A letter to the editor in the current issue of Science: A Uranium Miner's Daughter.

[NNadir]

I have argued that it is no longer necessary to mine uranium, since uranium and thorium already mined are sufficient in "breed and burn" settings, to provide all of humanities energy needs, and thus eliminate all energy mining, at least for many centuries.

Many modern uranium mines are generally of a leach type. In some cases, for abandoned fracking sites which are known to extract (and dump) radium derived from uranium's decay chain, leach type uranium mines might both clean up the fracking pollution - which will be with humanity forever - while removing uranium. The day of the uranium rock miner is over.

Nevertheless I found this intriguing letter in the current issue of Science:

A uranium miner’s daughter (TANYA J. GALLEGOS Science 16 Dec 2021 Vol 374, Issue 6574 p. 1455)

After serving in Vietnam, my dad moved to Grants, New Mexico, to mine uranium. Every day, he drilled out uranium in deep, poorly ventilated, confined, hot, and dangerous underground tunnels. After work, my mom washed his overalls and lunch bucket, soiled with radioactive dirt. One day, when I was in fourth grade, my dad came home early from the graveyard shift and said he was not going back. At the time, I did not understand the circumstances, but I later learned that the industry had collapsed due to declining uranium prices, leaving the local economy in shambles.

Uranium mining has always been controversial. Uranium fuels non–carbon-emitting nuclear energy, but uranium and its radioactive decay progeny may pose health concerns. Even so, my family is proud of my dad’s work in the mines because it afforded my parents a livelihood and the means to send their three kids to college, a luxury not given to them. With that opportunity, I pursued degrees in environmental engineering. For my PhD, I moved to Michigan to study iron sulfide–based media for use in cleanup of arsenic-contaminated groundwater. It was a difficult transition moving from sunny New Mexico to the cold, snowy upper Midwest, devoid of blue skies, New Mexico green chile sustenance, and, most importantly, my family. I began to question why I had started down this road, so far away from home without a clear vision of my destination...

...I realized that I could apply my expertise to research uranium! The following year, I accepted a Mendenhall postdoc position at the US Geological Survey to study the environmental impacts of uranium mining. Now, with over 14 years of uranium research stimulating my curiosity, I have returned to New Mexico seeking new insights for managing mine waste. It is fitting that my passion for science brought me home again, where it was nurtured from the beginning by a humble, hard-working uranium miner and his wife.

The author writes that during a fellowship in Korea, in one library the only books she could find in English was about uranium miners.



Caption:

The author’s (letter writer) father, shown here, mined uranium in Grants, New Mexico

I wrote, elsewhere on the internet, about how one can find books about uranium mining in lots and lots and lots and lots of places.

Sustaining the Wind Part 3 – Is Uranium Exhaustible?

An excerpt of what I wrote about finding books about uranium miners:

...As I prepared this work, I took some time to wander around the stacks of the Firestone Library at Princeton University where, within a few minutes, without too much effort, I was able to assemble a small pile of books[50] on the terrible case of the Dine (Navajo) uranium miners who worked in the mid-20th century, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer than the general population. The general theme of these books if one leafs through them is this: In the late 1940’s mysterious people, military syndics vaguely involved with secret US government activities show up on the Dine (Navajo) Reservation in the “Four Corners” region of the United States, knowing that uranium is “dangerous” and/or “deadly” to convince naïve and uneducated Dine (Navajos) to dig the “dangerous ore” while concealing its true “deadly” nature. The uranium ends up killing many of the miners, thus furthering the long American history of genocide against the Native American peoples. There is a conspiratorial air to all of it; it begins, in these accounts, with the cold warrior American military drive to produce nuclear arms and then is enthusiastically taken up by the “evil” and “venal” conspirators who foist the “crime” of nuclear energy on an unsuspecting American public, this while killing even more innocent Native Americans.

Now...

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. I had a post recently about life in a county in western Colorado.

The linked article goes into uranium mining.

