Eric Anderson does brief business interest pieces for Ralwco radio called “Prosperity Saskatchewan” that I’ve long enjoyed – they’re well explained, to the point and factual.
Recently he made a tour of the McArthur River underground uranium mine and the McClean Lake mill/open-pit mines. He sent this report, along with some photos by email;
The McArthur River mine has the highest grade uranium ore on earth at an average of 20% (that is the amount of U3O8 per load of rock) vs. the rest of the world at 0.1%; some of McArthur River’s is over 80%. While it is not recommendable to live in a house made of the ore itself (which is in a deposit between 530 and 640 meters underground), it is obviously safe in the short-term. Depending on the grade of this specific bucket-load of ore (photo taken 640 meters underground without a flash, no telephoto lense, yes I was safely that close), it could be worth more than $1-million.
The barrels of yellowcake are ready for loading onto a truck before they leave McClean Lake for Ontario – yes, I am touching them. Each barrel weighs 894 lbs, with 856 lbs of that being the yellowcake itself. The yellowcake is actually “yellow” before the final step (see image of it being poured, no telephoto lense, also see today’s SP image), but closer to black when packaged into barrels. There are 48 of theses barrels loaded into each semi heading to Ontario for fuel fabrication.
The loader is just cool to see – the trucks are even larger.
And if you have thoughts of some sort of massive conspiracy or cover-up regarding the safety of uranium mining – there’s not. The head of Areva Canada (the parent company to Areva Resources that is located in Saskatoon, and also oversees reactor sales, fuel sales, power transmission sales, and spent-fuel management) was standing beside me for the entire tour. If I was in any danger, so was he. If it was Erin Brockovitch, the head of PG&E was willing to drink the water from Hinkley in this case. The uranium industry is the most regulated and scrutinised industry in Canada – it’s extremely safe.
Thanks, Eric.
You can listen to some of his pieces in the archives here. I especially recommend this one (mp3)
Despite the fact that the uranium industry is well-regulated and safe, the fearmongering, anti-nuke busybodies have mobilized here in Sask. and have packed local town hall meetings in an attempt to stop a proposed nuclear reactor in the province.
Conjuring up images of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and even Hiroshima is a lame attempt at rational debate …. but it seems to work.
When you have the NDP, masters of “mediscare” and other doomsday prophesies cheerleading from the sidelines and sending in plays, rational debate doesn’t really come into play.
Fain that we whisper that the anti-nuke crowd is kowtowing to American liberals…
Is this the solution for Chalk River?
I find Eric Anderson’s upbeat, straight-up, matter-of-fact interest-pieces quite enjoyable.
Oh the horrors !! And then there is that hotbed of eviros – Fwaunce, At 80%
I work at the Cigar Lake mine and can tell you that is without a doubt the safest workplace I have ever been at. And no we are not forced to say that, we are not idiots but the anti nukes always imply that we are either stupid or deliberately trying to kill the world. I find most of the anti nuke rhetoric is easily shown to be based on half truths and assumptions but I do not blame them for Saskatchewan being so easily lied too. Our children are not being taught anything in school about Uranium mining, nuclear power or radiation control. When you take away the rhetoric and base everything on scientific facts you find that Nuclear Power is a viable option.
I just got back from 9 days at Key Lake…safety is definitely top of mind for CAMECO. It isn’t the radiation I’m worried about, it’s the mobilization of trace metals (arsenic, selenium, uranium, moly, etc..) from the massive waste piles that worries me.
Uranium mining has filled our provincial programs for the past 1/2 century, CAMECO has been an amazing corporate citizen to both Saskatoon and Saskatchewan, every government for the past 60 years has supported it.
What we need in this province is an honest, open, truthful debate. Not the stacked process presented by the Sask government and not the fear-mongering by those opposed to everything nuclear.
What are the costs environmentally? what are the costs financially? what are the costs socially?
Why is it so hard for both sides to just have a straight-up conversation?
I wish that Three Mile Island accident (the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry), had a larger influence on the debate…
…The Kemeny Commission Report concluded that “there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects.”
In other words full steam ahead (pardon the pun)
[quote]I wish that Three Mile Island accident (the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry), had a larger influence on the debate…[/quote]
The Three Mile Island accident proved that one Nuclear Scientist was competent & right…The media focused on the other scientist that was “Not” competent, and wrong. The accident was contained.
I lived in South NJ, and at the time, and was reasonably concerned why there was a conflict… The Scientific record, since that era, convinces me that they have thier shit together.
