Some anticipate a major expansion of nuclear power

The case for nuclear power as a low carbon energy source to replace fossil fuels has been challenged in a new report by Australian academics.

It suggests greenhouse emissions from the mining of uranium - on which nuclear power relies - are on the rise.

Availability of high-grade uranium ore is set to decline with time, it says, making the fuel less environmentally friendly and more costly to extract.

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Yes, we can probably find new uranium deposits, but to me that's not the real issue Dr Gavin Mudd, Monash University

A significant proportion of greenhouse emissions from nuclear power stem from the fuel supply stage, which includes uranium mining, milling, enrichment and fuel manufacturing.

Others sources of carbon include construction of the plant - including the manufacturing of steel and concrete materials - and decomissioning.

The authors based their analysis on historical records, contemporary financial and technical reports, and analyses of CO2 emissions.

Experts say it is the first such report to draw together such detailed information on the environmental costs incurred at this point in the nuclear energy chain.

Nuclear impact

The report is likely to come under close scrutiny at a time when governments around the world are considering the nuclear option to meet future energy demands and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Mining companies are likely to have to dig deeper for deposits

Lead author Gavin Mudd, from Monash University in Australia, told BBC News: "Yes, we can probably find new uranium deposits, but to me that's not the real issue. The real issue is: 'what are the environmental and sustainability costs?'

New uranium deposits are likely to be deeper underground and therefore more difficult to extract than at currently exploited sites, said Dr Mudd.

In addition, he said, the average grade of uranium ore - a measure of its uranium oxide content and a key economic factor in mining - is likely to fall. Getting uranium from lower-quality deposits involves digging up and refining more ore.

Even in the worst case scenario for CO2 emissions, the impact of nuclear on greenhouse emissions is still very small Thierry Dujardin, NEA

Transporting a greater amount of ore will in turn require more diesel-powered vehicles - a principal source of greenhouse emissions in uranium mining.

"The rate at which [the average grade of uranium ore] goes down depends on demand, technology, exploration and other factors. But, especially if there is going to be a nuclear resurgence, it will go down and that will entail a higher CO2 cost," Dr Mudd explained.

Overall, the report suggests that uranium mining could require more energy and water in future, releasing greenhouse gases in greater quantities.

New technology

Thierry Dujardin, deputy director for science and development at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), said the analysis made an important contribution to clarifying the impact of nuclear energy on CO2 emissions.

"It is the beginning of the answer to a question I have raised in many fora, including within the agency," he told BBC News.

But Mr Dujardin said he did not fully agree with the authors' conclusions.

"Even in the worst case scenario for CO2 emissions, the impact of nuclear on greenhouse emissions is still very small compared with fossil fuels," he explained.

The NEA official admitted that lower grades of ore might have to be exploited in future, but he added that emissions from mining were only a small part of those produced in the nuclear supply chain as a whole.

He said he was also confident that entirely new deposits would be found as the industry stepped up its exploration effort.

The nuclear industry is carrying out research into recovering uranium from rocks used in the industrial production of phosphates. Various technologies based on solvent extraction can be used to get the element from phosphate rocks.

And in the longer term, some predict that so-called fast breeder reactor technology would increase by up to 50-fold the amount of energy extracted from uranium.

FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, April 6, 2008 (ENS) - A federal judge Friday evening issued an injunction against the British mining firm VANE Minerals and the Kaibab National Forest, halting uranium exploration on public lands within a few miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

The order came after a day-long hearing in a case brought by three conservation groups - Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Trust - to challenge drilling taking place close to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River with no public hearing and no environmental review.

"This order stops uranium exploration on the banks of a national treasure," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Forest Service had allowed drilling to begin while the case was pending, so the order comes as a major relief. We're elated."

In December, the Kaibab National Forest approved exploratory uranium drilling by VANE Minerals at up to 39 locations across seven project sites just south of the Grand Canyon.

The approval was granted using a "categorical exclusion," the least rigorous public and environmental review available to the agency under the National Environmental Policy Act.

In March, environmental groups sued the Forest Service, demanding that a more complete analysis be conducted.

The suit focuses on the Forest Service's failure to fully consider the controversy and cumulative impacts attending all uranium exploration slated for the area. It cites National Environmental Policy Act, Appeals Reform Act, and Administrative Procedures Act violations.

