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Reporter's Notebook

Getting an X-ray dose a kilometer underground

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

There is not much to the surface of the Rožná uranium mine, just a few squat buildings presided over by a pyramid of steel beams and cables that push and pull the lifts of the mine’s principal extraction shaft.

Stepping into one of the steel lifts, its white paint rusting off in flakes, there is a calm, the only sound that of rainwater rushing hundreds of meters below. Then several staccato bell rings, reverberating through the metal, and a plummet into black. The lift bucks and shakes against the speed of descent, tossing its complaints into the air like a robotic banshee, shrill and consuming.
We stop on the 16th level, adjusting our battery packs, headlamps and emergency chemical respirators, activated with a few quick breaths to let us pass through any unventilated pockets of radon gas, which can cause lung cancer and used to be the leading killer of miners. It’s over 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) to the next shaft, which will bring us to the active deposits. As we walk, I run my hand against the rough-hewn white walls of a tunnel.
“What rock is this?” I ask our guide.
“It’s concrete.”
We walk up to a small enclosed train, an industrialist version of the locomotives that ring kids’ amusement parks, complete with conductor. We sit in single file, and the train rackets through a pitch-black tunnel, lit only by our wan headlamps.
Down another shaft, this one blind — it doesn’t connect to the surface. We’re a kilometer down, more than twice the height of the Empire State Building.
We walk past a string of mining cars jumbled full of uranium ore, which looks like granite and, for shame, doesn’t glow. I bang my hardhat against low-hanging pipes.
After several forks, we climb a ladder to an active seam, where four young miners are reinforcing the tunnel with lumber, so their dynamiting — there are no worries of trapped methane gas, unlike with coal — doesn’t take the tunnel down. It’s not precision mining: There are no picks in sight. After blasting, the miners sweep through the broken rocks with radiation detectors, which seems like cheating, and shovel the positive ore into a waiting car.
Back the way we came, our guide measures our radiation dose for the visit: 10 rems, or about the equivalent dose you’d receive from a chest X-ray or an airplane flight from Prague to Australia. We’d been underground for two hours.

Paul Voosen can be reached at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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