Extraction

• As with any other sort of natural resource mining, the process of removing uranium from the Earth can be damaging to the environment on both a short- and long-term basis. Most people are familiar with the tunnel mining technique used to extract coal; uranium employs this technique as well as open pit mining and in situ leaching, the safest method for miners since it never involves putting humans in direct contact with the radioactive ore.
  
  

Radiation

• Uranium is a radioactive element dangerous to humans. Both long-term low level and short-term high-level exposure can cause sickness, death and even birth defects for generations, as has been seen following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts at the end of World War II. Though the raw material mining process is not as traumatic as those events, uranium is radioactive even sitting in the ground, creating some risk to miners as well as the problem of how to safely dispose of the material left over after extraction.
  
  

Pollution

• On the plus side, uranium mining is less damaging to the environment than traditional methods of pursuing fossil fuels through both mining and drilling. A single nuclear power plant emits very little carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing fewer greenhouse gases to the disputed effects of global warming than burning fossil fuel. In addition, a large amount of electricity can be generated from a single plant, requiring less physical space than the sprawling multitude of traditional power plants.
  
  

Uses

• Uranium is the primary source for the nuclear weapons created as both offensive weapons of mass destruction, as seen at the end of World War II, and as a deterrent that kept the United States and former Soviet Union from destroying one another over the decades of the Cold War. The medical industry employs radioactive isotopes from uranium in a variety of uses ranging from diagnosis and treatment procedures to equipment sterilization and killing bacteria on food.