Reuters: US to send depleted-uranium munitions to Ukraine

[womanofthehills]

21. The Navajo Nation has high cancer rates & kidney failure from uranium mining

In the late 80's, early 90's I worked at Carrie Tingley Children's Hospital in Albuquerque. Sometimes we had kids helicoptered in from the Navajo Nation. Kids would come & stay for weeks/months for rehab. I developed a very close relationship with a 12 yr old girl Beverly from Crownpoint, NM who had an amputated leg from bone cancer. I took her out of the hospital all the time - she loved Lotaburger and the Albuquerque flea market. After knowing her for 2 yrs, she died of cancer as her mother had. The docs at Carrie Tingley had no doubt it was the uranium tailings at Crownpoint - drinking water, air, houses contaminated with uranium.


Inside the Navajo Church Rock Nuclear Disaster, the largest radioactive disaster in US history that's somehow often forgotten

In 1979, a dam holding millions of gallons of nuclear waste in Church Rock, New Mexico, collapsed.

In a matter of hours, 94 million gallons of radioactive water and 1,100 tons of uranium waste flooded into a nearby river.

The spill killed crops and cattle, and contaminated the surrounding land and the people who lived off it for decades to come.

It happened just four months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. It was the largest accidental release of radioactivity in US history and third worst accident in history, after the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011.

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/inside-the-navajo-church-rock-nuclear-disaster-the-largest-radioactive-disaster-in-us-history-thataposs-somehow-often-forgotten/slidelist/100802898.cm

For The Navajo Nation, Uranium Mining's Deadly Legacy Lingers

The federal government is cleaning up a long legacy of uranium mining within the Navajo Nation — some 27,000 square miles spread across Utah, New Mexico and Arizona that is home to more than 250,000 people.

Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.

Mining companies blasted 4 million tons of uranium out of Navajo land between 1944 and 1986. The federal government purchased the ore to make atomic weapons. As the Cold War threat petered out the companies left, abandoning more than 500 mines.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/473547227/for-the-navajo-nation-uranium-minings-deadly-legacy-lingers