Kleberg residents oppose new uranium mines

[struggle4progress]

07/31/2005

By LYNN BREZOSKY / Associated Press

<snip> The Garcias have another local distinction: Their water is contaminated with uranium at levels so high the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration has told them to stop drinking and see their doctors because of a high risk of cancer.

The government and the company that has been mining uranium in the area for the last 20 years told the Garcias the contamination is natural seepage from the vein of the radioactive material that runs near their well, the very uranium that attracted Lewisville-based Uranium Resources Inc. to Kleberg County in the first place. <snip>

URI well casings stick out of the ground on Garcia Hill. In the 1980s and early 1990s, URI pumps sucked uranium-filled water from deep underground for processing.

The activity ended when prices plummeted from more than $30 a pound to around $7. Claiming financial problems, the company left without cleaning up the area or restoring the water below. <snip>

http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D8BMHTNO6.html

[NNadir]

1. This reminds of the residents of Sparta, New Jersey and my own water.

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people are, something of which I am continually reminded of in this forum whenever radiation comes up.

Now, let's just for a sense of reality, note that as usual, this is a vague report written by a dumb reporter who only reports the anecdotal claim of a (clearly) uneducated family.

What is missing is: 1) A statement of how much uranium is in the water.

2) A statement of how much risk is actually associated with the well.

3) Proof that the situation has changed from what it has been for decades, even millions of years.


This reminds me of the town where my sister-in-law lives, Sparta, New Jersey, which, unfortunately is NOT a uranium mining town. Like most of western New Jersey, including my own home, we live on a geological formation known as the Reading Prong, which has high levels of uranium in the soil and rocks owing to the supernova from which the earth formed. A few years ago, some folks at the New Jersey EPA bought a new radiation detection machine and began sampling water. Lo and behold they found uranium and its decay products in the water in Sparta in certain private and public wells.

As usual there was a crowd of completely uneducated idiots who chanted radiation! radiation! Danger! Danger! Cancer! Cancer! Death! Death!

The result?

A fire truck was sent to the center of town and filled with uranium free water to which people could collect drinking water supplies.

Sparta is actually a wealthy town, though, and there were a few educated people around. They looked into the risk. It was determined that the increased risk of getting cancer from Sparta wells, if one drank 4 or 5 glasses of water for 70 years was one in 10,000.

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/Sparta-NJ-Uranium-Water24mar04.htm

And what is the risk of driving your SUV across town to get water from the fire truck? The fatality rate for accidents is currently around 1.7 per 100 million miles driven.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_21_13/ai_54721693

Let us assume that the average family drives their SUV 10 miles to get drinking water once a day from the fire truck. (As I've been to Sparta, this is a perfectly reasonable figure.) Now they have to do this for the same 70 years to protect them from the (OH MY GOD, SCARE, SCARE, SCARE, PANIC, PANIC, TERROR, TERROR, SCREAM, SCREAM) Uranium. If they drive 10 miles a day 365 days a year for 70 years they will drive a total of 255,000 miles each, consuming about 13,000 gallons of gasoline in the process. 5000 families doing this will thus drive a total of approximately 1.3 billion miles. 1.3 billion/100 million is of course, 13. 13 times 1.7 equals approximately 22. Thus the risk of getting killed getting water from the fire truck is 22 times greater than the risk of drinking the (GASP GASP FEAR FEAR FEAR) uranium laced water.

Here is what radiation paranoid fear mongering anti-environmental anti-nuclear dumbbells do not do: Compare risk.

They scour dumb newspaper stories endlessly to extract terrifying stories in isolation because they cannot think, because they are not ethical, and because they have a profound bias and agenda built on their parochial fears.

Anyone with half a brain can tell that the risk to the Garcia family who are evoked in this article to increase fear of uranium is balanced by the losses to families whose wells have been destroyed by run-off from thousands of unregulated coal mines that are unremarked and unnoticed. In fact, every man woman and child in the United States has been poisoned (to some measurable extent) by mercury injected into the atmosphere by coal fired plants.

And, as we all know, there is NO solution for the carbon dioxide that is being injected into the atmosphere as the citizens of Sparta drive their SUVs to get uranium free water and people throughout the US address a thousand other risk perversities based on complete misunderstanding of mathematics, science and ordinary plain reality.

