Coal and uranium for the homeland

The municipality of Buchholterberg is located on a sunny ridge northeast of Thun and is part of the border area between the Bernese Oberland and the Emmental. The municipality, characterized by agriculture, consists of several hamlets and the village of Heimenschwand.

As everywhere else, the time of the Second World War in Buchholterberg was hard and full of hardship: the able-bodied men were on active duty and faced an overwhelming enemy at the border. At home, those left behind had to continue the mostly agricultural work with little technical support and thus help to secure the food supply in the country.

There was a shortage of many goods and especially raw materials, as Switzerland is not rich in minerals. A report of the Oberland daily newspaper of February 3, 1944, stating that due to lack of tires, the daily mailbox lunch route from Steffisburg to the village of Heimenschwand could only be run on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The afternoon course was even stopped altogether.

At that time, the search for the rare domestic raw materials was the task of the “Federal Bureau of War, Industry and Labor, Ministry of Mines”. So the geologist Dr. On June 6, 1942, Rolfrutsch also went to the Buchholterberg and reported to the “Bureau”. He had followed up on a tip from a farmer, according to which there was coal in several places near the river Rotache, which over long distances forms the boundary between the Buchholterberg and the neighboring municipalities of Unterlangenegg and Fahrni.

During his inspection, Rutsch even found a coal bearing layer (pit coal) in one of the high Nagelfluh walls on the banks of the Rotache. The location was difficult to reach, but to determine how the coal seam developed in the Nagelfluh, a tunnel about eight meters long was cut into the rock. The result was disappointing, the deposit turned out to be too small to be worth mining. Rolfrutsch’s report to the “Bureau” was correspondingly negative.

After the Second World War, the Swiss economy quickly recovered, but the Cold War also began. Suddenly there was a particularly high demand for a raw material: uranium. The business community saw nuclear energy as the key to meeting future energy needs, while the Swiss military dreamed of having its own nuclear weapon. Uranium was the starting material for both projects. As a result, the search for it also advanced in Switzerland.

In 1949 the geologist Dr. Hermann Vogel from Basel looked at pieces of coal that he had examined three years earlier for a mining company and that showed increased radioactivity. They came from a stream on the Buchholterberg called “Ibachgrabe”. This ditch is one of the many tributaries of the Rotache, which finally flows into the Aare after a journey of 18 kilometers.

For example, Dr. Vogel is looking for and analyzing more uranium-containing coal deposits and marl layers in the Buchholterberg region. He found what he was looking for in several places. The coal appeared to be in a thin, non-contiguous layer from 1080 m above sea level. M. located Falkenfluh over the Buchholterberg to the Rotache. In several incisions in the terrain, smaller clusters of coal emerge from the Nagelfluh.

Dr. Vogel’s studies then showed that radioactivity could certainly be measured in the rock and coal. He calculated that about 1.6 kg of uranium could be extracted from one ton of Ibachgrabe coal. But here too the small amount of coal, spread over a large, inaccessible area, proved too great an obstacle for mining.

A few years later, Thun physician Dr. medical Otto Hubacher with the question whether the uranium-containing coal deposits and the resulting radioactivity in the Rotache area could have an impact on human health. The trigger for this was an increase in cancer rates that he had observed over a long period of time in people living near the course of the river. To clarify the question, rotache water samples and pieces of coal were analyzed in detail at several European universities.

While the results also showed a slightly elevated level of radioactivity in the samples examined, Dr. medical Hubacher, however, concluded in his report published in 1963 that due to the low values ​​no connection could be made with the uranium-bearing coal deposits and the regionally common cancers. The illnesses turned out to be an inexplicable coincidence.