Eddie Koch
Farmers in the Potchefstroom district fear vast tracts of arable land in the North-West have been damaged by radioactive waste and contaminated ground water from neighbouring gold mines.
The Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS) last month completed a R5-million clean-up operation aimed at removing tons of used pipes and machinery that had been sold by a number of mines to a scrap metal yard, located on a smallholding some 20 kilometres out of town, even though the waste was contaminated by large amounts of radioactive uranium sludge from the mines.
The CNS cordoned off a site next to the Katdoornbos farm in May this year after farmers complained that the headwaters of the Boskop Dam, which supplies Potchefstroom and surrounding agricultural estates with water, had been contaminated by waste that had been bought by the scrapyard owners and sold to surrounding farms as cheap construction material.
Some spots on the contaminated site registered radioactivity more than a 100 times the safety level, according to farmer Theo van Niekerk. His neighbours complained that their cattle’s reproductive rates had declined dramatically in the past few years, possibly due to radioactive exposure.
Gold mines on the dolomitic belt in the Gauteng and Free State provinces produce large amounts of radioactive uranium as a byproduct of their production process. Sediments of contaminated sludge tend to clog up pipes and other parts of machinery on the mines. The waste has been sold to scrapyards for the past 20 years even though it should have been stored in special disposal sites.
CNS representative Tienie Fourie said clean-up activities had been completed and radioactive levels at the Katdoornbos farm were back to normal. It appears that all the scrap metal and a layer of topsoil a metre deep has been removed and taken to a nuclear disposal
“The final results of recent tests by the Council for Nuclear Safety and the Atomic Energy Corporation show that there are no elevated levels of radioactivity in the Mooi River adjacent to the Katdoornbos farm,” said an official CNS press release.
But farmers and conservation authorities remain disgruntled because much of the contaminated piping had been sold to farms and industries all over the region.
‘Nobody can tell us where these pipes and scrap metals from the mines now are. For all we know they are still out there creating a real danger for citizens,” said Deon Swart, a law enforcement officer in the North West Province’s Department of Environment Affairs. Mines in the region belong to Wesgold, Anglo American and Gencor, but it is impossible to locate the precise origin of the waste.
Fourie admitted the CNS did not have the funds or personnel to search for the radioactive material.
“The sludge in these pipes is probably not that dangerous, but any level of radioactivity needs to be removed. The CNS does not have the money and the mines are going through tough times so we are not sure who will pay for this,” said Piet Brand, a retired professor of microbiology who owns a farm near the Boskop Dam.
Fourie said the CNS had identified 38 scrap metal sites in Gauteng, North-West and the Northern Province where radioactive waste had to be cleared. Members of the Chamber of Mines have donated R5-million for the pollutants to be cleaned up but almost all of this has been used to decontaminate the site at Katdoornbos.
The CNS hoped to make an announcement about a new fund by the end of the month, said Fourie. However, it was likely this would be devoted to clearing the other scrap metal sites rather than individual farms that have radioactive materials on them.
On top of this, commercial agriculture has been rocked by evidence that gold mines near Fochville, to the east of Potchefstroom, have been leaching heavy metals and salts into the ground water.
“It appears that farmers can’t farm on between five and 10 large farms in the area,” said Swart. “There are also indications that other areas will be affected as mines may have been pumping polluted sludge into underground dolomitic caverns in the area.”
Steve Johnson, director of conservation in the North- West, said anti-poaching units had recently been converted into a general environmental inspectorate in terms of new conservation and resource protection structures that had been set up in the province.
“The law enforcement section of the old Transvaal Provincial Administration is being converted so that field operators will become responsible for auditing natural resources in general,” said Johnson. “We are throwing a lot of effort into solving the nuclear issue.”