There is no limit apparently, to stupidity. Absolutely none.

For the record, I have radionuclides in my own water. I installed a carbon filter and ion exchange resins. (I also have a considerable quantity of perchloroethylene from dry cleaning plants in our area.) The cost for my clean (analyzed) water: Around $2,000. It tastes great and it's absolutely clean.

[struggle4progress]

2. This seems to be more of your usual hostility to groundwater protection.

In situ "mining" has a fairly bad record in Texas: despite the fact that Texas has some of the weakest environmental laws in the country, over half of the in situ uranium leaching operations there have had their permits cancelled or revoked.

Many people who rely on groundwater resources are naturally concerned if someone proposes to inject materials to solubilize subsurface deposits in order to extract minerals, in part because it is extremely difficult to understand the subsurface well enough to predict accurately the transportation of the solute, which (as the article points out) can contain various substances affecting potability, including (for example) arsenic.

According to the article, an engineer hired by local families a decade ago correctly predicted contamination of the Garcia's water supply, and it is the EPA which has encouraged them to stop drinking the water. If remediation could be simply and cheaply achieved by filtration, as you seem to suggest, then it is difficult to understand why the company has been unwilling to undertake remedial measures. And prevention, of course, is always less expensive than remediation.

Water is an increasingly scarce resource: the country developed with plentiful supplies of cheap clean water. But contamination incidents such as this, repeated tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of times across the country, effectively limit future supplies and increasingly threaten our quality of life in coming years.

You, apparently, see only that in this case uranium mining is blamed and therefore fly into yet another rage against anyone who does not whole-heartedly support the nuclear industry, replete with the usual name-calling ...

[NNadir]

3. Whatever.

I note that anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists are as indifferent to clean water as they are to clean air.

They have a very selective (and convenient) rage, one that I find morally questionable. No, I'm mincing words. I find it morally reprehensible.

I seldom hear these breathless stupid stories raised about the millions upon millions of acre feet of water destroyed by coal waste. How many threads have been started by anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists (for whom I am continuously proud of having zero respect in any sense of the word) on the subject of the complete destruction of 75 miles of the Big Sandy river?

Zero I think.

"The Big Sandy River has been identified as the seventh most endangered river in the United States. On October 11, 2000, a mineshaft beneath a “coal slurry” impoundment owned by Martin County Coal Company collapsed and released millions of gallons of molasses-like slurry into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. The slurry suffocated aquatic life for miles downriver, and the EPA called this event “one of the worst environmental disasters to occur in the Southeastern United States.”

http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/waterways/the_problem/watersheds_and_you/p_big_sandy_watershed.htm

Here are the pictures of what anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists are supporting through selective appeals to ignorance:

http://images.amrivers.org/objects/view.acs?object_id=121



If it had been a uranium tailings spill on the Big Sandy rather than a coal ash spill we would have had endless stupid claptrap on the subject.

QED.

[struggle4progress]

4. Sounds like you're blaming the Garcia family for Martin Coal's negligence.

As I have pointed out to you more than once before, there is absolutely no reason to believe that increasing reliance on nuclear power would have the magical effect of ending the problems associated with coal: it will continue to be used exactly as it is presently until adequate political power is able to establish the regulatory regime necessary to prevent further abuse and to accumulate sufficient funds to remediate historical problems.

Part of that puzzle, of course, would probably involve constructing organized political power among those who have lived in the coal-producing regions: as your dcr website notes, "the Big Sandy watershed .. lacks the basic infrastructure such as sewage disposal, solid waste disposal, water supplies, highways, and building sites, to effectively market its abundant natural, historical, and cultural resources in a sustainable manner."

But since your view appears to be that anyone who does not completely agree with your views is an idiot who is responsible for most of the problems of the world, I think it is unlikely that you would be able to work constructively enough with anyone to be able to make progress on such problems, if you were even actually interested in such matters.

That "whatever" really sums up your attitude rather accurately, I think ...

[NNadir]

5. My view is not that everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot.

My view is some of the people who disagree with me are idiots.

