United Nuclear Corporation Research Articles

Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation

On a low, windswept rise at the southeastern edge of the Navajo Nation, Jackie Bell-Jefferson prepares to move her family from their home for a temporary stay that could last up to seven years. A mound of uranium-laden waste the size of several football fields, covered with a thin veneer of gravel, dominates the view from her front door. After many years of living next to the contamination and a litany of health problems she believes it caused, Bell-Jefferson and several other local families will have to vacate their homes for a third round of cleanup efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Decades of uranium mining have dotted the landscape across the Navajo Nation with piles of contaminated mine waste. The EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large commercial mining operations.1 The Navajo people did not have a word for “radioactivity” when mining outfits looking for vanadium2 and uranium3 began moving onto their land in the 1940s, and they did not understand that radiation could be dangerous. They were not told that the men who worked in the mines were breathing carcinogenic radon gas and showering in radioactive water, nor that the women washing their husbands’ work clothes could spread radionuclides to the rest of the family’s laundry. Bell-Jefferson and her brother Peterson Bell played in and around the mines, splashing and swimming in pools of radioactive water that had been pumped out of the mines and then collected on their property. The contaminated water looked and tasted perfectly clean. Families used it for cooking, drinking, and cleaning. Hogans and corrals were built with mine wastes, as were roads. All that changed on 16 July 1979. Just about a mile and a half from Bell-Jefferson’s home, a dam broke at the United Nuclear Corporation mill, where workers processed ore from the nearby Northeast Church Rock uranium mine. The spill dumped 94 million gallons of mill process effluent and 1,100 tons of tailings—an acidic, radioactive sludge—into a large arroyo that emptied into the Puerco River.4 The Church Rock spill occurred less than four months after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and it released three times as much radiation, making it the biggest nuclear spill in U.S. history, yet it received only a tiny fraction of the news coverage.5 Declared a Superfund site in 1983, the heaps of waste around the mill still cause radiation survey instruments to squeal from the invisible uranium atoms that remain active 30 years later.6 “This area used to be my playground,” Bell-Jefferson says. “Now it’s just a huge wound.” For the Bells and other Dine (the term by which many Navajo people refer to themselves), the Church Rock spill was a turning point. When corporate and government officials appeared in the spill’s aftermath and began inquiring into exposure to the slurry and potential health problems, the Navajo people finally learned the truth—far from being harmless, these uranium mines were poisoning people, and researchers say they will continue to do so for decades to come.

LISBON TO SENDAI, NEW HAVEN TO FUKUSHIMA: THOUGHTS ON 3/11

1 4 Y L I S B O N T O S E N D A I , N E W H A V E N T O F U K U S H I M A T H O U G H T S O N 3 / 1 1 J O H N W H I T T I E R T R E A T Someone put the bottle in the wrong place. – Robert Peabody, technician, United Nuclear Corporation, 24 July 1964 Everyone makes mistakes. – Hatamura Yōtarō, chair, Committee to Investigate the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Nuclear Power Station Accident, 24 June 2011 In the wake of the most powerful earthquake their country has experienced in modern times, the Japanese know that everyday life has changed, but they are unsure just how much. The economic geographer Okada Tomohiro’s collected précis of events in the immediate aftermath hints at a bewildering national trauma: On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake stretching from the Tōhoku to the Kantō region of Japan produced a tidal wave that engulfed coastal villages and communities from Sanriku to the Bōsō peninsula. It far exceeded the num- 1 5 R ber of casualties in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake: nearly thirty thousand people were killed or have whereabouts unknown in Japan’s worst disaster since the war. In addition, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake has led to nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the release of radiation, and fires in oil storage facilities and residential areas. Radioactivity unleashed by the accident into the atmosphere spread over a wide geographical area and contaminated soil, water, crops, and seafood products. One month later, we are in no position to evaluate fully the impact. From our perspective less than a year later at this time of writing, we see that it is the ongoing crisis of an atomic power plant, rather than unstable plate tectonics or tidal waves, that poses the greatest intellectual, not to mention public health, challenge to Japan. ‘‘Everyone,’’ the Japanese historian Seki Hirano wrote in May, ‘‘senses that Japan after this accident can no longer be the nation it earlier was.’’ There is some irony in this, if only because Japan, of all nations, has perforce contemplated the ‘‘nuclear’’ since 6 August 1945. ‘‘Japan, in the end,’’ Nishitani Osamu wrote soon after 3/11, ‘‘is the world’s guinea pig for nuclear culture, starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, continuing with the No. 5 Lucky Dragon fishing boat [in the 1954 Bikini Atoll aboveground test], and now including Fukushima.’’ This may be hyperbole, but it is worth asking why Japan, an ‘‘earthquake nation’’ ( jishinkoku), has the planet’s third-highest number of nuclear power plants, as well as the ongoing costs of what scholars such as Rob Nixon have called American ‘‘nuclear colonialism’’ in the Pacific have been. Along a coast teeming with atomic reactors – all in rural or semi-rural areas colonized for the power needs of Japan’s huge cities – nuclear power plants are so concentrated in Miyagi and Fukushima that those prefectures have been dubbed ‘‘the world’s nuclear-power Ginza.’’ The rationale for their proliferation is not governed by the logic of market economics, nor is it mere proof of technological prowess; rather it has to do with Japan’s assignment within the post-1945 American world order to redouble the pace of its modernization as a project of mimesis. Under U.S. pressure to buy 1 6 T R E A T Y American reactors, former prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, only a young parliamentarian in 1954, first proposed a bill in the Diet to ‘‘study’’ the feasibility of domestic nuclear power. That project of mimesis may now be over, if what everyone senses has changed is indeed as profound as some observe. In July 2011, Prime Minister Kan stated that Japan would eventually shut down all its nuclear generators: a promise unlikely to be kept but still marking a historic departure from the once sacrosanct ‘‘equal partnership ’’ Japan and the United States pretended to share. The economic decline of Japan since the Lost Decade following the bursting of...