"The Grand Canyon is too important for the Forest Service to give short shrift to the possible and significant negative impacts of uranium mining exploration," said Sandy Bahr, conservation outreach director for the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter.

"The Forest Service should take a hard look at the impacts and the public should have an opportunity to review and comment on this mining exploration," Bahr said. "We are pleased that the judge recognized the importance of protecting the Canyon and the possible significant impacts this exploration could have."

The Forest Service claims it has little power to deny uranium development under the 1872 Mining Law. But the groups argue that the mining law does not go against the agency's separate obligation under the National Environmental Policy Act to carry out in-depth public and environmental reviews of such proposals.

Thousands of new uranium claims have been staked on public lands surrounding Grand Canyon in recent years. VANE's project is the first of five major exploration projects slated for the area.

Vane Minerals had already begun to drill while the court case was pending. (Photo courtesy Vane Minerals)

The Forest Service has also been in discussions with Denison Corporation about opening of the Canyon uranium mine in the same area.

"The judge's decision reinforces our belief that the current uranium boom poses the most significant threat that Grand Canyon has faced in many years," said Richard Mayol, communications director of Grand Canyon Trust. "Grand Canyon just isn't the place for new uranium development."

While the suit was pending, the Forest Service and VANE Minerals began uranium exploration drilling at three project sites. That drilling is now on hold.

On February 5, the Coconino County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution opposing uranium development on lands in the proximity of the Grand Canyon National Park and its watersheds.

The resolution requests the Arizona Congressional Delegation to initiate the permanent withdrawal from mining, mineral exploration, and mineral entry all federal lands in the Tusayan Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest and the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management in House Rock Valley.

Radioactive Remains | The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines

By Warren Cornwall

Sherman Alexie was a teenager when he first felt threatened by the uranium mines near his home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

His grandmother had died from esophageal cancer in 1980. A few years later, his mother and some other tribal members took out a road map and began marking red dots on every home where someone had cancer.

The roads where the ore trucks rumbled by were pocked with red.

"I remember at that point knowing at some point in my life I'm certainly going to get sick," recalls Alexie, the acclaimed author who now lives in Seattle and recently won the National Book Award. "I have very little doubt that I'm going to get cancer."

Such is the legacy of the Northwest's only uranium mines. At least for those who even know they exist.

Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation, toxic birthplace of the bomb that set off the atomic age, routinely makes headlines. The Midnite Mine, just 100 miles to the north, is all but forgotten, a combination of denial, neglect and willful amnesia.

One of the world's largest mining companies is trying to wash its hands of responsibility for a costly cleanup. The federal government is supposed to help sick uranium miners, but people on the reservation don't even know the program exists.

Even on the reservation, where everybody once worked at the mines or knows someone who did, its presence is almost invisible: no monuments honoring miners, no displays of old photos showing dirty, tired workers next to mountains of ore.

But for the people who live here, it is a nagging presence, at once feared and longed for.

In a place where more than three-quarters of the people on the reservation are out of work, according to the latest federal statistics, the mines were a ticket out of poverty.

But now a new case of cancer can take people back to the uranium-tainted dust that settled on miners at work and came home in their clothes. People know which houses once sat next to the plant that milled the uranium ore, as if they were haunted.

The mine itself haunts people with a question: Are we being poisoned by what was done to our land?

Concerns about global warming, mixed with the demand for more electricity, have some in the United States taking a second look at nuclear power. The price of uranium has soared, sending prospectors back into the hills. A pound of uranium sold for $7.10 in 2000. Today it's priced at around $90 a pound.

"People are just crazy about uranium right now," says Chuck Gulick, an Eastern Washington state mine inspector who heard people talking about resumed exploration at a recent Spokane meeting of the Northwest Mining Association. "It feels like the late '70s all over again. It's kind of freaky."

AS ALEXIE once wrote, no one winds up on the Spokane Indian Reservation by accident.

Miles from the nearest town, perched on a rolling plateau of rock outcroppings and ponderosa pine forests in the state's northeast corner, only two country roads and a little-used state highway join the 157,376-acre reservation to the outside world.

