Radioactive city: how Johannesburg’s townships are paying for its mining past | Cities | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/06/radioactive-city-how-johannesburgs-townships-are-paying-for-its-mining-
Residents here fear the wind most. When it blows, fine particles from these man-made dumps are carried up into the air and deposited on to residents’ homes. It is no ordinary dust, either: the residue of decades of mining, it can contain traces of everything from copper and lead to cyanide and arsenic.
“During August and September, the dust is terrible. You stop cleaning the floor after a while. It’s just useless,” says Plaatjies.
In the local clinic, respiratory cases such as tuberculosis and asthma are ubiquitous across all age groups, says Musa Mbatha, chairman of the clinic’s civic committee. Rashes and skins diseases are commonplace, too.
“People can’t afford to buy food every day, so they leave the food and it gets contaminated,” Mbatha adds. “The government said that it would do a survey of the health impacts of the mining dust, but until today it hasn’t happened.”
An even more dangerous pollutant is lurking in Johannesburg’s mine dumps, however: radioactive waste. According to one university study, an estimated 600,000 metric tonnes of radioactive uranium are buried in waste rock in and around Johannesburg – around three times what was exported during the Cold War.
“[Johannesburg] is undoubtedly the most uranium-contaminated city in the world,” says Dr Antony Turton, a professor at the University of Free State’s Centre for Environmental Management.
Uranium naturally occurs in reefs alongside gold, meaning the two are often excavated at the same time. For every tonne of gold mined in the Witwatersrand gold fields – the southern sections of which border western Johannesburg – between 10 and 100 tonnes of uranium were also mined.
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