The Sequoyah Corporation Fuels Release and the Church Rock Spill: Unpublicized Nuclear Releases in American Indian Communities

The Three Mile Island nuclear release exemplifies why there is public and policy interest in the high-technology, highly visible end of the nuclear cycle. The environmental and health consequences of the early steps in the cycle--mining, milling, and processing of uranium ore--may be less appreciated. We examined 2 large unintended acute releases of uranium--at Kerr McGee's Sequoyah Fuels Corporation in Oklahoma and United Nuclear Corporation's Church Rock uranium mill in New Mexico, which were incidents with comparable magnitude to the Three Mile Island release. We urge exploration of whether there is limited national interest and concern for the primarily rural, low-income, and American Indian communities affected by these releases. More attention should be given to the early stages of the nuclear cycle and their impacts on health and the environment.

Indian Country by Peter Matthiessen

Reviews 59 eries of the party were presented in a unified picture. The final map in the Atlas, labelled “Lewis and Clark Map of 1814,” makes impressively clear what they had accomplished. Indeed, the contrast between this map, revealing the courses of unknown rivers and the hitherto unguessed-at complexity of the Rocky Mountain system, and the preliminary maps with their great unfilled spaces, may be the most vivid possible testimony to the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. REX E. ROBINSON, Logan, Utah Indian Country. By Peter Matthiessen. (New York: Viking, 1983. 320 pages, $16.95.) In Indian Country, Peter Matthiessen uses the skills of a polished fiction writer to present the saga of the present-day Indian Wars. We are introduced to “traditional” Indians who are quiet, humble men, more truly in the spirit of Crazy Horse as he is consistently remembered than the urbanized militants of Matthiessen’s preceding book. The spiritual life of these Indian people continues to be assaulted by aggressive missionaries as well as by purveyors of various kinds of junk, new and old — television, pollution, drugs, booze, etc. Traditional Indians are desperately fighting for their lands, and for the Indian identity which is inseparable from that land, in their own communities, in their schools, and in the federal courts. Many Americans will be shocked to learn about the ruthless policies which their government continues to force on Indian people, but Matthiessen’s selection of urgent and little-known environ­ mental batttles will alarm the majority of readers (and voters) into complete attention. In Northern Arizona and New Mexico the Navajo people and their land have been criminally battered by Kerr-McGee, who, “attracted by cheap, defenseless labor” and inadequate safety regulations, employed Indian miners who “perhaps because they had no concept of radiation” were given neither masks nor drinking water. They often drank from the puddles of “hot” water on the mine floor. A few years after the mine closed, more than half of these had died or were dying of lung cancer, dust poisoning, pulmonary fibrosis and other “ravages.” Kerr-McGee left behind seventy-one acres of “spent uran­ ium that is estimated to retain up to eighty-five percent of the original radiation.” Throughout the western states the piles of “tailings” have been washed or may still be washed into rivers used for drinking water. The ash from the tailings also travels by wind and in towns like Durango, Colorado it has affected many children with severe respiratory ailments. On July 16, 1979, a dam at a United Nuclear Corporation tailings mill near Church Rock broke, “releasing ninety-five million gallons of radioactive water” into the Rio Puerco River. Several of these Three Mile Island-like episodes have not been publicized because “most of the victims have been Indians,” because about seventy-five percent of known uranium reserves in the United States 60 Western American Literature is controlled by the seven major oil corporations, and because the “great energy consortiums are looting the Southwest (and the Great Plains) under the red-white-and-blue banner of ‘energy independence’ for America.” But if the monster can be identified, he can be stopped. Recently, after many legal setbacks, Indian and non-Indian environmentalists prevented the U.S. Forest Service from turning a sacred mountain of the Karuk and Yurok people of Oregon into “Doctor Rock Recreation Area, Zone 7-11A Recreation Area, Primitive Experience.” Matthiessen realizes that the beast’s language radi­ ates his essence, and he has put him squarely in our sights. JULIAN C. RICE Florida Atlantic University California Writers. By Stoddard Martin. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. 224 pages, $20.00.) The subtitle, “Jack London John Steinbeck The Tough Guys,” is not intended to label London and Steinbeck. Dashiell Hammett, James N. Cain, and Raymond Chandler share (with references to Upton Sinclair and B. Traven) the longest chapter in the book. London and Steinbeck are treated in separate chapters; an “Introduction” and a concluding chapter, “The Sixties and After,” make up the remainder. We also find 17 pages of “Notes,” as the book has the look of a scholarly treatise. The Steinbeck chapter alone has 101 footnotes...

