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Nuclear News - Nuclear Monitor #824 - 1 June 2016

Nuclear Monitor Issue: 
#824
01/06/2016
Shorts

WISE-Uranium: 2015 Mining Issues Review

Peter Diehl, coordinator of the WISE-Uranium project, has published a review of global uranium mining issues in 2015. The comprehensive review covers uranium prices; exploration projects; mine development projects; alternate uranium recovery projects; issues at operating uranium mines and abandoned mines; decommissioning issues; legal and regulatory issues; and uranium trade and foreign investment issues.

A few things that caught our eye:

Protests in 2015 included:

  • In Tanzania, activists climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in July in an endeavour to call African governments to ban uranium mining and nuclear weapons.
  • In Germany, protests against uranium transports on Hapag Lloyd ships were held in ten cities. The Bonn City Council adopted a resolution against uranium transports across the city.

Industrial actions at uranium mines included:

  • Workers held a three-day strike at Areva's Akouta mine in Niger in April.
  • Contract workers handed over a petition to the management of Rössing Uranium in October, complaining about working conditions at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia.
  • Namibian contract workers downed tools at the Chinese-owned Husab uranium mine project in Namibia in June 2015. In November, the Namibian High Court declared the strike illegal.
  • At Paladin's Langer Heinrich uranium mine in Namibia, workers protested against unsafe working conditions. Later, a report by the office of the Prime Minister confirmed a lack of safety at the mine.
  • Over 300 miners at the Crucea uranium mine in Romania protested by staying underground in March.

Abandoned mines issues:

  • The U.S. government announced it would fund a clean-up evaluation (not the clean-up itself!) of 16 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land.
  • The cause of the mysterious sleeping sickness that plagued residents of two villages in Kazakhstan was identified as carbon monoxide exhalation from the former Krasnogorsk uranium mine. The local authorities decided to move both villages to a safer location.

Decommissioning issues:

  • The U.S. Justice Department announced that it has awarded more than US$2 billion (€1.79b), in compassionate compensation to eligible claimants under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. These claimants include former uranium miners, among others.

Health impacts

  • An international cohort study found an association between protracted low-dose radiation exposure and leukemia among nuclear workers, and it moreover confirmed the Linear No-Threshold model for low dose rates.
  • Heading in the opposite direction, in response to a petition, the US NRC invited comment on a request to replace the Linear No-Threshold model for radiation effects with the radiation hormesis model.

Peter has an eye for the idiosyncratic and the hypocritical. As a proxy for the general state of the industry, he tracks the number of companies adding or removing the word uranium from their company name. Reflecting another miserable year, two companies removed the word uranium from their company name in 2015 and another announced its intention to do so. Peter notes that the previous year's "anticyclical exception, a company changing its name to "NX Uranium, Inc." apparently did not evolve into a high-flier, as it produced no news at all ‒ thus confirming our then suspicion that the name must be correctly read as "Nix Uranium, Inc.""

In relation to Areva's defamation action against anti-nuclear activists, Peter writes: "In France, an Appeals Court dismissed Areva's legal action against an anti-nuclear activist. In 2014, a Paris court had condemned the NGO Observatoire du nucléaire to pay penalties of several thousand Euros for "defamation" of Areva in a 2012 press release titled "Nuclear/corruption: AREVA offers a plane to the President of Niger...". So, in the end, the Appeals Court apparently shared the surprise we expressed in last year's review: "how can it ever be possible to defame a company that has 181 entries in its Hall of Infamy on the WISE Uranium website?""

Peter's "Mind-blowing Company News of the Year Award" for 2015 went to struggling Australian uranium explorer Capital Mining for its announcement that it was diversifying into growing cannabis in Canada. The company's share price doubled on the day of the announcement!

The WISE Uranium Project − www.wise-uranium.org − is a unique and remarkable resource. Some of the resources of interest include:

India: Uranium mine accident kills three people

In a major accident in the Turamdih uranium mine near Jadugoda in Jharkhand, three workers died on May 28 and 10 severely injured workers were admitted to the Tata Main Hospital.

India's Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace said:

"We are shocked by the accident causing such huge loss and stand with the families and friends of the affected in their moment of grief. We support the demand of the workers and the local community that an independent probe into the accident must be initiated, and the deceased and injured must be immediately and duly compensated.