Before whites arrived with their plows and railroads and rifles, the bands of the Spokane Tribe lived throughout the Spokane River Valley, including what is now the city of Spokane. After smallpox epidemics and several skirmishes with the U.S. Army, in the 1880s part of the tribe agreed to live on a reservation near the confluence of the Spokane and Columbia rivers.

The tribe wound up with some of the least valuable land. Too rocky for farming, it also turned out to have little of the gold and silver early prospectors wanted.

Then, in 1954, brothers Jim and John LeBret, both tribal members, discovered something fascinating on the side of Spokane Mountain, near the center of the reservation: rocks that glowed under a special light. It was uranium.

The government was scouring the country for the radioactive metal, raw material of the nation's growing nuclear arsenal. Much of it lay beneath the red sandstone of the Southwest, also on Indian reservations. But the Spokane Tribe sat on a hot spot.Over the next 27 years, workers dug 38 million tons of rock and radioactive rubble from the ground at the Midnite Mine. Later, workers also dug at the nearby Sherwood Mine, open for just five years.

From the Midnite Mine, they trucked the ore through the center of the reservation to a mill that crushed and bathed it in chemicals to make yellowcake. That form of uranium could be converted into highly radioactive rods destined at first for nuclear-weapons factories like Hanford, and later nuclear-power reactors.

The uranium mines became an economic and social mainstay of the reservation.

"It was a good thing. It brought lots of good jobs," says Pearl McCoy, who worked at the Sherwood Mine along with many of her 13 children. Her husband, Alfred McCoy, a revered tribal leader, worked at the mill.

While McCoy says she would like to see the mine return, she simultaneously wonders if it contributed to her husband's death from emphysema.

THE WORD "URANIUM" might evoke images of mushroom clouds and toxic waste. But on the reservation it was part of everyday life.

Deb Abrahamson, a founder of a small group of tribal activists pushing to clean up the mine, remembers her father, a millworker, bringing home hard rubber balls used to help crush the radioactive ore. They became playthings for her and her siblings.

As a child, Harold Campbell played in the dust beneath huge ore trucks as they were parked near his house. He lived next door to the mill, in a small settlement called Uranium City.

Chico Corral's body still bears the scars of his time at the mine. He fell down a hole there, he says, and broke his neck and four ribs. He wore his dusty work clothes home, where his wife washed them. There was a washing machine at the mine, he says, but it was always broken.

The risks? "Nobody knew. We just worked."

WHEN THE URANIUM market crashed in the 1980s, the mines crashed, too.

But while the mines closed and the jobs vanished, the pollution didn't.

The two mines and the mill were filled with tons of radioactive debris. At the bottom of one of two giant pits at the Midnite Mine, a small lake contains a brew of toxic metals and radiation so poisonous the eerily blue water is virtually sterile.

Roads along the 18-mile route from the Midnite Mine to the mill were littered with spots that set Geiger counters whirring. So did driveways at homes, built from crushed ore hauled from the mine.

Uranium and other toxic metals leached into groundwater, and into the sand and water of several small streams feeding Blue Creek, which runs through the reservation, and eventually into the Spokane River.

Fish in Blue Creek had high levels of heavy metals. The roots of plants growing around the mine had radioactive uranium levels as much as 11 times higher than plants from elsewhere in the area.

The tribe should basically warn people away from fishing, hunting and berry-picking around Blue Creek because of prolonged contamination, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

One scientific model used by the EPA concluded that someone living on food gathered in the Blue Creek drainage and using the water for sweat lodges had a 1-in-5 chance of getting cancer from the added radiation.

Some of the mess is already cleaned up. The short-lived Sherwood Mine and its adjoining mill are now a series of sculpted earthen terraces.

The original mill next to what was Uranium City is in the final stages of being dismantled. Dawn Mining Co. paid to scoop up radioactive soil along the roadsides.

But, at the center of the reservation, the Midnite Mine remains a festering wound.

TO GET THERE, drive up a dirt road, past weathered, metal-sided buildings littered with debris left from the mining days. Higher on the mountain, massive piles of ore remain.

