Areva

Areva

Did you know you could get HIV/Aids from radioactive radiation? No? Well, the French Nuclear Corporation Areva figures as much and the company-owned hospitals prefer to diagnose the cancers of its mineworkers as cases of the deadly HIV virus. Are we kidding you? No, this is actually happening in the north of Niger where Areva is the majority shareholder of two companies (Somaïr and Cominak) that mine for uranium. But why the false diagnoses? The state-owned French company would rather not pay for the treatment of its former employees. The mineworkers and their families receive little or no information about the health hazards of uranium mining. Radioactivity concentrations in the air, the water and the soil are far too high. Contaminated material is stored under the open sky. Now this is the kind of information that the operators of nuclear power plants like Mühleberg and Gösgen do not want their customers to know. Because their customers might be very upset to hear that some of the uranium used in Swiss reactors comes from Areva mines.