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I put a rough 5-gallon bucket shape into the dose calculator for 0.33% uranium ore and got 20uSv/hr at 1cm distance. Still a factor of 400 off (but not the 20,000 you got: article said 800mRem/hr contact). http://www.wise-uranium.org/rd...

Reading through them, it's mostly meh for the Uranium - keep in mind that I immediately also brought up other mining operations. Hell, a dam containing non-radioactive but still extremely dangerous heavy metals burst last year in the USA and contaminated a whole river.

I'm not saying that there aren't concerns, but I saw a combination of 'not really any danger from the radioactivity' and outright fear mongering.

I missed a more technical and much more informative link: http://www.wise-uranium.org/uw... . Dismiss it as fearmongering if you like.

Your fixation on radiation noted, but recall that Uranium is a heavy metal as well, and Uranium Oxide especially is quite poisonous in the old fashioned sense - at least it is the most oftne observed poisoning compound of Uranium so if you are trying to diminish the importance of Uranium dumps, you probably shouldn't use Heavy metal waste ponds as an example.

U-238, which is the major unranium isotope, is no less toxic than the other isotopes. And just so you know, I am pro-nuclear power. But unlike the stereotypical "nothing to see here" slashdotter pro nuc, I do not dismiss people's concerns out of hand. I suspect that most pro nuc slashdotters would accidentally remove themselves from the gene pool in short order. A lot of unstable energy packed in that stuff - which is the very reason it is useful. It can be handled safely, but you gotta respect it. And you have to respect it for all it's qualities.

According to this page, a person would get a dose of roughly 0.2 millisieverts from inhaling a milligram of natural uranium or 1.2 millisieverts from ingesting said milligram of natural uranium. According to Wikipedia, the "Banana equivalent dose" is roughly 80 nanosieverts.

Wikipedia noted a coal mine in North Dakota which had 0.005% U3O8 by mass or 50 milligrams of uranium per ton of mined coal.

Crude calculation is that there appears to 750,000 banana equivalent units of radiation from natural uranium alone (not counting thorium!) per ton of this coal. So we would need to ingest a bit over 1 microton (or one gram!) of this coal in order to have that banana equivalent dose.

I'm not sure what 2 even means; "hard to mine?" Lots of things are hard - try raising kids. In economic terms, "hard" just means "expensive". It's either affordable or it isn't.

In context of the total cost of nuclear power, it's been getting expensive and rare lately because of soaring *construction* costs, not fuel costs, since fuel costs are a single-digit percentage of the whole; it's almost all about paying off the multi-billion-dollar mortgage on the plant. Even before this discovery, the Japanese believed they could extract uranium from seawater for a few hundred dollars per kg - that's several times the current price, but should we "run out of uranium" (i.e. nothing but "hard" places left), then a ceiling will be put on the price, since it would take many centuries of "mining the sea" for the concentration to decline.

Before that happens, of course, it'll become affordable to re-process spent nuclear fuel, which means 97% of what is currently regarded as "waste" will become fuel again, because reprocessing costs 3X as much as mining new stuff. That 30:1 ratio will stretch out the supply a ways.

As for "dangerous", your own link to radon notes that new standards for mining procedure were enacted back in 1971. Most of the data on higher lung cancers and so forth come from those exposed some time ago, particularly Navaho uranium miners, where there were many allegations that racism prevented a more serious response to their concerns.

More recently you can run across comments like this one:

On June 18, 2004, the Saskatchewan Uranium Miners' Cohort Study Group released its report on a feasiblity study it had begun in 2002:
"It concludes that it is not scientifically feasible to conduct a study of present and future miners who work in modern Saskatchewan uranium mines (1975 onward). Today’s Saskatchewan uranium miners have radon exposures that are between 100 and 1000 times lower than those of past uranium miners, such as miners from Beaverlodge, because of dose limits, improved mining techniques, and other radiation protection practices. Any higher-than-normal rates of lung cancer from such workplace exposures would be virtually impossible to measure. The feasibility study was completed in October 2003 and it was then reviewed by three internationally respected radiation researchers." [ http://www.wise-uranium.org/uhm.html ]

Simply, this is an engineering and economic issue. Proper safety procedure lowers the risks of mining hazardous materials (where do you think things like arsenic and mercury come from? Somebody has to extract and purify them...), and make the risks tolerable - at least as tolerable as coal mining, your only practical alternative...and they also increase the cost of the extraction, which is then either affordable or it isn't. In the case of the nuclear industry, it would probably only a a tenth-cent per kWh to pay double or triple for uranium, so it's always going to be affordable to mine it - and dispose of it - safely.

