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EPA permits fracking for uranium to go ahead in USA

Goliad skeptics have been fighting UEC’s plans for five years. At Goliad the uranium ore is located just 400 feet deep within the same rock as a groundwater reservoir that ranchers tap for drinking water, both for themselves and their livestock. Water, not oil, is the region’s long-term liquid gold. “We are running out of water; I don’t want mine ruined,” said one rancher who asked not to be named. “When you’re out of water, you’re out of everything.”….

A 2009 study of Texas in situ mines by the U.S. Geological Survey … found no instance in which there wasn’t more selenium and uranium in the water than before mining.

Energy’s Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium This story appears in the February 11, 2013 issue of Forbes. No tour of Uranium Energy Corp.’s processing plant in Hobson, Tex. is complete until CEO Amir Adnani pries the top off a big black steel drum and invites you to peer inside. There, filled nearly to the brim, is an orange-yellow powder that UEC mined out of the South Texas countryside. It’s uranium oxide, U3O8, otherwise known as yellowcake. This is the stuff that atomic bombs and nuclear reactor fuel are made from. The 55-gallon drum weighs about 1,000 pounds and fetches about $50,000 at market. But when Adnani looks in, he says, he sees more than just money. He sees America’s future.

“The U.S. is more reliant upon foreign sources of uranium than on foreign sources of oil,” says Adnani,……

Adnani insists that he can close the yellowcake gap through a technology that is similar to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has created the South Texas energy boom. Fracking for uranium isn’t vastly different from fracking for natural gas. UEC bores under ranchland into layers of highly porous rock that not only contain uranium ore but also hold precious groundwater. Then it injects oxygenated water down into the sand to dissolve out the uranium. The resulting solution is slurped out with pumps, then processed and dried at the company’s Hobson plant.

Standing next to a half-dozen full drums of UEC’s yellowcake, we’re not wearing any protective gear, save a hard hat. We don’t need to. The uranium emits primarily alpha radiation, easily stopped by our skin. That doesn’t mean yellowcake is safe. Inhaling or swallowing it–in drinking water, for instance–can cause kidney and liver damage or cancer. That’s why Adnani’s plan has prompted concern in a region otherwise nonchalant about environmental impacts on health and comfortable with the risk-reward ratio that comes with fracking. ……

UEC’s process doesn’t take place 2 miles down. Rather, it’s dissolving uranium from just 400 feet to 800 feet down–not only from the same depths as groundwater but from the very same layers of porous rock that hold it. “By design it’s much worse than fracking,” says Houston attorney Jim Blackburn, who is suing UEC on behalf of residents near the company’s new project in Goliad, Tex. “This is intentional contamination of a water aquifer liberating not only uranium but other elements that were bound up with the sand. We know this process will contaminate groundwater; that’s the whole point of it…. UEC, which already has one mine in operation, a second under construction and a handful more in the works, making it the most notable uranium producer in South Texas……..

From the 1950s through the early 1980s big oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and even U.S. Steel mined uranium in South Texas. Not only did they find a lot of the stuff while hunting for oil and gas, but the federal government, amid the Cold War, even required that they also run tests in every oil and gas well to check for the presence of uranium. The oil companies sold their yellowcake to the government for the production of nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. “Back then every company was down here,” recalls Anthony, who was a young engineer for Union Carbide. “This was the stomping ground.”

But in the process, they made a mess, gouging out muddy pit mines and building tailings ponds to hold toxic sludge left over from processing ore with acid. A uranium mine in Karnes County was designated a Superfund site; it remains polluted, as does the nearby Falls City uranium mill site, where, the Department of Energy says, “contaminants of potential concern are cadmium, cobalt, fluoride, iron, nickel, sulfate and uranium.”….

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that groundwater “remains an outstanding issue.”….. after a history of mining messes can Texas ranchers now trust UEC in its Goliad project?….. Goliad skeptics have been fighting UEC’s plans for five years. At Goliad the uranium ore is located just 400 feet deep within the same rock as a groundwater reservoir that ranchers tap for drinking water, both for themselves and their livestock. Water, not oil, is the region’s long-term liquid gold. “We are running out of water; I don’t want mine ruined,” said one rancher who asked not to be named. “When you’re out of water, you’re out of everything.”….

A 2009 study of Texas in situ mines by the U.S. Geological Survey … found no instance in which there wasn’t more selenium and uranium in the water than before mining.

An investigation of 76 in situ mining sites by geoscientist Bruce Darling done on behalf of locals in Goliad County concluded that producers’ inability to sufficiently reduce concentrations of uranium (and other pollutants) “calls into question the operators’ understanding of the geochemistry of the hydrogeologic systems that they are exploiting.” A study of in situ leaching for the Natural Resources Defense Council by University of Colorado hydrogeologist Roseanna Neupauer found that “contaminants will remain in the aquifer after all efforts at restoration and will migrate through the aquifer into the future.”……

For Blackburn, and the people he represents, the idea of a tiny company gambling a region’s groundwater on a market that may never appear seems nothing short of insane. “There’s no source of water here other than groundwater,” says Blackburn. “How can you mine inside a drinking water aquifer?”

And yet it is happening. Last month UEC received the last permit it needed: an aquifer exemption from the Environmental Protection Agency. Construction and drilling at Goliad has begun–and UEC has leased more than 20,000 acres in the area. The company plans to be producing uranium there by the end of this year. http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/01/23/fracking-for-uranium/2/

January 25, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, technology, Uranium, water