Power is Dirty

All the buzz today in the energy industry in making your power clean.  We all hear about "clean" coal technology, and natural gas.  Photovoltaics (solar panels) are portrayed with butterflies and bunnies all around them, and wind power is the same way.  The energy industry has set out to appear clean.

When I tell people that I am going into the nuclear industry, much of the concern I inevitably hear is about the handling of the nuclear fuel, whether it be the mining and processing or the handling of the waste.  Nuclear power is having a problem making its image "clean" due to the attacks on Uranium mining, milling, and waste storage.  I have to admit that I did not know much about the details of these processes, so I am setting out with you to learn about the process starting with the mining of Uranium.  As an aside, I am currently taking a graduate environmental class on the stewardship of nuclear materials.  Therefore, by the end of the semester I should have a few more interesting points to discuss with you guys.

For those of you who haven't been following the argument, I feel that this video does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of the argument.

Being raised in southern Colorado, I have heard many stories about Uranium mining.  One of the largest Uranium milling sites, the Cotter facility, was located about thirty miles west of where I was raised.  This facility was shut down when traces of Uranium was being found in the water supply for Canon City, Colorado.

This brings to light the problems that the people near the mining sites have.  Everybody is afraid of anything that is radioactive.  Activists attack Uranium mining as being different from other types of mining.  The truth is that there are many issues that are universal to any mineral mining that takes place.  If you are interested in the details of Uranium mining, I recommend that you check out this website, but I will try to highlight the key issues here.

Uranium mining is attacked as being extremely wasteful due to the large amount of material that must be ground up in order to get the needed amounts of Uranium out.  This is due to the fact that Uranium in the highest quality ore only makes up about 0.1% to 0.2% of the mass.  Therefore in order to obtain the roughly 200 tons of uranium ore needed to operate a plant for a year, over 100,000 tons of earth are ground up.  This results in the "tailings" piles that are so infamous from Uranium mining.  Now I know this seems like a lot of dirt to remove for so little, but before you judge too much, take a look at this video.

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(h/t to Rod Adams at Atomic Insights for finding the video) This video is of a train delivering enough coal to a power plant to operate for about a day and a half. Doing some research online, it seems that each of these large coal trains hauls nearly 20,000 tons of coal on average. That means that in a little over a week, the train will have delivered over 100,000 tons of coal to the plant to operate. Thus, over a year the coal power plant will have consumed millions of tons of coal. Now think that all this coal has to be removed from the ground, just like the Uranium ore. This is why whole mountains are being destroyed in West Virginia and Kentucky. This makes the amount of ground moved to get the Uranium seem quite insignificant. Keep in mind that after processing, the nuclear power plant will only "burn up" about 20 tons of fuel grade Uranium. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of resources being used by the coal industry.

Another argument against the tailings piles is that they are dangerous and need to be stored away from society for many many years. I think the fact that the Uranium is radioactive has little to do with this. What is more concerning is that Uranium is still a heavy metal and thus we need to worry about keeping the tailings away from water supplies. This again comes with the territory of any mineral mining. As far as the radioactivity, we must remember that the Uranium is naturally in the soil, and that is why we are mining it. We are exposed to it everyday living in areas where Uranium is present. It is just part of the background radiation we deal with living in Colorado. As far as the Radon levels, again those of us in Colorado know about that since we have to have ventilation systems in our basements to keep the Radon gas clear. I am not saying that the tailings piles don't have an effect on the radiation dose of those near them, but the dose is not that high and is by no means dangerous.

I want to also address the secret that solar power likes to keep. Photovoltaics relies on the use of batteries to store the power that they make. This means that they rely on lithium, which is another metal that must be mined.  The process is similar to Uranium mining, but Lithium is much more caustic that Uranium.  It has many respiratory effects, and like Uranium requires large amounts of water to mine.  I don't want to attack the process, but I do want to bring to light that the dirty mining process is not central only to nuclear power.  If we want to use the natural resources that mother nature gives us, then we really have no way around it.

There is much more to discuss on the topic, but I think this is a good introduction.  In the future I will be posting on a different mining process known as situ leaching, which gets rid of many of the complaints about conventional Uranium mining.

I hope you see that activists are using any means by which they can to attack nuclear power.  I don't want to make the claim that the mining has no negative environmental effects, but I can say that the mining process is not only for nuclear power.  Why then does nuclear power have to bear the criticism for it when power sources such as solar power totally can ignore it?

As an aside, there is another nuclear blog for this class called the Nuke Truth which is addressing some of the same topics that I am.  There has been an article posted there this week about Uranium production, so I suggest that you check it out.