Nuclear power on the up, but uranium mining is still 'invisible'
Nuclear power on the up, but uranium mining is still 'invisible'
Nuclear needs fuel, but uranium is conspicuously absent from the conversation
Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
Green Rocks hasn’t devoted many pixels to nuclear energy. Part of the reason is that groups like the World Bank have excluded it in reports on renewable energy. Nuclear energy isn’t renewable, nor is it necessarily low-carbon. It relies on uranium, a limited fuel source that is dug from the ground and refined with processes that so far have required lots of fossil fuels.
But interest in nuclear power seems to be growing. Innovations in nuclear reactors claim to be far cleaner and cheaper than previous ones. Nuclear power featured heavily in Bill Gates’ new book coverage. Recent videos from The Economist, Vox, and In a Nutshell (a popular science channel) with cumulatively several million views tout the benefits of nuclear energy. They steer attention toward the big headlines that people associate with nuclear problems: Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three-Mile Island.
Opponents of nuclear have emphasized the danger of events like those, but they also have other considerations. Many, like the energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, point to the technology’s difficult financial constraints, which don’t make it an attractive short-term solution for climate control. Wind and solar, after all, have become much cheaper. Long-term prospects also don’t seem high: nuclear waste can remain dangerous for at least tens of thousands of years.
Conspicuously absent from all of the videos above — as well as many other sources — is the extraction of nuclear’s fuel source: uranium. It’s rare to hear a mention of uranium mining when people discuss whether the rich world’s energy needs should be met with nuclear energy. It’s as if uranium is “invisible,” Stephanie Malin told me. She’s an environmental sociologist at Colorado State University and wrote The Price of Nuclear Power.
In an article last year, Malin wrote that uranium was “one of the most charged, controversial, and important elements in the Anthropocene age (or Capitalocene, if you prefer).”
It’s worthwhile to bring uranium mining back into the discussion, even if it doesn’t fare well for a technology that has amassed staunch, well-funded defenders. Under Trump’s leadership, federal officials sought to revitalize uranium mining. It’s unclear how Biden will approach new uranium projects, especially considering the new Secretary for the Interior, Deb Haaland, is a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe in New Mexico, which is still dealing with the environmental and health impacts of a large uranium mine on its land that stopped production in 1982.
“When we’re talking about nuclear technologies in particular, we're talking about a scale of intergenerational injustice that is just mind-boggling, due to half-lives of uranium and plutonium,” Malin says. Long half-lives mean that some areas are put in almost perpetual danger of radiation exposure.
The intergenerational injustice stretches both forward and backward from the present. The nuclear waste leaves deadly problems for generations to come. Uranium mining in the US especially has left ongoing environmental and health issues for people decades after mines were closed. There are over 1,000 abandoned mines from the uranium boom that ended in the 1980s. In the Navajo Nation alone, there are more than 500. Piles of mine waste dot the landscape.
In the western US, particularly in the Four Corners region where the Navajo Nation sits, some groundwater has been contaminated and harmful particulates are blown through the air. In the 1970s, Native uranium miners began seeking help to find evidence that unsafe work conditions were causing lung disease and killing people at relatively young ages. Since then, uranium exposure in the area has been linked to cancers, kidney diseases, hormonal irregularities, and bone damage. The government places the burden of proof on communities to prove harm, rather than companies to prove safety.
“We don’t have a regulatory culture where the onus is on industry operators or what have you. It’s on folks or members of the public to establish there was some harm done to them after it has happened,” Malin says. Evidence mounts, but abandoned mines still remain exposed to the elements.
These are some of the “legacy” issues of nuclear energy in the US. Although much of past uranium mining was tied to the military production of nuclear weapons, it’s the same business at the mine and mill. Proponents of nuclear energy sometimes complain that current nuclear energy projects shouldn’t have to pay for the mistakes of the past.
However, these issues are ongoing, Malin says. Companies that have the power to do clean-up are also proposing new projects.
“That presentation of the industry of being completely different … isn’t backed up by the empirical reality,” Malin says. “There are still some serious issues with this that seem to mirror and mimic the legacy issues that we’re dealing with as well.”
“I think it’s really important to address the legacy issues before we move forward with a robust effort to renew production.”
This is not just a US story. Kazakhstan produces the most uranium globally, with Canada and Australia each producing roughly a third as much. France, which relies on nuclear for the majority of its electricity demand, imports uranium from these places, including Niger.
In Kazakhstan, residents near a uranium mine began falling asleep for days. After years of research, scientists now understand that dust blowing from a nearby uranium mine likely caused this strange condition. In January, an Aboriginal group in Australia successfully saw the end of a mine that they say was “imposed on” them and which they suspect spiked cancer cases. It’s not simply a matter of finding a place isolated enough to shift production, Malin says.
“We have a lot of evidence that it can become a NIMBY [not in my backyard] event where smaller, possibly less politically powerful, more spatially isolated groups of people are impacted, and often these are communities of color and or poor communities that are impacted by other industrial risks as well.”
Renewed acceptance of nuclear energy could drive a major rush to secure uranium supplies. In globalized markets, that has typically led to a ‘race to the bottom.’
“The risk is that the incentives in this current structure of deregulation and globalization, as neoliberalism becomes more common globally, is that you end up with these industries voluntarily having fewer regulations and enforcement of those regulations, so that they are as friendly to business as possible.
So the risk there is that we reproduce these legacy issues, and even if there are perhaps more regulations and better regulations on the books, they’re not enforced, so that we can be globally competitive. I’m not saying that would happen, but that’s what the race to the bottom in other areas has shown and the danger that lies in the global competition in getting multinationals corporations to locate in your state or your community by making it as business friendly as possible.”
One of the places to build new uranium mines, especially given the US push to find domestic resources, is where the infrastructure is already located. Energy Fuels Resources, which operates the only US uranium mill in Utah, says that nuclear energy can be the solution to both the climate crisis and the legacy issues of uranium mining and milling that it continues to oversee. As an added bonus, the company’s mill could produce rare earth products totaling 10% of US demand, it says.
New uranium projects are not simple. Surrounding communities, including some that understand they may have been exposed to cancer-causing environments, rarely unanimously oppose or support new developments. Economic development paints a promising picture, Malin says, especially where boom and bust cycles have taken their toll. From The Price of Nuclear Power:
“This is the fundamental paradox of renewed uranium development: the people and the communities that are most damaged by the legacy of uranium production are often constrained by historical and economic circumstances to support industry renewal.”
All energy sources in the transition — wind, solar, hydro, biomass, geothermal, nuclear — have risks. Solar and wind also require a lot of metal. Uranium and plutonium, however, are fuels, rather than pieces of construction. Once they are used, they exit the economy. There’s no chance of recycling and closing the loop.
Nuclear powers like the US and France have heaps of uranium already mined and refined that could be used in nuclear energy. It lies in bombs owned by the military, and repurposing it for energy would require at least a partial disarmament of the weapons designed for mass, indiscriminate death.
So how might climate policy wrestle with nuclear? Malin prefers to think of the conundrums about the risks of climate technologies more broadly than simply a zero-sum game.
“I think that the more we were to open this up to democratic participation and scale it down to having more neighborhood and community connections to where we get our energy, we might have actually be able to solve some of these issues.”
Further Information: Southwest Research and Information Center, Uranium Watch
Thanks for reading! These topics are relevant to anyone who consumes energy. If you know someone like that, pass this along: