[en] Radon release from uranium tailings deposits was identified in UNSCEAR 1993 as the main potential source of collective dose to the world population from the use of nuclear power (rather than, say, gamma doses to power plant workers, or doses to reprocessing plant workers or to waste-handling workers, or residents living adjacent to these facilities). This is due primarily to the ongoing nature of the radon releases over geological time and to the assumption of a 10,000 year integration time. UNSCEAR 1993 estimated 150 person-sieverts per GWe-yr of produced power, based on some very general assumptions about area of tailings per unit of uranium produced, uranium usage per unit of power produced, radon emanation per unit surface area of tails, population density within 100 km of the site, and from 100 km out to 2000 km from the site, and atmospheric dispersion. It should be noted at the outset that the idea of adding vanishingly small doses across the entire world population and integrating for 10,000 years into the future, to obtain a collective dose which is then used to infer induced cancer deaths, is warned against by ICRP, and more strongly disavowed in recent papers by Roger Clarke, as being unrepresentative of any real risk and a recipe for misallocation of resources. These UNSCEAR assumptions and the resulting estimations of collective dose were reviewed by SENES Consultants Ltd of Canada, in a report commissioned by the Uranium Institute, both in terms of the methodology and in terms of the factors used. In this report SENES substituted its best estimate assumptions, based on responses received from major commercial uranium mining operations for UNSCEAR's assumptions, which it identified as highly pessimistic, and arrived at a putative collective dose of about 1 person-sievert/ GWe-yr. The most recent UNSCEAR 2000 report acknowledges the uncertainty in the figures, and references the SENES report as providing more specific (but still limited) data. Taking on board the data in the SENES report, UNSCEAR 2000 has reduced its estimated radon release rate from abandoned but stabilized tails from 3 Bq/m².s to 1 Bq/m².s. The initial impetus for the present paper was a request to review the SENES Report. In the process of this review it became obvious that there was only patchy data in the published literature which reported actual measurements of radon release, or radon flux, either from rehabilitated or from unrehabilitated tailings deposits. There certainly appeared in our initial literature reviews to be no attempted compilation of real world data aimed at providing 'global' or 'overview' figures. This would appear to be a major information gap, which the present paper seeks to address. This paper will briefly review the SENES Report, so as to provide a more detailed background to the discussion of radon as a global consequence of uranium mining, and will then go on to provide the results of our literature searches and interpretation. The present authors have found that the amount of data available in the literature regarding radon release from rehabilitated and from unrehabilitated tailings deposits was not large, and it was hard to find. This document presents the results of our literature searches, as described above, an attempt at an overall review, and our interpretations of the general findings of these literature searches. We wish to acknowledge useful feedback from S Frost, of CAMECO. Copyright (2002) Australasian Radiation Protection Society Inc