Tue Dec 14, 2021: Some worried western Montrose County would fade after the co[div class="excerpt"ECONOMY

Some worried western Montrose County would fade after the coal plant closed. It hasn’t.

As Colorado’s coal industry takes its last gasp, the West End of Montrose County, which lost its coal plant and mine years ago, offers a glimpse of the future.

Shannon Najmabadi 5:30 AM MST on Dec 14, 2021



Traffic and pedestrians move along Main Street in downtown Nucla Colo., Friday November 5, 2021. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Nucla — Brad Campbell took the best job he could after graduating high school, working at the local coal-fired power plant for up to $42 an hour. He got married, bought a house and paid it off in three years.

When he learned Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association would close the Nucla plant early, in 2019, he transferred to the company’s plant in Craig, where he worked as a water chemical technician.

The decision was easy, said Campbell, now 27. It was a six-figure job with a pension and health benefits. Tri-State paid his moving expenses. His wife, a medical assistant, had recently given birth and wanted to stay home with their new child.

But three months after moving, Campbell learned the Craig plant would be closing, too, by 2028.

He returned to the West End, with the challenge of finding work in a region that had lost its biggest employers, the generating station and the coal mine that supplied it.

{snip}al plant closed. It hasn't.]

[4dog]

2. Thanks for your efforts in showing us this and many other little-known topics

Also for the open link. I no longer have easy access to _Science_. Too much stuff to read.

[captain queeg]

3. What is used in the leach fields? I've seen sulfuric acid used in copper mines

Cyanide in gold mines. So I’d guess different products use different leaching media.

[NNadir]

4. There are a number of leaching agents utilized in these mines.

First off, let me say that we really don't need to mine uranium. What we need to do is to convert existing U-238 already mined to plutonium in fast neutron spectra. All of the breed and burn reactors under late stage development will do this. We can also utilize the mine tailings from the lanthanide mining industry that supports the useless wind and EV industries to extract thorium, and convert it either in thermal or fast neutron settings to U-233.

However, the current nuclear industry does mine and enrich uranium.

Current leaching technologies include these:

Sulfuric acid solutions are one leaching agent, albeit one of which I personally do not approve; it has the advantage of not extracting radium but also has the property of acidifying ground water, which is unacceptable to me. It will also release carbon dioxide from carbonates, not a good thing obviously.

Radium carbonate is also insoluble, and carbonate/oxygen extraction is far more environmentally favorable. The process was discussed recently here: Cai, J., Feng, J., Li, J. et al. Study on scale analysis and synergistic removal behavior of neutral uranium mining hydrometallurgy process. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 328, 991–1000

I'm not sure if the paper is open sourced, so here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Uranium in-situ leaching (ISL) with CO2?+?O2 (neutral uranium mining) is currently the most advanced third generation uranium processing technology with supreme cost and environmental protection advantages [1]. In situ leaching uranium is a process integrating mining, beneficiation and water metallurgy. Under the condition of the natural occurrence of the deposit, the prepared chemical reagent is injected into the ore bed through the liquid injection borehole drilled from the surface to the ore bed to react with the minerals and dissolve the uranium in the ore. Then the solution containing uranium is pumped to the surface and sent to the workshop for ion exchange, leaching, precipitation, pressure filtration and drying, finally qualified products are obtained. In the process of uranium extraction, due to the leaching agent (CO32?/HCO3? ) reacts with groundwater (Ca2+/Mg2+) and some components in ore (SiO2, calcium magnesium sulfate and vanadium phosphorus oxide) to form HSiO3?, Fe(OH)3, CaCO3, MgCO3, VO32? and PO42?. With the continuous injection of leaching solution and the increase of CO32? concentration in solution, Ca2+ and Mg2+ are continuously transformed into CaCO3 and MgCO3 precipitation, which will lead to the decrease of permeability in different degrees, blockage of pumping and injection wells, resin poisoning and other problems [2].

Reference 1 is in Chinese, and cannot be called up on Google scholar.

My preference, other than what I will discuss below, would be for supercritical carbon dioxide extraction with a complexing agent like 2-hydroxyisobutyric acid (a natural metabolite in human and animal tissues). A recent example of this approach is here, albeit not connected with mining: J. Deepitha, K.C. Pitchaiah, G. Chandrasekhar, N. Sivaraman, Solubility studies on 2-hydroxyisobutyric acid in supercritical carbon dioxide: Solubility evaluation and application to actinide extraction, Separation and Purification Technology, 2021, 120174.

This would be an ideal technology for use in cleaning up the dangerous natural gas fracking mines in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, which otherwise will be releasing radioactive materials essentially forever. This gas was fracked because the dangerous natural gas industry had a great fig leaf in the solar and wind industries.

If the carbon dioxide is obtained from seawater or air, this constitutes sequestration, some of which will amount to carbonates precipitated as in the Chinese account above.

However, we might consider uranium recovered by removing it from groundwater being pumped to supply irrigation and drinking water. I believe I may have discussed this paper here at one point: Large-Scale Uranium Contamination of Groundwater Resources in India (Rachel M. Coyte, Ratan C. Jain, Sudhir K. Srivastava, Kailash C. Sharma, Abedalrazq Khalil, Lin Ma, and Avner Vengosh Environmental Science & Technology Letters 2018 5 (6), 341-347)

I may have commented on this paper somewhere, if not here, but I am no longer discussing scientific papers here or elsewhere in deep detail.

Were we to place well known amidoxime resins in the line of the water pumps, we would over time collect significant uranium while preventing people from ingesting it. This uranium is NORM, (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials)

It is clear that because we did not rapidly expand nuclear energy beginning in the 1990's, after the bugs were cleared, and instead squandered trillions of dollars on solar and wind which did not address climate change, isn't addressing climate change and won't address climate change, our sources of fresh water in many places in the world are drying up.

This leaves the future generations we screwed by our embrace of happy fantasies that didn't work, aren't working and won't work with the requirement to desalinate ocean water, hopefully doing so in such a fashion as to not entirely disrupt salt flows on land and at sea.

The required influx of seawater to desalination plants allows for "mining" the world's largest uranium ore, the ocean, again by placing solid phase extraction agents, including, but not limited to, amidoxime resins within the intake pipes.

However, again, we don't need to mine uranium, dangerous natural gas, dangerous coal, or dangerous petroleum if, and only if, we make full use of the uranium and thorium already mined.

[captain queeg]

5. It does seem like more people are open to nuclear power nowadays.

There’s been a knee-jerk reaction against it, but maybe people will come around. Seems like most everything going in these days are solar and wind. They are not really able to support the grid alone. There needs to be some large scale energy storage developed.

I’ve seen new mines go in that take a lot of care with the leach fields. I’m guessing older mines don’t have real good containment, but it’s possible when you start from scratch and are willing to make the needed investment.

[NNadir]

6. The knee jerk reaction mostly takes place on the part of old people, my generation.

Overall, we were a bunch of idiots.

My sons tell me that their peers are facing the fact that solar and wind are just expensive fronts for fossil fuels, and that they must have nuclear energy. On my son's applications to nuclear engineering graduate school programs he indicated that his goal is centered on climate change, the challenge his generation faces starkly.

Solar and wind have experimentally proved useless, at the expenditure of trillions of dollars, at addressing climate change. What all the wind and solar plants represent is a massive pile of electronic waste with the bill to come due in 20 or 30 years, when today's babies will be entering their adult lives with an atmosphere containing more than 450 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.

This is what my generation is leaving for the future.

We do not need large scale energy storage. That is a material and thermodynamic waste.

We need reliable energy. It is well known how to provide it.

Unfortunately the only hold up to providing it is that there remains an anti-nuclear movement which is exactly, to my mind, the precise equivalent morally and intellectually of the anti-vax movement. It is ignorance that kills people.