Sure, I was too impulsive myself, but it's really difficult to read dismissive comments when people all around you lose 10+ years of life expectancy to this "non-problem" just so that some guy in France can have his nuclear energy for cheap.
I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed into a short paper:
I live in one of the mentioned countries (Kazakhstan) very close to one the major (unenriched) uranium processing plants. It's in the very east of the country close to the border with China, you'll easily find information about it if you're interested.
It most definitely is causing problems, but you will not hear about it because: a) nobody gives a flying fuck about us, especially our own government, and b) very little research is being done because nobody important is interested in doing it.
Most of the money made by destroying our health and environment goes to Switzerland (i.e. Glencore), and they have no incentive to care about us.
I read one study by a grad student who managed to escape from here to a French university, and she used a scanning electron microscope to find very high levels of heavy metal pollution -- including uranium -- in tree leaves all around the plant. That's about it.
And here's a personal anecdote of what the reality is here: when I was in college, I was working for a few months with a group of researchers that were testing novel techniques of reducing particulate pollution from a local coal power plant. While we did see some positive results, the emission values (both before and after) were significantly higher than what is permitted by government emission standards, about 8-10 times as much. So we were "asked" (and complied -- you don't really say no to these things) to reduce numbers to acceptable levels and publish that. This makes for a pretty piss-poor study if you ask me, it's not really science.
I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed into a short paper:
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
I'll look around a bit more for the original.