The industry doesn't WANT to, any more than slaughterhouses want to pay a decent wage and up the cost of your hamburger by a nickel; but that's a "mere" matter of regulating the activities of very wealthy investors. Hard, (sorry) but possible.

The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.

Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.

In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?

@JakaraDean

Thank you for this, it didn't sound correct to me and I was about to do the same as you to figure this out.

The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.

Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.

In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?

can't we just pump it into the air.

Just use it as fertiliser.

Uranium processing plant sprays radioactive waste as fertilizer

The shutdown Sequoyah Fuels uranium conversion plant is disposing of low-level radioactive waste by spraying it on 9,000 acres of company-owned grazing land.

Of course, they have good reason to spray it around.

"The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering issuance of a license amendment to materials license SUB-1010 to authorize decommissioning of the Sequoyah Fuels Corp. (SFC) site near Gore, Oklahoma. This license is issued to SFC to possess contaminated material at its Gore site. NRC licenses these facilities under 10 CFR part 40. Specifically, the license authorizes SFC to possess up to 20 million metric tons of source material in any form. The contaminated material at the Gore site is in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater."

http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE

Nuclear is actually cost competitive with coal,

So the Wall Street Journal is wrong? Even they say "The only way to handicap the field in nuclear power's favor is to put a big price tag on emissions of carbon dioxide." If however emissions of carbon dioxide had a price tag then geothermal, solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources would be more competitive as well not just nuclear power. And if nuclear is so great then why does the industry need subsidies and gets loan guaranties?

and is the only green energy source that is.

Nuclear power is not clean, it is dirty from cradle to grave, oops there is no grave for nuclear waste. Ask the Navajo how clean uranium mining is. Or some First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, or any number of other indigenous peoples throughout the world.

It's also wrong that nuclear plants need to be these massive, expensive things. We've had portable nuclear generators since the '60s, and you can build out plants of various sizes from there all the way up to the mega installations.

Is that why Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant has costs overruns raising it's cost from 3 billion euros to more than 4.2 billion? Or seen it's operation delayed from 2009 to 2012 at the earliest? Since you didn't like the previous CATO article you probably won't like this one either but Nuclear Energy: Risky Business says "the industry in the early 1990s asked for-and got-exactly the sort of safety regulations, permit review process, and public comment regime now in place." Further, it says "Indeed, if government were the reason why investors were saying "no" to their loan applications, I would expect that industry officials would be the first to say so. But they do not."

Solar is currently 3x - 10x more expensive than coal.

Saying that's true now, I don't know, solar is constantly dropping in costs. And coal does not pay all of it's own costs. Like other energy sources coal is subsidized. Mountaintop removal probably the safest way to mine coal is very destructive and polluting.

The only reason it can be cost effective is because the government very very heavily subsidizes solar installations.

If ethanol subsidies, most of which go to corn and there are better feed stocks than corn, are removed from alternative energy subsidies coal comes in first place in the amount of subsidies it gets. The graph on the page linked to says alternative energy got $4.875 billion in 2007. Of that though $3 billion went to ethanol. Coal on the other hand is broken down into 2 categories. Refined coal, whatever that is, got $2.370 billion and coal got $932 million. Together coal got $3.302 billion whereas goethermal, solar, wind and other alternative sources got $1.9 billion excluding ethanol. I do see that it has nuclear as getting less than alternatives though, however I wonder how it breaks down for the different types? As that page asks, "which pig wears the most lipstick?"

Geothermal will never amount to more tha

Sorry to burst your bubble, but nobody actually recycles nuclear waste:
"No use of reprocessed uranium in French reactors in the near future"
http://www.wise-uranium.org/epfr.html
This is just another lie of the nuclear industry.