U-Pb ages of uranium ores in the Churchrock uranium district, New Mexico

Examines samples from the largest US uranium-producing region in order to determine ages of mineralization of different orebodies. Uranium from this area has come mainly from arkosic and subarkosic sandstones of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation. Several lines of evidence suggest that ages range from Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous to at least as young as Tertiary. Geologic observations indicate that the oldest (primary) orebodies are tabular in shape and rich in amorphous organic material, whereas the youngest orebodies tend to be poor in amorphous organic material, display roll-front geometry, and are commonly spatially associated with Laramide or younger faults. Both types of ore were formed by relatively lowtemperature, dilute fluids that were essentially ground water in nature. Concludes that the 0- to 1-m.y. U-Pb apparent ages of the United Nuclear Corporation Church Rock Mine relate to redistribution, by roll-front processes, of earlier-formed ores by oxidizing Pleistocene ground waters, perhaps those that resulted in the present-day limonitic zone of the Westwater Canyon Member. Suggests that the 10-m.y. apparent age of sample KM-17-1 may represent an earlier phase of redistributed ore formation, perhaps related to the Tertiary oxidation front that resulted in the present-day hematitic zone of the Westwater Canyon Member.

UNIFLUX 90

Abstract UNIFLUX 90 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) for welding in carbon dioxide shielding gas in the flat groove and horizontal fillet positions. It was developed to weld high-strength low-alloy steels, but it can be used successfully to weld other low-alloy steels and carbon steels. It is used to deposit typically 2.40% nickel steel weld metal with good low-temperature impact properties. Uniflux 90 is used widely in shipbuilding and other fabricating industries. It provides around 85,000 psi tensile strength and around 25 foot-pounds Charpy V-notch impact at -60 F. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on low temperature performance and corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: SA-362. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

UNIFLUX V90

Abstract UNIFLUX V90 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) developed to weld high-strength low-alloy steels, but it may be used to weld other low-alloy steels and carbon steels. It is used to deposit typically 2.40% nickel steel weld metal with good low-temperature impact properties. Welding is protected by a shielding atmosphere of either 75% argon-25% carbon dioxide or 100% carbon dioxide. Uniflux V90 is used widely in shipbuilding and other fabricating industries. It provides around 88,000 psi tensile strength and around 26 food-pounds Charpy V-notch impact at 60 F. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: SA-355. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

UNIFLUX 70

Abstract UNIFLUX 70 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) for welding in carbon dioxide shielding gas in the flat groove and horizontal fillet positions. It is used widely in shipbuilding and other fabricating industries to weld carbon steel and provides around 82,000 psi tensile strength and around 50 foot-pounds Charpy V-notch impact at 0 F. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: CS-74. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

UNIFLUX V70

Abstract Uniflux V70 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) that is used to deposit carbon steel weld metal. Welding is protected by a shielding atmosphere of either 75% argon-25% carbon dioxide or 100% carbon dioxide. Uniflux V70 is used widely in shipbuilding and other fabricating industries to weld carbon steel and provides around 85,000 psi tensile strength and around 37 foot pounds Charpy V-notch impact at 0 F. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: CS-73. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