A steep side road leads up to a rocky outcrop. Harold Campbell walks to the edge of a cliff. At his feet, a vast hole opens up. This is Pit 3. A thick hose snakes from the pit, pumping the eerie blue water up to a building where it's treated to take out heavy metals, radium and uranium.

Campbell drove an ore truck into that pit in the late 1970s, as they dynamited away part of the mountain.

"When they'd blast, we'd drive in, and there was still dust in the air," he remembers.

They would drive to where people equipped with radiation measurers mounted on poles directed them.

"The probers, they were the worst ones. They're probing in here when the stuff is hot. They didn't care about us. They just cared about getting the uranium to build bombs and stuff."

Did the uranium mines make anybody here sick?

Start with this basic fact: It's virtually impossible to say for sure.

No one has done the difficult medical detective work it would take to try answering the question.

But there's ample evidence uranium mining causes lung cancer and other fatal lung diseases. Studies in the Southwest found that Navajo uranium miners in underground mines were three times more likely to get lung cancer and more than twice as likely to get other serious lung diseases. Uranium-mill workers have higher incidences of lung disease, blood cancers and kidney disease.

On the Spokane Reservation, the U.S. Public Health Service recently declared the mine doesn't pose a risk to newcomers if they keep away from it.

But many in the tribe don't believe it. They're angered by the suggestion that it's safe as long as the center of their reservation is treated as a toxic no-man's land. And the report said nothing about what it might have done to people who lived or worked there for years.

Tribal councilman Richard Garry's mother-in-law died of breast cancer. His wife has lupus — a disease of the immune system.

"She got it at a young age. I was bringing the clothes home. It had dust on it," says Garry, who worked at one of the uranium mills. Councilman Matt Wynne's uncle, Hank Wynne, died of emphysema. He was a heavy-equipment operator at the mine starting in the 1970s.

In addition to watching her husband die of emphysema, Pearl McCoy has buried her oldest son, Donald Dennison, who died of liver cancer years after he worked as a mine foreman.

"A long time ago, people died of old age. You didn't hear about cancer," says McCoy. "It was after these mines came in."

In some cases, such as lupus, there's no known link to radiation. There is for emphysema. But the picture is complicated by other things. For example, McCoy's husband also smoked for decades, the single biggest cause of emphysema.

Bob Nelson, who now manages the mothballed mine and mill for Dawn Mining, says he doesn't think the mine has made anyone sick. He's worked there since 1968. For much of the 1970s he was the radiation-safety officer.

Some people "believe there's a lot of gloom and doom there, and there isn't. There is a problem that we're pretty well controlling," he says.

Whether or not the illnesses trace back to the mine, the very question has become like an illness, spreading whispers of doubt when a diagnosis returns, changing the way people interact with the land.

The McCoys stopped fishing in Blue Creek after they saw it running milky white one day. Harold Campbell won't hunt deer and elk on the mountain above the mine. Deb Abrahamson's family stopped gathering chokecherries along Blue Creek. The tribe's library has Geiger counters people can check out.

After visiting people around the reservation last year to talk about the mine, Abrahamson sits in the tribe's tiny casino at the edge of the Spokane River, eating lunch. As she speaks, tears surface. Her voice cracks, words spilling out over the electronic chirps and bells of the slot machines.

"It's like our life revolves around loss a lot of the time . . . We're surrounded, so surrounded by loss and death."

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is supposed to be doing something to help ease the losses for some miners and their families.

Congress created a program to pay each sick uranium miner, mill worker and ore-truck driver $100,000. It also took the unusual step of apologizing to miners and their families.

To qualify, applicants have to prove they or a dead relative worked at a uranium mine or mill for more than a year before 1972, when all of the uranium was mined for the government. And they must have one of the diseases linked to uranium mining.

But there's no sign any of that money has come to the Spokane reservation.

The Justice Department, which administers the program, says its records don't show payments to a member of the Spokane Tribe, or to anyone who worked at the Midnite Mine.

Pearl McCoy, who would likely be eligible since her husband worked in the mill, hadn't heard of the program. Neither had Garry, the tribal councilmember.

Abrahamson has been trying to boost awareness. She has asked the Justice Department to send someone to talk about it, but she says officials refused.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller says the department was never invited to visit the reservation. It did send some forms to the tribe, but did not hear back. Someone from the program would be happy to visit if they're asked, he says.

