ople unknowingly have used mill tailings as building materials. Corinne Browne and Robert Munroe, who are very well internationally known authors, state that :In some places, such as Grand Junction, Colorado, people used the mill tailings as landfill and construction material. In Grand Junction, five thousand houses, a school, a church, a supermarket, and a hospital were built on tailings, thus creating situations where people live and work in buildings emitting radioactivity. (81)In towns that have been built on mill tailings there is a great increase in health related costs because of an increase in cancers and radiation induced diseases. Corinne Browne and Robert Munroe go comment on the effects of living in an environment that has radiation. In the early 1970s, a pediatrician in Grand Junction noticed an abnormally large number of children being born with cleft lips and cleft palates. A study showed that there was a far higher incidence of leukemia, hydroencephalitis, and subtle birth defects in the Grand Junction area than in surrounding counties. (81)A person could then conclude that the nuclear industry is mostly to blame for the nation wide increase of cancers and deaths. Is the nuclear industry really benefitting the nation or is it just making the world into a radioactive dump which takes thousands of years to clean up?One last major problem with nuclear energy that needs to be touched on is the storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste includes all contaminated parts that have had contact with any source of nuclear energy and all products of a nuclear reaction that was discussed at the beginning of the paper. There are several problems that relate to the storage of nuclear energy. At a nuclear storage facility, there are security officers, technicians, scientists, and regular staff which make sure the facility is safe. In the paper, Uranium: Its Uses and Hazards, it states the half-life of some radioactive isotopes. U...
