I don’t know why but I started mulling over where tin was smelted after the last smelter closed in Cornwall. It turns out that Harvey’s moved to Bootle to take advantage of the Bolivian tin entering Liverpool. But my biggest surprise was the Smelter at Capper Pass, Humberside which was the biggest in Europe. I put this in the DB along with link to an aticle although it was one of many that could have been chosen. It was an environmental disaster of the highest magnitude. I must have been having a very long senior moment because I don’t remember reading anything about it.

The Capper Pass tin smelter, (1937-91) which one top nuclear scientist has called "...a timewarp back to the days of Dante's inferno (which) it would not surprise me that Dante himself helped design" has been closed down.
The plant, on north Humberside, Northeast England, was for many years one of the major sources of environmental ionizing radiation in Britain. Owned and managed by RTZ, the world's largest mining company, Capper Pass performed a unique - and uniquely pollutive - task. The plant operated not just as Europe's only primary tin smelter, but as the recycler of a devil's cauldron of heavy metals and radioactive wastes, including radium and uranium. It was the presence of polonium-210, however, spewing out of the company's 600-foot chimney into the surrounding countryside, which first alerted local people to something nasty.

See article.

http://www.hullwebs.co.uk/content/m-21c/newspapers/cappa-pass.htm 

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I'm gobsmacked...lost for words.............

I often wondered what happened to Capper Pass. That is disgraceful and unbelievably well hidden!

A small extract from Hansard.

Capper Pass processes metal ores and residues to extract tin, lead, other metals and alloys. Some of those raw materials can contain naturally occurring radionuclides which can become separated due to extraction and processing. The levels of radioactivity in these raw materials are usually such that they fall outside the scope of the Radioactive Substances Act 1960.

Full report.

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/mar/10/capper-pass-factory-polonium-emissions 

A wonderfull example of parliamentary woffle considering RioTinto made a stunning, yet almost un-reported, admission of negligence. Doesn't compare with Bhopal of course.

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I understand that even burning coal releases far more radioactive pollutants into the atmosphere than does the civil nuclear industry, in the UK at least. If I remember correctly, it is mostly thorium, with some uranium and radium, which are present in trace quantities in the coal.

Now there is an interesting problem for someone to solve, filtering tiny quantities of heavy pollutants out of flue gas.

I also remember seeing on TV some years ago a program about the leukaemia clusters, and many seemed to be close to metal smelters or other similar industry, not just on Humberside. One was on Tyneside. I noticed that one such cluster was centred on Tintagel. No surprise there, lots of naturally occurring radiation.

What does disgust me is that issues like this are covered up, as if we were living in a dictatorial banana republic.

Not sure I follow the no surprise at Tintagel.

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I think this report needs to be logged in the white papers section of AditNow for members and visitors alike to see.
What were the NRA doing to allow them to deliberately continue to pollute a major water course ie The Humber!
I'm pretty sure if that crud was floating past the House of Commons, waterborne and airborne, they'd have been closed down a year after opening (1968.)
Another example of big business flexing muscle over government. Nothing ever changes, just the size of the hush money.

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I've uploaded the Hansard report as a white paper to the docs. library with, I think, a suitable comment attached.

http://www.aditnow.co.uk/documents/Personal-Album-272/http___hansard.millbanksystems.com_commons_1988_mar_10_capper-pass-factory-polonium-emissions.pdf 

[tweak]Link added by vanoord[/tweak]

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Carnkie,

My comment about Tintagel was because there are a number of caves and/or mines which expose strata which contains trace amounts of Uranium. That would probably be where the exposure to radiation, and hence the leukaemia, comes from.

But the producers of the original TV program, a long time ago, missed the point. They were trying to demonstrate something about the alleged connection between leukaemia clusters and military establishments, such as Aldermaston, so they somewhat frivolously picked Tintagel castle as a military establishment, which it was maybe 1000 years ago. They never realised that the connection was indeed uranium, due to the geology.

With you now. I've told this story before but Bryan Earl told me once that if you travel across a section of road in Cornwall with a geiger counter in the car (as you would of course) it will zoom off the scale. Dodgy aggregate?

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A bit of exaggeration.....since most U stuff is alpha which doesn't go through paper....

It's true though, you drive around near S Terras (U Mine) and you will get huge GC readings from the road metal/background/engine house/etc.

S Terras was entered by people wearing BA and their detection methods all got cooked by the radiation. You get 18mSv in an hour!!!!! that's about gas mark 6

If you take a geiger counter along the beach at Carbis Bay there are hot spots galore, very very hot in places. It's the only place I know where you can get a tan both sides without turning over 😮 :lol:
On the subject of dodgey aggregate, What about the stuff under the forecourt of Sainsbury's Filling station in Truro?
This was sourced from the tips of a recently closed mine in Cornwall, I won't say which, and a good few hundred tons were taken and laid. At about the same time someone, an engineer / surveyor?, happened to be walking over the same tips and noticed a detonator in amongst the spoil. A further search turned up pieces of unexploded gelignite :blink: and not just one or two if you follow me 😮 😮 😮
After a period of mad panic (there were suits and white hats flying around like angry bees), someone stuck their neck out and deemed it safe. The alternative was to take up the concrete forecourt dig out the aggregate, CAREFULLY! with HSE and probably the Royal Engineers bomb disposal squad standing by, close Station Hill, evacuate County Hall and surrounding public buildings etc, etc.
Give me uranium any day :thumbsup:

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I continually read stuff about arsenic dust in soil from mining activities, radon and high background radiation, yet have not seen any evidence linking it (in cornwall) to large increases in health problems.
The only strange thing I've noticed connected with smelters and mining waste are the strangely coloured rabbits near the old seleggan smelting site (Black and browns not greys) - or is that due to pet rabbits escaping when the site shut?
If you walk along from Basset mine to Wheal buller, you'll probably spot them.

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There's a lot of black rabbits near where I live and they are down to 1 pet male escaping 20+ years ago :guns:

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I decided to do some more checking of facts on the leukaemia cluster problem, and it seems that there may also be another explanation, which is that it may be caused by a virus, and small, relatively isolated communities with a huge influx of visitors may be susceptible. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2006/07/11/ecsella11.xml&sSheet=/connected/2006/07/11/ixconnrite.html Tintagel could fit those criteria, but so could other places where the disease is unknown.

This http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1059986&blobtype=pdf  makes some connection between railways and other industry, nuclear plants etc and the clusters. No surprise there, as benzene is probably implicated, but steelworks and power stations burn coal, and steelworks in particular were implicated.

Despite extensive Googling, I have not been able to find free access to a map of leukaemia clusters in the UK, so I don't know what source of data the TV program used, and why they picked Tintagel. (This was well before the Camelford cluster, not so far away, allegedly but probably not caused by the water pollution incident.) There is now considerable evidence of a cover-up, under the guise of data protection, and protecting the anonymity of cancer sufferers, so it may be impossible to find evidence of leukaemia clusters in rural areas now.