Friday, January 13, 2012
Baseless fears regarding uranium mining
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Lindholm is a mechanical engineer who lives in Roanoke.
In the past couple of months, we've seen two different commentaries in The Roanoke Times arguing against uranium mining in Virginia: "Keep uranium moratorium as long as the commonwealth exists" (Dec. 29, by William Mitchell) and "Consider coal in judging uranium mining" (Jan. 4, by Dan Radmacher). In both commentaries, phrases such as "widespread disaster to the environment," "grave long-term threats" and "extreme potentials for danger" are put forth without any explanation as to what those hazards are.
What are the hazards of uranium mining? Most of the hazards of uranium are the usual hazards of any mining operation. Mine workers must work with explosives and heavy industrial equipment. Silica dust, diesel exhaust fumes and mine collapses are also potential hazards. For open-pit mines, altered erosion patterns can become an environmental concern. While all of these risks are real, none of them is unusual, and they all are being appropriately mitigated in the hundreds of mines already operating in Virginia.
There are only two hazards that differentiate uranium mining from mining of other minerals. The first is that uranium is radioactive. It must be noted, though, that uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. This means that it is long-lived and weakly radioactive.
Contrast that to radioactive iodine, which was emitted from the Fukushima disaster and has a half-life of eight days. Iodine-131 gives off astoundingly intense radiation, but is thankfully very short-lived. All of the radioactive iodine from Fukushima has long since decayed away.
Radioactive iodine kills directly by radiation poisoning. Plutonium increases the risk of cancer. With uranium, the radiation hazard is barely measurable at all. The primary radiation risk from uranium mining is instead from radioactive radon that naturally builds up around uranium ores and is suddenly released during the mining process. This presents a hazard mainly to the workers in the mine, and as the National Academies of Science report notes, this risk can be substantially reduced with improved mine ventilation.
The second hazard is the fact that uranium is chemically toxic, like many other heavy metals. It is not exceptionally toxic, though, being less hazardous than lead and mercury (which are much more prevalent in the environment and can stay in the human body for years). The biological half-life of uranium salts is a mere 15 days.
Fortunately, most uranium compounds (primarily uranium oxides) are insoluble in water and are not easily moved from wherever they are buried. They even precipitate out of retention ponds, instead of remaining in solution like many compounds in coal-based fly ash do. This is why many municipal water systems don't bother testing for uranium, despite the fact that it's more prevalent in the ground than cadmium and arsenic.
Mining activity will not change this appreciably, and the NAS report notes that compacting tailings before burying them can substantially reduce water-based spreading of uranium. Proper selection of burial sites helps further.
I read the 290-page report on uranium mining by the NAS and found nothing particularly distressing. The academy was primarily critical of Virginia's regulatory infrastructure, noting that it had substantial gaps when addressing the special aspects of uranium mining. Nowhere did it indicate that mining uranium is intrinsically too dangerous to allow.
In closing, I ask: If we don't allow uranium mining in Virginia, from where shall we get our electricity? Coal mining is a much higher-volume operation that clearly causes more environmental damage than uranium mining ever would. "Fracking" for natural gas pollutes underground water systems.
Hydroelectric dams alter river ecosystems and kill fish. Even the wind turbines favored by environmentalists alter airflow patterns and kill birds.
All forms of electricity generation create some level of environmental hazard. If we say no to everything that presents even the slightest level of risk, we effectively outsource those hazards to elsewhere and then wonder why we have no jobs in Virginia.
