect
ourselves, too, and so we don't let them go across awful roads,"
Johnson said.
At first, Johnson was a lone voice speaking
out against the mines. When Johnson attended a Mesa County Planning
Commission meeting in November, she was the only one there who opposed
the mine.
"Everyone in the room was really silent about
what they were doing. They had spent an hour and a half talking about a
dog kennel close to a housing area out by Palisade, and the whole
uranium mine thing was just sailing right through," Johnson said.
"So
I stood up that night and I thought,'Well, if nobody's going to talk,
I'm going to talk.' I'm going to at least say, 'I don't like this,'"
she added.
After that meeting, Johnson decided to try to
organize other activists in the community to challenge the mines'
reopening. The next month, at a meeting of the Mesa County
commissioners, the opposition to the mines numbered in the double
digits. Nevertheless, the commissioners voted to back the plan, hoping
that it would bring jobs to the area.
With the mines all
but set to move forward, Johnson's hope is that she can help make
people more aware of the dangers surrounding uranium mining, milling
and processing.
Grand Junction is a wonderful place to live, but the town has yet to really deal with the legacy of uranium, Johnson said.
"Would
you want to come here? Would you want to raise children here? I don't
know," she said. "I'm sure it makes us look not so good, but what makes
us look worse is if we don't acknowledge and deal with it better and
learn from our past mistakes."
Gable is an independent energy and environmental writer in Woodland Park, Colo.
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