The anti-nuke group are stuck on stupid and are now reduced to hard core obstructionists
Nuclear is the only energy source that has a provable role for future generations…
Solar power will diminish as the earth moves further from the sun…Future Space travel will increasingly depend on Nuclear power
The Windmill Grave Yard will fill the great lakes
JMHO
“The uranium industry is the most regulated and scrutinised industry in Canada – it’s extremely safe.”
I hope it’s better regulated than Maple leaf meat packers.
Why do I have this reflexive misgiving of government regulated safety? Could it be the record of failures?
Winston..if you expect anal control over the food industry to prevent any possble accidental growth of bacteria you are living in a bubble. We live in an imperfect world.Lets shut down all food industry because one accident happenned.
There now lets shut down all nuke industry because one accident happenned.
Perfection,eh?
I went out to a rig with a downhole tool (I was testing software, other guy ran the tool). All of the rig crew were joking about lead underwear, extra limbs/eyes, then were huddling by the door in the doghouse. They were actually afraid. When I told them the tool with the source was on the floor, they all scrambled down the stairs to the ground and hid behind the generators. I had a new handheld detector we were testing, on the highest sensitivity, and it only went up a few percent over background. As soon as the tool went into the hole, levels dropped to normal.
From radiation training course:
Distance is your friend – inverse-square law.
Canadian industrial aource limit – 1 milliSievert dosage per year.
All rad workers wear a dosage badge.
Canadian industrial practice – you hit the limit, you made a mistake somewhere, big inquiry, maybe lose license.
Natural and medical sources usually exceed the limit.
A city in South America exceeds 4 milliSieverts from natural sources.
Aircrews are exposed to far higher doses because of altitude (less atmospheric protection).
The Alberta govt ran a web survey on nuke power. I support it, but suggested that due to heat loading by cooling water, northern Alberta is a better location than the south which has too many shallow lakes/rivers that are already too warm.
Have the electric car advocates considered how ill-equipped is our power grid for all this new load? We’ll be chopping down trees by the hundreds of thousands to make way for new transmission lines (none of which will transit Aboriginal Victim lands).
Even if you have all the stinkin’ fans you could ever imagine – a leftie greenie’s dream of a fan on everybody else’s land – we won’t be able to get sufficient power distributed without massive changes and upgrades to the grid.
Reduce All Consumption Now! No to Carbon Tax. Yes to Advertising Tax.
Winston Smith said “I hope it’s better regulated than Maple leaf meat packers.”
I think the uranium industry will be very safe until the Teachers Pension Plan buys into it. Then they’ll do to it what they did to Maple Leaf Meats. Then they’ll blame Mike Harris.
It is too bad that Saskatchewan sits on top of mountains of high grade uranium, oceans of natural gas, great lakes sized pools of oil and vast areas of oil sands.
Al Gore will never approve of the Province’s success
The News Media is a constant profit of scary stories. Case in point is the latest Grizzly Bear extinction story where “Trophy” hunters are decimating them.
We need a scary story of a world without electricity. If we really want to do something about the Moonbats. that’s the best way.
Anyone up to it?
“It is too bad that Saskatchewan sits on top of mountains of high grade uranium, oceans of natural gas, great lakes sized pools of oil and vast areas of oil sands.”
Allowing the socialists back into power would be the best way to ensure that the uranium, natural gas and oil remains right where it is …. in the ground and absolutely useless.
On the bright side however, we could degenerate into “have not” status again and expect a nice, fat cheque from Ottawa every year.
Winston Smith said “I hope it’s better regulated than Maple leaf meat packers.”
That depends on whether the uranium industry brings in temporary foreign workers, as the food industry has. No one wants to come out and say it, but the meat-packing industry in Canada is being degraded by untrained, unskilled, and unsanitary African workers.
Hey, wasn’t that the 200 something tonnes of yellowcake imported from Iraq???
lol – everytime I hear the term yellow cake, I think of the funny Dave Chappelle ‘Black President Bush’ sketch. “Yellow cake – muther fu**er.” haha.
Here in Alberta we have a bunch of religious “leaders” bitching about nuke power. They should stick to their field expertise and let real people look after the energy industry.
@Phillip G. Shaw
“Nuclear is the only energy source that has a provable role for future generations…
Solar power will diminish as the earth moves further from the sun”
That is not quite true, or rather, it depends on the timeline you’re looking at:
The distance earth-sun is 1.496*10^11m and it increases with about 1.5*10^-1m per year. You can calculate for yourself what that means in terms of the energy the earth gets from the sun. Suffice it to say that we wouldn’t be looking a generations but rather thousands of generations. If we haven’t figured out how to travel to a new planet by then we’re all dead anyway.
