Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)
maisonneuve.org
maisonneuve.org
There are surprisingly strong parallels to the current 'Race for Lithium' and 'Race for Rare Earths'- hard-rock mining is a terrible business all the way around.
My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating black lung and other mining diseases that didn't involve mining for uranium.
Mining exploits the land, it exploits the people who do it, and our civilization is built on it and absolutely requires enormous quantities of it. I don't have a larger point, just that I try to live with it.
For myself, the concerns I have are about consent: how well are the risks explained to and understood by all parties involved, and what happens if one of the parties says no (especially the less powerful group). It should in theory be possible to mostly resolve those issues with consent, though in practice, even among adults it seems we have trouble with it, as the original article makes clear.
There are some philosophers who point out that a lot of the suffering from these sorts of trade-offs are actually felt by people who aren't even born yet- those who grow up amid the dust and debris, those exposed in utero, etc. which raises all sorts of even more difficult questions about consent.
Again, I have no answer for this, but I think it is good practice for humans to at least regularly think about these sorts of moral trade-offs being made by our civilization, because we each have our own point where we have to be the one who walks away from Omelas.
Not exactly just exploiting minorities. My grandpa died because he mined Uranium post-war, but he was white and afaik so was everyone he worked with.
They didn't say "just" or "only" minorities. However, most of the mines were located on or near, Navajo land and over 4 million tons of ore came for that land. The workers were disproportionately Navajo and the land is now poisoned with radioactive waste from the mining, with cancer rates doubling from the 1970s to the 1990s. Land the Navajo were forced onto. Recognizing the damage this has done to an already persecuted minority population does not negate damage done to individuals of other races or ethnicities.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...
The Manhattan Project was done to end a war killing tens of thousands of people a day, which I think can defend some grim tradeoffs.
I won't claim all workers were well treated, but many scientists were also killed and injured in this learning process.
> This secrecy was maintained long after the end of the war. “Efforts were made to give the message that the uranium came from Canada, as a way of deflecting attention away from the Congo..."
> Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...
- good schools. I miss Ms. Carter
- travel extensively through Yukon
- great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing
- maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa
- had a decent fossil collection for a while
- got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and her paddle. She might remember me too).
- awesome/epic snowball fights. I should have pitched for the Yankees
- appreciation for beauty of land nature
- caught my first fish in the keele River. Smoked it
- cold nights makes well read kids
- a piece of sputnik fell to earth not too far from us
- as ref almost all Canadians live very close to us border. The nwt capital (yellowknife) is on great slave lake about 40 degree north. You live there because you are a native, geologist, government worker. Named after local tribe
- great bear lake is one lake up from great slave
- Unofficial national dessert? Strawberry short cake or rhubarb pie.
I think you mean about 62 degrees north latitude?
It's fairly findable in the Northeast (as is maple walnut fudge). The best maple walnut ice cream I've ever had was at a place called Brickley's[1] in Rhode Island.
First I've heard of it being hard to find. It's everywhere in New England.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...
It's interesting being in Europe or somewhere and having a bunch of travelers introduce themselves, I've always noticed that most people will say what country their from, Italy, France, Canada etc, but Americans always just use their state.
Interesting topic. In Europe it seems by country. From France vs from Paris
For example if you're in a German train and ask someone where they're from, they might say they are from Swabia (a linguistic region similar but not identical to the state of Baden-Württemberg). If you had asked them in a Swabian accent, they would have instead answered with the specific city, e.g. Limburg. If you ask the same person in English while he's on vacation in Paris, he'll say he's from Germany.
What people actually identify with most strongly depends heavily on the region; in large cities it's often the city or metropolitan area, but elsewhere it's not uncommon to associate with linguistic regions, kingdoms that stopped existing centuries ago, or your state or administrative district (particularly when it coincides with one of the previous points).
Saying your state is imo closer to saying your European country instead of saying Europe.
Additionally, culture and education being what they are, most adults in western countries have heard of all the states, moreso than some of their principal cities, so it's not that odd to mention it.
anyhow, at one point a Canadian threatens the American that he's going to "go all War of 1812 on your ass."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7DozCqLxU
Other types of mines are less robotized, since they only have to worry about inhalation hazards, and not radioactivity. However, in most other types of mines, machines still do most of the drilling, lifting, detonation of explosives, and so on.
The biggest hazard in a modern mine is probably the accumulation of dust in enclosed spaces. I'd guess injuries during machine maintenance and repair come second, and cave-ins are a distant third. (I'm speculating though; I don't have data to back that up.)
Also what, Ehtséo Ayah didn't see a great mushroom in the distance? That's pretty disappointing
To be clear though, a huge amount of the key players were foreign scientists or foreign educated, such as Oppenheimer himself. We need to keep this in mind because although the U.S. helped pull all this together, we couldn't have done it without the foreign help we received. This is important in today's climate that gets more and more nationalistic by the day. Germany effectively gave the allies the win because they pushed out good people. The U.S. must keep this in mind.