In light of North Korea's claim to have a hydrogen bomb, it might be interesting to take a quick look at what happens to the people who build and work with these weapons.
A lot of bad things have happened to them. Of those who worked in our nuclear weapons plants since 1945, 107,394 workers contracted cancer and other serious diseases. Of these people, some 53,000 judged by government officials to have experienced excessive radiation on the job received $12 billion in compensation under the federal government’s Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that, between 1951 and 1963 alone, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons—more than half of it done by the United States—killed 11,000 Americans. Many lived in towns and cities located near U.S. nuclear testing sites and, thus, were contaminated by deadly clouds of nuclear fallout carried along by the wind.
The U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institute for Public Safety and Health conducted studies of uranium miners that discovered alarmingly high rates of deaths from lung cancer, other lung diseases, tuberculosis, emphysema, blood disease, and injuries. In addition, when the uranium mines were played out or abandoned for other reasons, they were often left as open pits, thereby polluting the air, land, and water.
No comments:
Post a Comment