UNESCO

Claudio Pescatore gave a research seminar for 20 staff and students at the Linnaeus University Centre for the Environment (CENWIN) in Kalmar, Sweden.

The title of his talk was “Humanity’s Uranium as a Planetary Liability – Its Chemical and Radiological Toxicity, Ecological Debt, and the Governance Gap.” Here is a 10-point summary:

• Uranium in the Earth’s crust belongs to geology: dispersed, buffered, and governed by natural timescales.
• Once extracted, it leaves geology and enters history — becoming part of human systems, decisions, and liabilities.
• Less than 1% is fissioned for energy; more than 99% remains as a long-lived material stock.
• Uranium is not consumed — it is redistributed into tailings, depleted uranium, fuels, and wastes.
• Its decay chain regenerates over time, while the uranium parent remains essentially undepleted.
• The hazard is therefore persistent, combining chemical mobility and radiological renewal.
• Remediation can manage flux and exposure, but it does not erase the underlying inventory.
• Dilution depends on finite environmental buffering capacity and cannot be a durable solution.
• Long-term safety requires working with natural processes — containment, geochemical stability, and stewardship — rather than assuming closure against them.
• A sustainability debate that ignores this enduring, mobilised uranium inventory rests on an incomplete material accounting.