To abandon solar power as a source of energy because of this would be completely stupid.
The total energy that reaches earth from the sun is about 3.8*10^24 Joule, total amount converted to wind (~2.2*10^21 J) or biomass via photosynthethis (~3*10^21 J) is about 1/1000 of that each.
Total human consumption of primary energy was 4.9*10^20 J in 2005, with electricity making up another 5.7*10^19 J.
Let me put all this a bit in persepctive:
The amount of energy from the sun that reaches us in one hour is more than what humanity in total consumed in the whole of 2002. The influx of energy per year is about twice as much as what can be garnered from all non-renewable sources of coal, oil, gas, uranium on earth combined.
Fissile materials, while still fairly abundant, are also a limited resource and will, if we we’re to switch from coal/oil/etc to nuclear right now and don’t implement a system of maximal recycling of nuclear materials, those too will be gone within a few generations.
So, if you’re looking at long-term energy policy than solar power is the ONLY way to go. Nuclear fission or, if we’re lucky enough to develop it in time, nuclear fusion might be acceptible for the intervening time but are completely useless in the long term.
The situation is difficult: Harvesting energy directly from sunlight isn’t efficient enough yet.
So you either choose to swear off fossil fules now, go with nuclear to bridge the gap and research solar like crazy to be able to quickly replace the nuclear plants with solar ones, but risk that the financial incentive in solar will not be great enough to develop it in time (something that has happenend already: We’ve known for a long time that we need to get off fossil fuels, but they were oh-so-cheap compared to the alternatives).
Or you forego the middleman and try and switch directly to solar.
There are truly safe reactor concepts around. The best way out of the energy crisis that I see is building those types of reactors, recycle all radioactive material as much as possible to limit the problem of nuclear waste and to reduce the amount of energy wasted and then switch to solar power as soon as possible.
That is, mind you, a very dirty solution, and I am quite sure that it wont come to pass because it would make energy much more expensive in the short term than it could be, and so there will always be cut corners.
That beeing so I think that foregoing nuclear is the better option. The risks are the same, only more immediate, but we don’t end up with tons of radioactive waste with nowhere to go.
Gord:
I have two bicycles in my back yard. I went out Thursday morning, only to find both had flat rear tires. I kicked them over, shouting “Mike Harris! Mike Harris!!”.
[quote]To abandon solar power as a source of energy because of this would be completely stupid.
[/quote]
I did not say to abandon solar…only suggested that it has a future dependant on “todays” understanding of the laws of science. If “light” is all there is, you will be right…and we are F…d
A) I do not believe that the Universe is flat. We only have half the equation today, and my money is that future generations will find the other half.
b) I do not believe we have an energy crisis.. but all of the above works for me. Final Solutions scare me
C) I don’t have any obligation to argue points that may contradict my point-of-view
Saskatchewan was a pioneer in Nuclear Medicine; they have the Source; they need to keep the R&D Jobs this time; that which comes from the earth can be returned to the same hole in the earth, in a safe condition. Those that focus on the Cost analysis, of one Vs. another, are not scientists.. It is what it is, a failed experiment/Project is all pissed down the drain
If we MUST do something, Nuclear Energy fits Saskatchewan… (Running up the Flag) and it has obvious & achievable goals going forward.
We don’t all have to chase the same pig.
BTW: You made a very good technical argument
Good on you SDA!!! Its about time people started to understand the need for a more comprehensive nuclear program in Canada. The opposition to nuclear is running on fear fumes that are quickly dissipating as more knowledge and education happens among the populace. To keep our nuclear reactors Canadian go and sign the CANDU petition here.
The large “loader” pictured would be a terrific commute vehicle although it might exceed the maximum height at the garage.
Philip Shaw: “BTW: You made a very good technical argument”
Actually he didn’t. The notes on solar flux are all fine, but there were several things missed. The key dodge phrase lastchancetosee (lcts) used was “isn’t efficient enough yet”. It is a fact that most of the sun’s photons do not have sufficient energy to break an electron out of a substrate, and nothing is going to change that. Because you cannot change the output of the sun, solar power will remain a marginal source at best in converting photons into electricity with improvements coming only incrementally and at the cost of using rare and/or difficult to fabricate materials.
The comment on total solar flux hitting the earth is interesting but irrelevant. If we harvested any significant fraction of it, the earth would have no living environment at all.