UNIFLUX VCM 225

Abstract UNIFLUX VCM 225 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) that is used to deposit 2-1/4% chromium-1% molybdenum steel weld when used to weld 2-1/4% chromium-1% molybdenum steel for which it was developed. Welding is protected by a shielding atmosphere of 100% carbon dioxide. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: SA-344. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

United States: State of New Mexico District Court Decision in United Nuclear Corporation v. General Atomic Company, et al. (Uranium Contracts; Compliance with Discovery Orders; Canadian Security Regulations)

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UNIFLUX VCM 125

Abstract UNIFLUX VCM 125 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) that is used to deposit 1 1/4% chromium-1/2% molybdenum steel for which it was developed. Welding is protected by a shielding atmosphere of 100% carbon dioxide. This electrode also may be used to weld other low-alloy steels and carbon steels; however, the weld metal may differ somewhat from 1 1/4% chromium-1/2% molybdenum because of weld-metal dilution. When Uniflux VCM 125 is used to weld 1 1/4% chromium-1/2% molybdenum steel, it provides 95,000 psi tensile strength at 70 F and 24 foot-pounds Charpy V-notch impact at 40 F. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: SA-340. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

UNIFLUX V100

Abstract UNIFLUX V100 is a continuous flux-cored welding electrode (wire) that is used to deposit 1/2% molybdenum steel weld metal when used to weld 1/2% molybdenum steel for which it was developed. Welding is protected by a shielding atmosphere of 75% argon-25% carbon dioxide. This electrode is also used to weld other low-alloy steels and carbon steels; however, the weld metal may differ somewhat from 1/2% molybdenum because of weld-metal dilution. Uniflux V100 is used widely in shipbuilding to weld 1/2% molybdenum steel. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, and tensile properties as well as fracture toughness. It also includes information on corrosion resistance as well as heat treating, machining, and joining. Filing Code: SA-339. Producer or source: Unicore Inc., United Nuclear Corporation.

Authors and Papers

Authors and Papers

Lucid, Authoritative, and Current

"Lucid, Authoritative, and Current." Nuclear Applications, 5(5), pp. 367–368 Additional informationNotes on contributorsD. Allan BromleyD. A. Bromley is Professor of Physics and Director of the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale University. Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Nuclear Science, a member of the Council of the American Physical Society and of the Executive Committee of the National Research Council Division of Physical Sciences, and a Director of the United Nuclear Corporation, he has worked extensively in research in nuclear structure and nuclear reaction mechanisms utilizing particularly3 He and heavy ion projectiles; he has been actively involved in the development of new nuclear physics accelerators and, with J. M. McKenzie, fabricated and used the first germanium surface barrier detectors in nuclear reaction studies as well as the first room temperature semiconductor detector—a silicon surface barrier unit.

UNITED NUCLEAR CORPORATION

UNITED NUCLEAR CORPORATION

Neutron activation of sulfur in hair: application in a nuclear accident dosimetry study.

Incident fast neutron doses sustained by personnel involved in the Wood River Junction, United Nuclear Corporation criticality accident of 24 July 1964, have been estimated from induced 32P activity in hair sulfur. Fast neutron doses to the head and pubis of the fatally injured victim were 1200 and 4800 rad respectively, corresponding to total gamma plus neutron dose estimates of ∼11,000 and 48,000 rad. Identification of 32P in hair samples from two individuals who entered the area later confirmed the notion that the system either remained critical or that a second excursion occurred. Comparison with the Los Alamos fatality of 1958 indicates that, although doses to the pelvis differed by a factor of 40 and the average total body dose may have differed by about a factor of 3, doses to the head may have been essentially the same (10,000 rad). Similarities in clinical course and survival of the two cases may reflect the approximately equivalent doses to the upper torso and head. These observations suggest that debilitation from massive radiation exposure may be more dependent on dose to the head and thorax than on average total body dose.

MONTE CARLO INTEGRATION OF THE SCHRODINGER EQUATION*

Transactions of the New York Academy of SciencesVolume 26, Issue 4 Series II p. 497-504 MONTE CARLO INTEGRATION OF THE SCHRODINGER EQUATION* M. H. Kalos, M. H. Kalos United Nuclear Corporation White Plains, N.Y.Search for more papers by this author M. H. Kalos, M. H. Kalos United Nuclear Corporation White Plains, N.Y.Search for more papers by this author First published: February 1964 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2164-0947.1964.tb03527.xCitations: 3 † This paper was presented at a meeting of the Section on November 20, 1963. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume26, Issue4 Series IIFebruary 1964Pages 497-504 RelatedInformation