I think you are leaving out the hazards of mining the uranium, which is probably the most dangerous part of nuclear power production. While nuclear is still probably the best short term option the number of deaths that could probably be attributed to uranium mining is possibly higher then deaths from atomic bombs. It is really hard to quantify the number of deaths from uranium mining as they often happen later and it is always hard to say where the cancer originated.
An overview of the problems, http://www.wise-uranium.org/uwai.html obligatory wiki link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Health_risks_of_uranium_mining

Interestingly the French don't even use the reprocessed fuel:

http://www.wise-uranium.org/epfr.html

"No use of reprocessed uranium in French reactors in the near future
The uranium recovered from reprocessing of spent fuel in France is not expected to be used for the manufacture of nuclear fuel in the near future. French utility EdF rather has made provisions for long-term storage of the reprocessed uranium for 250 years. This was revealed in a report of the French Court of Auditors on the decommissioning of nuclear facilities and the management of radioactive wastes. "

There's no technical impediment to reprocessing, but due to the US and Russia disarmament , HEU is really cheap. See the Recycled Nuclear Fuel Cost Calculator. I don't think many countries do any reprocessing besides maybe Japan, I forget that exact one.

In fact no. The plutonium is fabricated into MOX, but the uranium is stored because it is poisoned with U-236. Most of the reprocessing is just a precursor to long term storage and very little yields new fuel. The MOX is not subsequently reprocessed at all. http://www.wise-uranium.org/epfr.html. Considering that the French program devotes the output of three reactors to uranium enrichment, the energy return on energy invested is pretty low (less than 7) so that reenriching the spent uranium does not make a lot of sense even if it did not contaminate their enrichment facility. They might get a boost from going with centrifuge enrichment but that idea is currrently snarled up.

As for seawater extraction - where did that paticular gem come from and did the guy have more than an MBA?

People eat uranium every day. More uranium is probably ingested oraly by people living around coal burning plants than is released into the atmosphere by the plant itself.

Again a red herring. Only the material you breath in causes any signifigant level of harm. Any uranium you eat passes before if can cause much damage. Particles you breath in get lodged in there emitting alpha particles for years.

As you can see from studies on uranium toxicity, 0.63mg is the maximum amount of uranium considered "safe" to inhale in a year, while it's "safe" to ingest 31.5mg of uranium per year. I doubt people living near coal plants are eating 50 times as much uranium as they are inhaling.

All this basically means: we have already used up a significant amount of the world resources, and we will run out of uranium as nuclear fuel in 20-100 years, depending on how many reactors we are going to have.

I think it is a short sighted and stupid idea to use uranium for power generation for a couple of decades, and have a waste problem for thousands of years, when our nearby star provides us with almost free energy for the next billion years.

And if you want to go for breeder reactors: in Germany they have been abandonded years ago because they are too dangerous, too expensive and you have really bad plutonium waste problem.

In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years.

Completely false information. The decay products from DU are actually more radioactive than DU itself. DU dirty bombs and missiles produce a form of fallout where the contamination continues to get more and more radioactive for thousands of years. See http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html and http://www.wise-uranium.org/rccu.html. There are actually 14 decay steps before a stable isotope is reached, lead-206.

Quite apart from the effects of U238, the depleted uranium that has been used by the US has been seriously contaminated with radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors. This makes it much more radioactive than it would be if it were pure DU, and some of the trans-uranium contaminants also have a significant chemical toxicity as well.

Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper.

More misleading info, since the main danger is internal and our cell contents and DNA are not protected by a layer of paper. Up to 70% of a weapon's DU is converted to an aerosol of micron-sized particles after impact and conflagration. Dust particles lodge in the lungs (and exposed tissues such as the eyes or open cuts) and can be adsorbed and transported around the body by the bloodstream.

Doctors in Kosovo and Iraq have reported large increases in cancer and numbers of malformed babies following the USA's use of DU radiological weapons in its various wars. To quote from http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/iraq-m10 .shtml:

The rate of birth defects, after increasing ten-fold from 11 per 100,000 births in 1989 to 116 per 100,000 in 2001, is soaring further. Dr Nawar Ali, a medical researcher into birth deformities at Baghdad University, told the UN's Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) last month: "There have been 650 cases [birth deformities] in total since August 2003 reported in government hospitals. That is a 20 percent increase from the previous regime. Private hospitals were not included in the study, so the number could be higher."

The rise in birth defects is matched by a continuing increase in the incidence of childhood cancers. Six years ago, the College of Medicine at Basra University carried out a study into the rate of cancer among children under the age of 15 in southern Iraq from 1976 to 1999. It revealed a horrific change between 1990 and 1999. In the province of Basra, the incidence of cancer of all types rose by 242 percent, while the rate of leukaemia among children rose 100 percent. Children living in the area were falling ill with cancer at the rate of 10.1 per 100,000. In districts where the use of DU had been the most concentrated, the rate rose to 13.2 per 100,000.

too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up