Mineral rights were what Inuit leadership had been striving
for during the long and tense land-claim negotiations with
Canada’s federal government. Sovereignty and autonomy were
vital goals, as they are in any native drive for independence, but
the wealth of natural resources is also a powerful motivator,
particularly in a resource-rich country like Canada, where most
of the harvest from indigenous lands has long inured to the bene>t of Toronto businessmen and the national treasury.
SHOULD MINING BE ALLOWED to proceed in the Thelon
Basin, huge diesel-powered machines and trucks will be
shipped by rail to Churchill, Manitoba, then barged almost one
thousand kilometers to a yet-to-be-constructed port on Baker
Lake. From there they will be driven up a seventy->ve-mile all-weather road that is also yet to be built across the migratory
route of the Beverly caribou herd. Fuel for the machinery and
the mill will be hauled into the site along the same road by
diesel-fueled tanker trucks. All electricity at the mining camp
will be provided by diesel-powered generators.
Once the mine opens, uranium ore will be extracted from an
open pit and re>ned on site, and the resultant uranium oxide
(U O , aka yellowcake) will be hauled to the Baker Lake port and
38
tug-barged one thousand kilometers back to the railhead at
Churchill. In the winter months, when Hudson Bay is frozen,
yellowcake packed in >fty-gallon drums will be ?own from a yet-to-be-paved airstrip to Toronto, then trucked to Port Hope,
Ontario, where most Canadian uranium is shipped to reactors
around the world (never, according to national policy, to
weapons facilities).
This heavy reliance on fossil fuels is ironic, given the fact that
the driving force behind the nuclear renaissance is a claim that
nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source. The assertion is
that, once up and running, a functioning nuke creates no green-
house gases and thus contributes nothing to global warming.
That part is almost true, but the claim ignores the total environ-
mental impact of nuclear energy, which includes a long and
complicated chain of events known in the industry as the
“nuclear cycle.” The cycle begins with >nding, mining, milling,
and enriching uranium, then spans through plant construction
and power generation to the reprocessing and eventual storage
of nuclear waste, all of which creates considerable CO . At every
2
stage of the cycle greenhouse gases are released into the atmos-
phere from manufacturing steel and cement, burning diesel,
and, in the circumpolar regions of the planet, by disturbance of
the tundra, which releases huge amounts of methane, a partic-
ularly potent greenhouse gas.
Even the claim that a functioning nuclear-power facility is CO -
2
free is undermined by the fact that an operating plant requires an
external power source, and that electricity is almost certain to
derive from the burning of fossil fuels. So the frequently repeated
notion that nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source is simply
wrong. The estimated contribution of atmospheric carbon from
the entire nuclear cycle ranges from 5 to 30 percent of an equal
power output from fossil-fuel generation, depending on whom
you ask and what they’re comparing nuclear to.
Of course all this talk of carbon emissions obfuscates the
other signi>cant dangers associated with the nuclear cycle. If,
for example, one of those barges moving through Hudson Bay
should overturn in a storm and a ton or so of yellowcake is
released into open water, the western shores of the bay would
experience a major insult to their ecosystems that would last for
thousands of years. An inland radionuclide spill could be
AND THE GREENER PATH
WINONA LADUKE
are still seeking compensation. The Navajo Nation is still struggling to
address the impact of abandoned uranium mines on the reservation,
as well as the long-term health effects on both the miners and their
communities, many of which suffer astronomical rates of cancer and
birth defects.
As a college student, I worked for Navajo organizations, trying to
inform their people about the uranium-mining industry and the
large corporations—EXXON, Mobil, United Nuclear—that proposed
to mine their lands. It was a humbling experience, seeing some of the
richest corporations in the world faced by courageous peoples who
fought for the two things that mattered to them more than money:
their land and their identity. The Navajo people joined with many
others across the country who felt that there was a much better way
to make energy. In the end, the people did prevail—new mining proposals evaporated as tribal resistance and legal and administrative
battles merged with economic forces. Eventually, contracts for uranium were canceled by utilities, which no longer sought to build
unpopular nuclear power plants.
Now I feel like I am having very bad déjà vu—only this time nuclear
power is seen as the answer to global climate destabilization. In 2005,
the Navajo Nation passed a moratorium on uranium mining in its territory and traditional lands, which was followed by similar moratoria
