To Make A Living - Corn Pollen or Yellow Cake? The Dine Chose Corn Pollen - The White Man, Uranium

[Bobbieo]

Now, the Navajo are paying with their health!!!

http://nativeunity.blogspot.com

[NNadir]

1. How come you couldn't give a rat's ass about the Kayenta coal mine and power plant?

What's your opinion on that topic?

Don't know?

Don't care?

Couldn't care less?

I thought so.

Nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly superior to the stuff you don't bother to investigate, don't care about and are unwilling to develop a bathetic fetish.

It only needs to be better than all the stuff you don't know about, couldn't care less about, and about which you are unwilling to develop a fetish.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bobbieo]

4. Mr N - If you followed K Helms articles in My Native Unity column

which I use three times per week - you would see that she covers (Desert Rock) coal mining as well as the positive and negative aspects of uranium mining.

http://nativeunity.blogspot.com.

How dare you criticize me??? You are the uninformed one here. Somehow the only time I see your name on DU is when it pertains to aspects of uranium. Are you their rep here?

For your information Ms. Helms is an award wimming jourma;list for the Gallup Independent newspaper and my Native Unity blog covers ALL aspects of Native American culture. It is one of the ten NA blogs featured on Indian Country Today and has had a mention in the Wall Street Journal. The Blog will be seven years old on September 2nd, 2010.

[Statistical]

3. Science fail for $1000 Alex.

"The yellow substance they didn't choose, the leetso, they were told, would be returned to Mother Earth. “That will be her protector, so leave that with Mother Earth. That's hers. It should never be taken from her. You took the corn pollen way. "

Only one problem with linking Uranium to this charming story .... uranium isn't yellow!

Photo of a disc of pure uranium


Raw Uranium ore (Uraninite or more commonly known as "pitch blende")


So I am not sure what this "leetso" (the yellow substance not chosen by Dine) is but it certainly isn't Uranium.

Uranium is a silver metal.

"yellow cake" (refined uranium) can be yellow in color, however the yellow color comes from the effect to Tributyl phosphate used in the refining process. The irony is most "yellow cake" is no longer yellow. The term "yellow cake" has stuck but the most stable and efficient uranium oxide is Triuranium octoxide which is actually black in color. I guess changing the name to "black cake" would just confuse people.

[malakai2]

5. I vote for chocolate cake

That way we can get the anti-science crowd on board, and they can continue basing their opinion on something other than rational analysis.

[Bobbieo]

6. When I say the Native Unity Blog covers all aspects of Native culture that also includes

the wonderful ability of all tribes to relate the creation of the universe through nature and their view of the animal world. I do so want to believe the North American continent rests on the back of a giant turtle. You've heard of Turtle island!

[kristopher]

10. Leetso: the Powerful Yellow Monster

Leetso: the Powerful Yellow Monster

The monster was born on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico,
when the first atomic bomb exploded

Esther Yazzie and Jim Zion
Albuquerque, New Mexico


Mining uranium in the Navajo Nation. Photo by Milton Snow. Used courtesy the Navajo Nation Museum.To see a more indepth version of this article see: Leetso: the Powerful Yellow Monster
A Navajo Cultural Interpretation of Uranium Mining by Esther Yazzie and Jim Zion
Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Navajo word for “monster” is Nayee. The literal translation is "that which gets in the way of a successful life." Navajos believe that one of the best ways to overcome or weaken a monster as a barrier to life is to name it. Every evil - each monster - has a name. Uranium has a name in Navajo. It is leetso - meaning "yellow brown" or "yellow dirt". Aside from its literal translation, the word carries a powerful connotation. Sometimes, when we translate a Navajo word into English, we say it "sounds like" something. I think it sounds like a reptile; like a monster. It is a monster, as I will explain.

The Monster was fertilized in 1896, when radioactivity was discovered, and again in 1898, when the Curies uncovered atomic energy. It took shape in 1934, when Enrico Fermi achieved nuclear fission, and on December 2, 1942, when the first successful nuclear chain reaction took place under a sports stadium at the University of Chicago. The monster was born on July 16,1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, when the first atomic bomb exploded.

Navajos were the midwife of the monster, although they did not know it at the time . The Bureau of Indian Affairs discovered a uranium-vanadium bearing mineral in Navajo Nation in 1941. At the same time, the Navajo Tribal Council passed a resolution to support the United States in opposition to the threat of Nazi Germany. By the time the war broke out in late 1941, Navajos joined the war effort. Many enlisted in the American armed forces. They joined the military at rates far higher than the general population. Navajo patriots did the military to serve in Korea, Vietnam, and other places of confrontation. They also did their part on the nuclear front: Navajo lands contributed thirteen million tons of uranium ore from 1945 through 1988. The nuclear industry dug the world' s largest underground or deep uranium mine was at a site by Mt. Taylor. That mountain is Tsoodzil in our language, the sacred mountain of the south. Navajos had no say about the desecration of that sacred place by mining. The Laguna mine operated from 1979 through 1982; the Mount Taylor mine from 1979 through 1990. Mining created a boomtown environment, with all its associated violence. Mining took place throughout the Navajo Nation, and as of today, there are at least one thousand abandoned and unreclaimed uranium mines within the Navajo Nation. We have not yet discovered the extent of the toxic waste which came from the mills and plants which processed uranium and other products. In the aftermath of the atomic warfare and energy industry, people talk about using Indian lands to store nuclear waste....

http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pym.html

[joshcryer]

7. Just out of curiosity, how radioactive is that disk of pure uranium?

And what is it being used for here?

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Blurb for the photo:

A billet of highly enriched uranium that was recovered from scrap processed at the Y-12 National Security Complex Plant. (Y-12 is Oak Ridge).

I don't fancy guessing the weight or isotope ratio of that slab, but when it's just sitting around in a lump like that the activity is pretty low.

[Statistical]

9. Uranium is only moderately radioactive, and it is an alpha emitter.

If the slug was pure U-235 (which it isn't because even HEU is only 80%-95% U-235) it would have a decay energy of 4.2MeV which is about middle of the pack as far as decay energy goes.

Still Alpha radiation can't penetrate even a sheet of paper, (or gloves, or skin) so the danger is minimal unless you eat some.

To put it into comparison the fission of a single atom of U-235 releases 200 MeV.

[kristopher]

11. You don't know much about what folk lore is and how it works, do you?

You should though, since you constantly parrot it.