I am quite clear about those whom I regard to be idiots. I am seldom accused of subtlety.

I see no reason whatsoever to change my low opinion of people I regard to be consistently idiotic, none whatsoever, irrespective of the tack of their latest blather.

Right now the atmosphere of the entire planet is collapsing catastrophically. That may not sell papers for idiot reporters as well as potentially contaminated wells for a poster poor family, but it is real.

We don't in fact know very much about the situation of the Garcias because the idiot reporter from the newspaper doesn't even know enough science to report on the variables. I don't expect idiots to realize this, but - as shown in the Sparta, New Jersey case, uranium in drinking water is a rather common affair with and without mining. It has to do with something called geology. The attempt of an idiot reporter to claim that the Garcia's water has a provable established relationship to a defunct ion exchange plant owned by a mining company is rather, well, idiotically circumstantial and completely devoid of any positive evidence whatsoever. Since the area, being a mining area obviously has geological formations containing uranium, it is hardly surprising that a well drilled there would contain that element, just as wells drilled here in the Princeton area of New Jersey - my well in fact - contain uranium.

Let us suppose though that the mining company is at fault. In fact it would take billions of Garcia families to compare to the impact of coal, which - whatever asshole dancing they do around the subject when it is pointed out graphically - is totally off the radar screen of anti-nuclear anti-environmental idiots.

And still we play this little melodramatic game of "poor Garcia family!"

Bullshit. If there is one thing that is consistent about anti-environmental anti-nuclear idiots, it is their total contempt for the poor. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't hear all this mindless twittery about magic solar power, which still, no one but rich white people can afford. There is no affordable solar power. If there were, people would be falling over themselves to install it.

There are but two primary forms of energy that are readily available and affordable to humanity, fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Most of the new nuclear capacity is being built by nations that until recently were regarded as the poorest on earth, India and China. Why is that? Because they are poor. Because they want a future.

Not one anti-environmental anti-nuclear twit can establish even a single loss of life in the United States attributable to commercial nuclear power. How do I know? I ask them regularly to do so.

Everyone knows the climate is collapsing. It's even getting mention in the Bush administration it so obvious.

And still we are hearing from twits about obscure wells somewhere. Let me tell you something. Long before the uranium in the Garcia well kills anyone, there will be many millions of dead bodies all over the planet without the adoption - immediately - of a program of emergency nuclear plant building.

[struggle4progress]

6. ... In situ mining, in which a solvent is allowed to percolate through ..

.. unmined rock, leaching minerals directly, has the potential to contaminate groundwater ... http://www.uneptie.org/pc/mining/mine_env.htm

... Called "solution mining" or "in-situ" mining, this method causes relatively little disturbance of the surface. However, this process can contaminate groundwater, which must then be disposed of by injection into deep formations below fresh water aquifers ... http://www.texascenter.org/almanac/Energy/ENERGYCH7P3.HTML

... The mining solution mobilizes uranium and other metals such as arsenic, molybdenum, and selenium. Radium-226 is also elevated in this process. The solution, now containing uranium but also many undesired materials such as arsenic, is pumped to the surface. The liquid is sent to a facility where uranium is chemically stripped out of the solution. The contaminated water, minus the uranium, is pumped back into the aquifer ...
http://texas.sierraclub.org/Newsletters/SCR/March15-00/uranium.html

[struggle4progress]

7. Groundwater District Bill Dead

Monday's Internet Edition, August 01, 2005

<snip> A bill to create a Kleberg County Groundwater Conservation District is dead, the victim of a strong lobbying effort by Uranium Resources, Inc. to remove itself from the provisions of the bill, State Rep. Juan Escobar said last week.

“I was confronted by State Rep. Roberto Puente of San Antonio, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, to either agree to an amendment exempting URI from the provisions of the groundwater district or kill the bill,” Escobar said.

“I refused to compromise and would rather kill the bill than create the only groundwater district out of 87 in Texas that would have exempted an entity from its authority,” Escobar said.

URI has operated an in situ uranium mining operation in Kleberg County for more than 20 years, often surrounded by a cloud of controversy. <snip>

http://www.kingsvillerecord.net/story84.shtml


What a surprise! The nuclear industry opposes groundwater protection!