THERE IS A PLAN to repair the land around the Midnite Mine. But it will leave a lot of scars.

Mining debris would be pushed into the open pits and covered. A factory would clean water leaking out of the mine for the foreseeable future. Blue Creek, it's hoped, will eventually flush its pollution downstream and dilute it in the Spokane River.

The plan is expected to cost $152 million. No one knows when it will be finished. That's because no one knows who's going to pay for it.

Under the federal Superfund law, anyone with a hand in the pollution can be forced to pay for cleaning it. But Dawn Mining Co. has few assets.

That leaves two others: federal taxpayers, and Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp., Dawn Mining's parent company and, today, one of the largest mining corporations in the world.

U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush recently ruled the federal government is partly responsible because it controlled the reservation land where the mining happened.

Newmont, meanwhile, says it shouldn't have to pay because it didn't manage the mine's day-to-day operations. Newmont had a controlling 51 percent share of the Dawn Mining Co. It named a majority of the board of directors. Many of the mine's top managers were longtime Newmont employees who remained on Newmont's payroll while working at the Midnite Mine. An early agreement called for Newmont to manage "all operations" of Dawn.

The EPA, which is suing Newmont to force it to help pay for the cleanup, says that's ample reason for the company to get part of the bill.

The tribe agrees.

"Those responsible for the contamination should be required to clean it up, and Newmont is as responsible as Dawn," says attorney Shannon Work, who represents the Spokane Tribe.

But Newmont says it didn't have control of how the Midnite Mine was run — a crucial point for proving whether it bears responsibility for the pollution. The Newmont workers who ran the mine took orders from Dawn, the company argues in court documents. The management agreement just involved logistical support, the company insists.

"To try to say there may have been some Newmont employees involved and therefore we're liable for it, I don't think that flies so well," says Newmont spokesman Omar Jabara.

Could the new interest in uranium trigger a revival even at this troubled site?

Dawn Mining's Nelson says he's gotten calls from several people interested in getting at the remaining uranium at the Midnite Mine site. The company estimates that as much as 7 million pounds are left.

He tells people: "Well, we aren't going to. But I say, 'If you're interested, have at it.' "

More than half a century after the tribe's encounter with uranium began, leaders show little interest in digging up more of it while they cope with the mess. But neither has the tribe banned uranium mining, as the Navajos did in 2005.

Tribal councilman Wynne says he has been approached about restarting the mine.

"I don't see it going forward. If I were to have to vote today or tomorrow on it, I would vote 'No.' I'm pretty much an outdoors guy. I'm really close with my traditional ties, to how I feel about Mother Earth, and I just can't see doing it again."

Warren Cornwall is a Seattle Times staff reporter. He can be reached at 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com. Alan Berner is a Times staff photographer.

“Uranium mining requirements eased in proposal”

Feb. 21 news brief.

The brief, hidden article in last Thursday’s paper which announced that a legislative committee passed a bill that gives uranium mining companies the right to pollute without responsibility should have been blasted across the front page with large headlines.

Obviously, state Reps. John Kefalas and Randy Fischer, sponsors of House Bill 1161, have not read the research out of Russia regarding the health effects related to uranium mining.

Residents of Weld County should demand to see how the mining interests propose to control the dust and prevent groundwater pollution. They should ask to see proof that a safe uranium mining operation already exists on the face of this planet. The evidence of destruction and pollution caused by mining interests can be found all over Colorado.

Regardless of where you live in Colorado, you should be concerned about what is happening to your friends and neighbors in Weld County. In addition, the press should make a more responsible effort to inform the public regarding the questionable activities of legislators.

ID desert right for uranium plant, but firm wants tax goodies, too

Associated Press - February 23, 2008 8:34 PM ET

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - The House Revenue and Taxation Committee is expected to hear two bills on Monday that would give millions worth of annual concessions to a French nuclear services company if it builds a uranium enrichment plant in eastern Idaho.

Areva has been eyeing Idaho and several other states for its planned $2 billion facility. The company is expected to announce its final selection in coming weeks.

The proposed tax legislation rekindles a long-standing debate over how states manipulate taxes to attract new projects, and whether it's a good idea.