Living in mining’s toilet bowl

About 400 000 people living in informal settlements in Gauteng are living in mining “rubbish dumps” – water drainage areas heavily polluted by radiation and lethal mining toxins, academics are warning.

A 2011 study by Dorothy Tang and Andrew Watkins, university professors in landscape architecture and urban design, revealed the informal settlements are the nexus between water, poverty and mining.

For every ton of gold brought to the surface over 130 years of mining, between 10 and 100 tons of uranium were also brought up and separated at the top.

Until uranium became a tradable commodity (shortly after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima), it was discarded as waste, leaving Johannesburg with the dubious distinction as the world’s most uranium-contaminated city, according to a study for the Gauteng depart- ment of agriculture and rural development.

A December 2011 study for the Gauteng legislature concluded that soil contamination from the mining dumps and waste was a “pollution hazard”.

This report also admitted that “people are contaminated by, or externally exposed to elevated levels of radiation after unauthorised entry to a mine site, by living in settlements directly adjacent to mines or in some cases, living in settlements on the contaminated mine residue areas of abandoned mines.

Direct access to mine sites may

A December 2011 study for the Gauteng legislature concluded that soil contamination from the mining dumps and waste was a pollution hazard.

also expose the public to risk due to direct external gamma radiation, radon exposure, inhalation and ingestion of radionuclides and chemotoxic metals, as well as the physical dangers inherent to mining sites.”

Repeated cycles of flooding and drought have coated these banks with a sediment of alluvial soil that is contaminated with uranium and other toxic metals associated with mining.

For many South Africans, being poor means the absence of choice on long-term exposure to uranium and other toxic metals directly linked to MRA land.

Picture: Bloomberg MINING’S LEGACY. Tomorrow’s leaders walk past yesterday’s smouldering industrial garbage. The toxic legacy of South African mining may be an unaffordable burden for future generations.