More than 430 meters beneath an Arizona pine forest, miners are digging tunnels in search of a radioactive element that can be used to produce electricity. Two states north, in central Wyoming, drillers have drilled well after well into the desert, where the element in question, uranium, is buried in layers of sandstone.
Uranium mining is increasing across the West, driven by growing demand for electricity and federal efforts to exclude Russia from the U.S. nuclear fuel supply chain.
According to consultancy TradeTech, these two pressures have helped push uranium prices to their highest levels in 15 years, helping to revive mining regions that had entered steep decline towards the end of the Cold War.
THE RETURN OF NUCLEAR TO THE UNITED STATES
Nuclear energy is making a comeback in the United States as politicians and investors see the technology as a way to meet growing energy demand without releasing the gases responsible for climate change. This month, Microsoft, which is building energy-hungry data centers, said it would pay an energy company to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, closed since 2019.
Uranium is just one of the elements that companies and government officials are trying to produce domestically to help the country transition away from oil, gas and coal. Lithium and nickel are some of the others. The success or failure of America’s new generation of uranium miners will largely depend on how long this momentum lasts and whether prices remain high enough to encourage companies to dust off old mines.
WHO WANTS URANIUM MINES AND WHO DOESN’T
While some communities have welcomed the new investment, others, particularly in Arizona, are reacting with concerns about the potential health and environmental consequences of collecting radioactive materials near homes and livestock.
“We’re already contaminated here in the Southwest,” said Carletta Tilousi, a member of the Havasupai, a tribe that recognizes as sacred the land near a uranium mine in the Kaibab National Forest, south of the Grand Canyon. “This is our homeland.”
Workers began extracting uranium from that mine, Pinyon Plain, late last year. Owned and operated by a company called Energy Fuels, the facility is made up of a network of 10-foot-by-10-foot wet tunnels that are a five-minute elevator ride underground. Miners with hand drills and explosives remove dark gray chunks of uranium-rich ore from the earth.
Returning to the surface, that rock is trucked about 260 miles northeast to the White Mesa uranium plant in Utah, where workers turn it into a shiny powder known as yellowcake. This concentrated form of uranium is then further processed, enriched and transformed into fuel for nuclear power plants.
REDUCE DEPENDENCE ON RUSSIA
According to federal data, the United States produced about 20 million pounds of yellowcake in 1980, enough to power most of the nation’s current nuclear reactors.
But nuclear power fell out of favor after accidents that included a cooling system failure at Three Mile Island in 1979 and an explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl power plant in 1986. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, nuclear power Russia agreed to divert uranium intended for weapons use in US reactors, flooding the market.
The United States is now trying to reduce its dependence on Russia after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. A law that took effect this year will prevent American power plants from buying Russian uranium by 2028. About a quarter of Enriched uranium used in US nuclear reactors comes from Russia, according to federal data.
THE URANIUM BOOM ON NATIVE TERRITORIES
People living near uranium mines, including indigenous tribes, fear such a rapid recovery.
Much of the activity during America’s last uranium boom, from the 1950s to the 1980s, took place on or near Native lands. When prices collapsed, companies abandoned hundreds of mines. Dozens of those sites have yet to be remediated, leaving residents exposed to high levels of radiation, which can increase the risk of developing lung and bone cancer and other diseases.
Signs posted by the Environmental Protection Agency on Navajo lands along the Energy Fuels shipping route in Arizona warn people against “building, gathering, playing, corraling, digging.” The agency worked with the Navajo Nation and mining companies to assess and clean up the contamination.
This summer, members of the Navajo and Havasupai tribes were among those who organized protests to stop Energy Fuels from transporting minerals across Navajo lands. Energy Fuels voluntarily suspended transportation of uranium in August and said it was working with the tribes.
Mable Franklin, 66, was among the Navajos who protested. Referring to the abandonment of mines in the area, he said: “It’s just something that shouldn’t have happened.”
Environmental regulations and radiation safety have improved over the past fifty years, in part due to the federal Mine Safety and Health Act. Companies operating today, including Energy Fuels, are required to monitor radiation levels in soil and water around their sites, as well as posting bonds to cover cleanup costs.
Tribal communities are particularly concerned about their aquifers. In the Pinyon Plain tunnels, water levels can be mid-calf of an adult due to moisture in the rock.
However, Misael Cabrera, the former Arizona regulator in charge of approving state permits, said the mine does not drill into underground barriers that lead to the main aquifer that supplies drinking water throughout the state.
Miners today are exposed to much less radiation at work than in the 1970s. The risks vary, however, depending on the type of mine. Underground mines can be dangerous for workers if poorly ventilated.
MINES IN REMOTE PLACES
Increased mining has not sparked the same resistance in other places, some of which are more remote.
In Wyoming, Ur-Energy’s Lost Creek mine is about 15 miles from the nearest town, Bairoil, which is home to fewer than 100 people. The company’s extraction process is similar to the techniques used to produce oil and gas. Instead of removing chunks of rock from the earth, the company is drilling hundreds of small wells in the desert, then sending groundwater mixed with oxygen and carbon dioxide into the underlying uranium-rich sandstone.
About 450 feet below the surface, the uranium dissolves in that fluid, and Ur-Energy pumps it back to the surface. Nearby, the company sends the solution through a series of tanks and a vacuum dryer, turning it into yellowcake. The water is reused to extract more uranium. This technique is the most common way to produce uranium, partly because it is generally less expensive and requires fewer personnel than other approaches.
This is one reason why uranium mining is unlikely to ever become the economic engine it once was. Fewer than 400 people worked in the industry in the United States last year, down from about 22,000 in 1979, according to federal records.
Byron T. Seeley lives and works as a potter north of Lost Creek, in the former uranium boom town of Jeffrey City. The wind there regularly blows at more than 30 miles per hour, whipping around abandoned homes. “I doubt the city will ever come back,” Mr. Seeley said. “Nobody wants to live in a place like this.”
(Extract from the eprcomunicazione press review)
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