Underground And Radioactive

Capturing for posterity the vanishing world of uranium mining, this candid memoir recounts the author's adventures and misadventures working underground in 1970s New Mexico, the "Uranium Capital of the World." Detailed descriptions of the tools, methods and hazards of uranium mining, along with character sketches and entertaining anecdotes, provide a colorful glimpse of a bygone way of life--drilling, blasting and mucking the sandstone of the Grants mineral belt in the San Juan Basin.

Experts from science, industry, and government discuss the unresolved scientific and technical issues surrounding the Yucca Mountain site as a geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste.

The Plowshare program of the Atomic Energy Commission sets forth to put nuclear explosives to peaceful, economic use. The present report evaluates the major fields of application proposed up to now for such explosives. They are the stimulation of gas and oil reservoirs, production of shale oil, applications to mining, cratering, and a list of various other projects, among them storage of natural gas, waste disposal and water resource management.

To achieve successful solutions to the problems resulting from local, distant and global radioactive fallout after nuclear explosions and accidents and to achieve successful retrospective analyses of the radiation conditions from recent observations, certain information is needed: the distribution of the exposure dose rate in the atmosphere and in a country; the distribution of radionuclides in natural environments and the nuclide composition of the radioactive fallout; the features of formation of the aerosol particle-carriers of the radioactivity and of the nuclide distribution of the particles of different sizes formed under different conditions; the processes involved in the migration of radioactive products in different zones and environments; the external and internal effects of nuclear radiation on human beings. This monograph is devoted to a number of these problems, namely, to studies of the radioactive fallout composition, the formation of the aerosol particles that transport the radioactive products and to the analysis of the external radiation doses resulting from nuclear explosions and/or accidents. Problems of restoration and rehabilitation of contaminated land areas are also touched upon in the monograph. To solve such problems one requires knowledge of the mobility of radionuclides, an understanding of their uptake by plants, their transportation within the food chain and finally their uptake by animal and/or human organisms. The results of many years of study of radioactive fallout from atmospheric and underground nuclear explosions and accidents are summarized in this book. It is intended for various specialists - geophysicists, ecologists, health experts and inspectors, as well as those who are concerned with radioactive contamination of natural environments.