nuclear-news

by sdpeacejustice Yesterday was a tough day for those of us who want to keep South Dakota’s water safe for future generations. At 10:00 am, the Senate Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee held a hearing for Senate Bills 148, 149, and 150 to bolster state oversight of uranium mining (read more in our earlier post on the three bills). After hearing from ranchers, public health experts,  activists, lobbyists, and South Dakota citizens who will have to deal with the fallout from Powertech’s proposed Dewey-Burdock Project in Fall River County, the Committee promptly voted to defer all three bills, effectively killing them…..

The future (and even present-day) water supply and water quality of local South Dakotans is what economists refer to as an “externality.” ……. when Powertech mines uranium, it uses up water from the Madison and Inyan Kara aquifers that, even at their deepest and dirtiest, could someday serve as drinking water sources for a swiftly warming South Dakota. More to the point, groundwater movement, and its importance in maintaining ecosystems (well-documented in Robert Glennon’s fascinating, frustrating 2002 book Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping & the Fate of America’s Fresh Water) especially during a period of intense drought, is difficult to predict. Groundwater models can change drastically depending on the assumptions about water usage and flow that underlie them. ….  there’s the very real chance that, as at Christensen Ranch in Wyoming, today’s science (and the assumptions embedded therein) may have unforeseen consequences.

Those unforeseen (or perhaps foreseen but simply discounted) consequences are the positive externalities in this case: lower water tables during times of drought; the possibility for heavy metal contamination in possible drinking water sources; pollution of, and concentration of preexisting pollutants in, potential drinking water sources; ecosystem disruption; and so on…..

It’s in Powertech’s interests to suck the Southern Hills dry, especially since they are able to externalize the costs of that sucking dry – all the things I just mentioned – onto the local population, long after they have packed up their machines and headed back to Canada with the profits from our resources.

So what regulations like Senate Bills 148, 149, and 150 do is they build in the costs of those externalities: they increase continuous oversight at the state and local levels (since our federal regulators are stretched dangerously thin as it is); they require that groundwater be returned to pre-mining levels and purity; they require that accidents be reported immediately. Yes, that all imposes costs on the mining company. But there are real costs that, under a deregulated market regime, the mining company doesn’t have to bear but that the rest of us do. Regulations like those in the above bills make sure that the company’s incentive isn’t just to not care at all and stick the rest of us with the bill for decades afterward.

Evidently, South Dakota lawmakers care more about foreign uranium companies than they do about their own citizens.

So it should be unsurprising to learn that, in addition to this legislative blow in Pierre, opponents of Powertech were dealt a propaganda blow in Hot Springs last night:

Powertech’s proposed uranium mining project was generally seen as positive at a meeting Thursday night hosted by the Southern Hills Economic Development Corp…..

not everyone who showed up was equally enthused:….http://sdpeacejustice.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/a-tough-day-for-uranium-opponents/