This Inside Climate News piece notes that currently, very little uranium is mined in the US, but how there's a push to both open new mines and reopen old ones, either on the Colorado Plateau where Gallup, New Mexico, is, or the Wyoming Basin, or parts of southeast Texas. And, this includes the Church Rock mine. I grew up in Gallup, and remember when the berm-dam for the tailings pond at the Church Rock mine (owned by a Kerr-McGee subsidiary, by the way!) broke. I've written about that, the economic destructiveness of uranium busts, the environmental damages of uranium ore dust and more.
Today's methodology? Less destructive, in not involving surface-level pit mining, but it instead uses massive amounts of water, scarce in many places where the new mining push is in, and with its own environmental risks.
Rather than involving pit mines, like my New Mexico youth, it instead uses injection wells broadly similar to the oilfield. Here's a description, per the illustration above.
Unlike pit mines, which scrape away acres of earth, most modern uranium extraction projects drill hundreds of wells, inject them with solvents and suck up the mineral slurry they create.
That shows you why the water concerns are real, and not just in the Southwest, as we'll see.
There's also the problem that mines in the Southwest, while generally on federal land, also generally abut Indian sacred sites.
Some of the fast-tracked New Mexico mines border the lands of the Acoma and Laguna pueblos. In the nearby Navajo Nation, the new activity has sparked concern.
The Navajo Nation “continues to be affected—not only from abandoned uranium mines and mill sites—but also from other contaminants,” said Perry Charley, chair of the Diné Uranium Remediation Advisory Commission, at a public meeting in August in Shiprock, New Mexico.
From 1944 to 1986, mining activities left more than 500 abandoned mines and an enormous amount of uranium waste in various regions of Navajo land.
Once again, rich White America has zero sensitivity or care, for the most part, for American Indians. This includes, IMO, environmentalists pushing a revival and expansion of nuclear power with little foresight.
And, albeit without American Indian cultural sensitivity, the water quality problems of modern water injection well mining are also coming to Texas.
The uranium mining revival has churned up similar concerns in the savannah of South Texas. Encore Energy, based in the Gulf Coast city of Corpus Christi, started production at its Rosita site in November 2023 and its Alta Mesa site in June 2024. In August, it acquired 5,900 more acres adjacent to Alta Mesa, where it plans to begin drilling in October. Another Corpus Christi-based company, Uranium Energy Corp., expects to start mining at its South Texas sites in early 2026.
One rural groundwater conservation district is fighting the renewal of an old, unused mining permit UEC holds for a site in Goliad County.
“We are extremely concerned that UEC’s uranium mining activities will lead to groundwater contamination,” said a request for a hearing on the mine permits filed by the district with Texas’ environmental regulator late last year. ...
The Goliad site will use about 130 million gallons per year, according to Art Dohmann, vice president of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District. But mining is exempt from groundwater permitting requirements under Texas law, he said.
“This may cause more wells in the area to go dry,” the district wrote in comments to the state.
In August, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality voted unanimously to grant the district’s request for a hearing on the permit. UEC did not respond to requests for comment.
Separate state permits authorize UEC to inject up to 105 million gallons of mining wastewater underground for disposal every year at its Goliad site. UEC has four other projects under development in South Texas.
There you are.
It also notes the US currently has just one diffusion plant for enrichment, just one for processing into fuel and has NO domestic facilities for the fuel needed by more modern plants. Anything we need right now? We get mainly from the Russkies.
In other words, just snapping our fingers to expand domestic mining will do little in and of itself to expand domestic nuclear fuel supply.
No comments:
Post a Comment