Medicine: Uranium Miners’ Cancer

The U.S. uranium industry was only a fledgling operation in 1949 when the U.S. Public Health Service, aware that lung cancer was striking down European uranium miners, decided to launch a quiet, long-term study of workers in the ore-rich Colorado Plateau mines. Last week the PHS’s Dr. Harold J. Magnuson, results in hand, dashed to Denver for an emergency meeting with four Western Governors. The news he carried was alarming: the death rate from lung cancer among uranium miners is five times as great as that of U.S. men in general.

The cause seemed clear: radon, a dense gas that emanates from uranium, is highly radioactive and breaks down into products that are radioactive too. If there are more than 300 micromicrocuries of radioactive material per liter of air in a mine, the mine is officially rated unsafe. Investigators found air in 50% of the uranium mines in Colorado and Arizona contaminated by four to five times the safe level of radiation. In one mine, they counted 47,000 micromicrocuries per liter of air.

Colorado’s Governor Steve McNichols blamed the Federal Government for the radon menace. State attempts to improve working conditions in the mines, said McNichols, have been handicapped by the government’s reluctance to furnish information on the dangers of radiation. He charged that the Atomic Energy Commission has forced the price of uranium so low that small mine operators cannot afford proper safeguards and ventilation for their miners.