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Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

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Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#41

Post by ipaddr »

palijer wrote: post #33
cgeier wrote: post #30

I had to look this up: the Northwest Territories are a part of Canada. It's only mentioned about half way through the article.

As a Canadian, this is how I feel whenever folks are talking about US states other than like, Texas or New York. It's interesting being in Europe or somewhere and having a bunch of travelers introduce themselves, I've always noticed that most people will say what country their from, Italy, France, Canada etc, but Americans always just use their state.

People go with big cities usually. Some people like Nevada but most will still say Vegas. People say they are from Philadelphia rather than the state. Chicago is used more often. Buffalo over New York. New Jersey, Rhode Island seem to be used more than a city. Boston over the state but in Cambridge they use the city and state. Texas is more common than Austin unless you are in the states. Florida could go both ways and be more regional South Beach, Miami, Ft Lauderdale vs from Florida.

Interesting topic. In Europe it seems by country. From France vs from Paris

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#42

Post by wk_end »

pdonis wrote: post #39
wk_end wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no defence for the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous people - either in this case or in a thousand others - but describing the Manhattan Project as "an American mission to kill as many people as they could in Japan" is really, really facile. For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehan…

> the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few…

Thanks for the pointers...I'm not interested in defending American Jingoism by any means, and am very interested in learning more about the decision to drop the bomb.

That said, I do want to dispute this:

> The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.

It's an exaggeration to say that they were "destroyed". Yes, ~100,000 died in the firebombings of Tokyo...but even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima. Whatever the "true" motivation, the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#43

Post by hedora »

AYBABTME wrote: post #32

Perhaps a dumb question but why isn't mining highly robotized? As a layperson, it seems like it would lend itself well to remotely controlled heavy machinery.

Mining is highly robotized. Here's a How It's Made video about mining uranium in Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7DozCqLxU

Other types of mines are less robotized, since they only have to worry about inhalation hazards, and not radioactivity. However, in most other types of mines, machines still do most of the drilling, lifting, detonation of explosives, and so on.

The biggest hazard in a modern mine is probably the accumulation of dust in enclosed spaces. I'd guess injuries during machine maintenance and repair come second, and cave-ins are a distant third. (I'm speculating though; I don't have data to back that up.)

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#44

Post by juujian »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #17
twaway735 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel disgust for people who go around calling others racist Its a sort of religion, and there's the fanatics who accuse others of heresy. I'd feel the same disgust for ISIS activists

Can you show me where in the comment some one called someone else racist? Otherwise, it seems like you are projecting yourself onto the Belgium Congo being identified as racist, which is just like a "Well yeah duh" level of racism. It seems like you are angry that the Belgium Congo was identified as a racist enterprise, which even by their own accounts is objectively true. So do you self identify with the Belgium Con…

I mean, I will go on record and say that Leopold II was a racist based on what he did in Congo. I'm comfortable doing that. And while we're at it, Roosevelt was racist for putting all Japanese-Americans into camps. Btw, did you know that Belgium and the US fought Hitler and Tojo, who were also racist? I know all very controversial stuff. Man, I'm enjoying calling people out for racism on the internet and I feel so good about myself right now.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#45

Post by nonethewiser »

542354234235 wrote: post #23
oaththrowaway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Postwar US Uranium mines in Arizona and Utah also used Dine (Navajo) and other native peoples with similar levels of racism, exploitation, leaving thousands of people sick etc. Not exactly just exploiting minorities. My grandpa died because he mined Uranium post-war, but he was white and afaik so was everyone he worked with.

>Not exactly just exploiting minorities. They didn't say "just" or "only" minorities. However, most of the mines were located on or near, Navajo land and over 4 million tons of ore came for that land. The workers were disproportionately Navajo and the land is now poisoned with radioactive waste from the mining, with cancer rates doubling from the 1970s to the 1990s. Land the Navajo were forced onto. Recognizing the d…

Only one worth mentioning though apparently

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#46

Post by nonethewiser »

BurningFrog wrote: post #24
mandevil wrote: post #4

Based on my notes from reading The New World: Volume 1, 1939-1946 by Hewlett and Anderson, approximately 1/6th of the Uranium used for the Manhattan Project came from Canada, 1/7th from the US, and the rest came from the Belgian Congo (most of that was actually shipped across the Atlantic before the US entered the war- it was stored on Staten Island for safekeeping before US entry and the creation of the Manhattan Pr…

The risks around radioactive materials were very poorly understood at the time, and were largely learned by lethal trial and error. The Manhattan Project was done to end a war killing tens of thousands of people a day, which I think can defend some grim tradeoffs. I won't claim all workers were well treated, but many scientists were also killed and injured in this learning process.

More importantly than that, where is the intent that proves racism? Any bad outcome for a minority does not mean there was racism.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#47

Post by mandevil »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #35
mandevil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining isn't racist necessarily, but it is definitely done by exploiting people, and in ways that line up with the power structure at that place and time. My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating bl…

So does a community that allows a mining operation to "exploit" it have any say in the matter? Is it possible that the operating brings new jobs to the community that wouldn't have existed otherwise?

Complex question, one of personal morality and judgement, the sort of thing that everyone has to answer for themselves.

For myself, the concerns I have are about consent: how well are the risks explained to and understood by all parties involved, and what happens if one of the parties says no (especially the less powerful group). It should in theory be possible to mostly resolve those issues with consent, though in practice, even among adults it seems we have trouble with it, as the original article makes clear.

There are some philosophers who point out that a lot of the suffering from these sorts of trade-offs are actually felt by people who aren't even born yet- those who grow up amid the dust and debris, those exposed in utero, etc. which raises all sorts of even more difficult questions about consent.

Again, I have no answer for this, but I think it is good practice for humans to at least regularly think about these sorts of moral trade-offs being made by our civilization, because we each have our own point where we have to be the one who walks away from Omelas.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#48

Post by aidenn0 »

scrubs wrote: post #29

Lived in the nwt for many years as a kid. Highlights? A lot: - good schools. I miss Ms. Carter - travel extensively through Yukon - great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing - maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa - had a decent fossil collection for a while - got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and h…

> - maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa

It's fairly findable in the Northeast (as is maple walnut fudge). The best maple walnut ice cream I've ever had was at a place called Brickley's[1] in Rhode Island.

1: https://www.brickleys.com/

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#49

Post by opticfluorine »

scrubs wrote: post #29

Lived in the nwt for many years as a kid. Highlights? A lot: - good schools. I miss Ms. Carter - travel extensively through Yukon - great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing - maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa - had a decent fossil collection for a while - got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and h…

Is maple walnut ice cream not a thing across the US? I grew up in New England not far from the Canadian border, now live in upstate NY and have easy access to maple walnut ice cream. Never realized how lucky I was.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#50

Post by AlotOfReading »

pdonis wrote: post #36
scrubs wrote: post #29

Lived in the nwt for many years as a kid. Highlights? A lot: - good schools. I miss Ms. Carter - travel extensively through Yukon - great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing - maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa - had a decent fossil collection for a while - got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and h…

> The nwt capital (yellowknife) is on great slave lake about 40 degree north I think you mean about 62 degrees north latitude?

I suspect they looked up the latitude for the Great Salt lake instead, which is around 41N or ~40N if you're rounding down to SLC.
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