There is a more than two millennia-long narration about metal mining and its societal impacts, leading to terminal decay of society in dystopic scenarios. The most prominent example can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: „They penetrated to the bowels of earth and dug up wealth, bad cause of all our ills,—rich ores which long ago the earth had hid and deep removed to gloomy Stygian caves: and soon destructive iron and harmful gold were brought to light”. Iron is here an indicator for the last and devastating of the „Four Ages of Mankind”, which had started with a golden, peaceful and delightful era. The 20th century has breathed new life into those ancient images about the world’s end – first and foremost updated through the heavy metal Uranium, starring on the stage of Cold War and threatening a „doomsday” caused by atomic bombs. Uranium mining is the basis of the whole nuclear fuel chain, followed by enrichment, power plants, nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Even more covert are the cultural aspects of nuclear industry.

The German-Soviet stock company Wismut, founded in 1947, was one of the largest Uranium producers worldwide, operating in one of the most densely populated areas in Europe – Saxony and Thueringia. After the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic had vanished and mining had stopped in 1991, the extent of imminent danger for local inhabitants was discovered. A rehabilitation process without past comparison began, paid for by German taxpayers. The Uranium extracted from Central European ground not only probably fueled Chernobyl and is now, in its transformed state, scattered around the world, it is also a substance that has to be contained for 10.000 up to 1.000.000 years in deep geological nuclear repositories – an impossible task, yet to be fulfilled.
 

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