His notion of the scarcity of fissile materials is even more incorrect. Both the uranium-plutonium and the thorium-uranium fuel cycles allow the availability of fissile materials at current rates of use for approximately fifty millenia. Even the environmental analysis he presents is wrong. All radioactive materials decay into stable materials. So, take two chunks of uranium. The first chunk is used as nuclear fuel, comes out as rad-waste and eventually decays to stable materials. The second chunk is never used as nuclear fuel and simply decays away naturally. The total release of energy in the form of ionizing radiation is essentially equal. Hence, for waste purposes, and its impact on nature, it does not matter whether uranium is used as nuclear fuel or not. In fact, from a long term environmental perspective, the use in a reactor is an advantage because some of the energy is released to produce electricity in circumstances where the radiation is prevented during the fission process from having any release to the environment at all.
The antinukes have been beating this drum of scarcity of fissile materials, because, having lost out on all their other arguments on safety and economics, it’s about the only red herring they have left.
Concerning efficiency of solar energy:
Solar cells based on gallium-indium-nitride have a bandgab of 0.7eV, which is deep IR. The claim that most of the suns electrons don’t have enough energy to get electrons through the bandgap is therefore false.
And that is just semiconductor-based solar power. Biological system have an even higher potential for harvesting sunlight, plus woud directly produce hydrogen, therefore making energy convertion for storage unnecessary. Plants seem to manage quite well, using 3 times the energy of the whole of humanity combined, exclusively through solar power, and they are not even sufficient, because they use the electrons harvested for much more than just splitting water.
Concerning nuclear: I said from the outset that the timeline quoted relates only to an open fuel cycle. I used that timeline because there is no indication whatsoever of humanity switching to closed cycles.
“All radioactive materials decay into stable materials. So, take two chunks of uranium. The first chunk is used as nuclear fuel, comes out as rad-waste and eventually decays to stable materials. The second chunk is never used as nuclear fuel and simply decays away naturally. The total release of energy in the form of ionizing radiation is essentially equal. Hence, for waste purposes, and its impact on nature, it does not matter whether uranium is used as nuclear fuel or not.”
This is wrong.
Natural abundance radioactive materials DECAY through alpha & beta decay through the natural decay chains (U238 → Pb206, U235 → Pb207, Th232 → Pb208, Np237 → Tl205 (not exitent anymore)).
Radioactive materials in reactors are SPLIT, creating completely different decay chains and completely different materials.
Therefore a) the amount of energy released is different (much higher for fission), b) the activity of the byproducts are different and c) the relative percentages of different elements of different decay rates are different (much lighter elements for fission).
Now, nuclear waste falls into basically three categories, long, medium and short decay times. The first category is no problem, activities are low (natural uranium in the earths crust doesn’t kill us, so why should these if we bury them somwhere?). The last category is unproblematic as well. While highly active and therefore highly dangerous, they also decay rapidly so you can store them safely on a timeline for hundreds of years, after which time they are safe again.
The problem is in the medium decay times. Those elements are to active to be essentially harmless but too slowly decaying to be easily stored. With these you have to be sure that whereever you put them, they don’t get into the water supply for hundreds of thousands of years.
There currently exists no place to store these indefinetely, anywhere in the world. A few sites are still being investigated and hopefully they will turn out to be alright.
Wrong. The uranium atom has a certain energy potential. It is immaterial whether or not the atom is fissioned or decays, in either case, even though there are different end points, the total energy release is approximately the same.
The total energy released is very much not the same.
Take a graph of the binding energy of two nuclei. The difference between the two is roughly what you get going from one to the other.
Plot the binding energies of nuclei over mass. You’ll see a minimum somewhere around iron, I think, with monotonous increases towards higher and lower mass.
Look here:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes_DE.svg&filetimestamp=20090604074827
Fission gets you from u = 235 to u ~ 110 as opposed to u = 206 for natural decay. Thus the total energy released is larger.
It is even larger, as the graph shows, for going from H to He, thus making fusion such a much mor powerful energy source.
[quote]There currently exists no place to store these indefinetely, anywhere in the world. A few sites are still being investigated and hopefully they will turn out to be alright.[/quote] Lastchancetosee
Why in the world would I want to store anything “indefinitely”?.(but a mechanism may be found to return them to the mantle)… What is the need for follow up R&D if not to finish & polish the crude “minor” details…If we know the issues, solutions can be handled in a step function.
Your points actually reinforce my Point-of-View.. but you knew that.
Saskatchewan should invest in nuclear & the R&D that supports all derivatives, like solar, of fusion. It’s the natural food Chain.
Sask Power/Sask Gas/Sask Nuclear = Energy
BTW: Good Science may be found in a failed argument & technical disagreement makes for better science. That is this piss-ant’s opinion
“Why in the world would I want to store anything “indefinitely”?”
For all intends and purposes you’d have to. Hundredthousands of years, if you want to have some kind of number.