"This accident raises some serious concerns which the local community and the larger civil society has been voicing for decades. The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) functions in complete non-transparency and unaccountability. To cut costs, it compromises with safety measures and employs contractual workers routinely in dangerous work in brazen violation of standard norms.

"The criminal negligence and contempt for the surrounding population, which is mostly Adivasi and poor, is shocking. Toxic and radioactive waste is left in open tailing dams and uranium ore is transported in open vehicles. A number of peer-reviewed studies have shown high incidence of radiation-borne diseases in the area. India's present nuclear regulator, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) is entirely unequipped and ineffective owing to its non-independence.

"We demand that the government must put a moratorium on expanding the uranium mines and initiate an independent enquiry into safety and radiation affects in Jharkhand, involving environmental experts, labour unions and the civil society."

Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, Press Release, 29 May 2016, www.cndpindia.org/criminal-negligence-uranium-mine-takes-3-lives-govt-mu...

Saudi minister prefers solar over nuclear

Solar energy could overtake nuc­lear ambitions in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom looks to shake up its power sector, according to deputy economic minister Ibrahim Babelli.1 He said on May 25 at the Menasol conference in Dubai that not only was solar cheaper, but it also lacked the security risks that come with nuc­lear power stations.

"I don't think we need nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia," he said, adding that the potential to marry solar technologies with storage capabilities makes it a "no-brainer".

Last year, the kingdom said its nuclear capacity target of 17 gigawatts would be delayed 12 years to 2040. In March 2016, deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman released a transformation plan setting a renew­able energy target, including ­solar and wind, at 9.5 GW by 2023.

Riyadh-based Acwa Power, involved in both solar PV and concentrated solar power (CSP) outside of the kingdom, said the volume of CSP projects has to increase to push down costs.

"In five years from now we'll see PV with a [cost-efficient] battery lasting for four hours, but CSP will still be there and take a big part of the baseload," said Andrea Lovato, Acwa's executive director of business development. "The real game changer will be two countries: Saudi Arabia and China."

In an April 2015 paper, M. V. Ramana and Ali Ahmad from the Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University, summarized their research on the economics of Saudi Arabia's power options:2

"We compared the electricity generation cost from nuclear reactors with three alternatives: natural gas based power plants, solar energy from photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power stations. What we found was that unless natural gas prices rise dramatically, that would remain the cheapest source of electricity generation ‒ nuclear electricity would be more than twice as expensive than that produced by gas. The reason is simple: the very high capital cost of constructing a nuclear reactor, typically running into several billions of dollars. For example, the latest estimate for one of the three ongoing projects in the United States, in which two new 1,117-MW reactors are being built near Jenkinsville, S.C., is $11 billion (€9.87b). Electricity from gas would continue to be cheaper even if a relatively high carbon cost (even above $150/ton-CO2 in some scenarios) were imposed. ...

"But in the case of oil, our analysis showed that it does make economic sense to shut down oil based power plants and replace those with nuclear reactors ‒ or natural gas. But Saudi policy makers may have already realized that and nearly 100 percent of installed capacity in recent years is based on natural gas.

"The real surprising result that came out of our analysis was that solar technologies are very competitive with nuclear reactors. The key point is that it would take at least a decade, quite possibly more, for a country like Saudi Arabia to generate its first unit of nuclear electricity, even if the decision were to be made tomorrow, and solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar technologies have both been experiencing dramatic declines in prices. Based on current trends, the cost of electricity from solar plants would become cheaper than from nuclear plants around the end of this decade or soon after in areas like the Middle East with ample sunshine. Nuclear reactors, in contrast, are not becoming cheaper. Some studies find evidence of "negative learning" wherein nuclear costs rise as more reactors are constructed. ...

"In addition to all the problems of nuclear power, solar power is also very appropriate to Saudi Arabia. There is substantial overlap between the electricity demand and solar insolation patterns, and there will be little or no need for constructing expensive storage facilities to deal with the fact that the Sun doesn’t shine at night."

1. LeAnne Graves, 25 May 2016, 'Saudi minister prefers solar potential over nuclear energy', www.thenational.ae/business/energy/saudi-minister-prefers-solar-potentia...

2. M. V. Ramana and Ali Ahmad, April 2015, 'Saudi Arabia’s Expensive Quest for Nuclear Power', www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/802/saudi-arabias-expensive-qu...