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Uranium mining nears end

Government expected to earmark 80 billion Kc for cleanup effort

Diamo employee Jiri Kurfirst covers a barrel containing uranium oxide concentrate that is ready for the market.
By Jason Hovet
For The Prague Post
(November 6, 2003)


Uranium mining should end in the Czech Republic by 2005.

Roman Makarius, chairman of the Czech Mining Office, announced the end of the operations. The winding-down process began in 1989.

As there is only one remaining active uranium mine in this country -- the Rozna mine, which supplies the Dolni Rozinka mill in western Moravia -- ending mining will be the easy part. The business has become unprofitable because of market changes. What will be much more difficult is a cleanup project that was launched in 1989 and that has already cost the government 21 billion Kc ($778 million).
"Uranium mining is a problem all over the world."

Jan Haverkamp,
Greenpeace campaign director

Diamo, the state-owned uranium-mining company, has also contributed about 640 million Kc to the cleanup effort.

The planned closing of Rozna comes after years of pressure from Diamo to keep the mine open. Czech uranium ore deposits are considered the richest in Central Europe, and in this country they supply nuclear plants at Temelin and Dukovany.

Diamo won extensions after planned closings in 2001 and this year. Diamo officials couldn't be reached for comment for this article.

The country's leading energy supplier, CEZ, will continue to buy much of its uranium from the world market. The company had been expecting the mines to close for many years and is prepared, said Milan Nebesar, a CEZ spokesman.

By 2040, the government should earmark some 80 billion Kc for cleanup, according to the Czech News Agency.

Jan Haverkamp, Greenpeace's campaign director here, said the project would be expensive. "I'm afraid that's one of the costs we have to carry if we choose nuclear power," he said. "Uranium mining is a problem all over the world."

The nation is a relatively small player in world uranium mining. It mined 465 tons (422 metric tons) of uranium in 2002. The top 2002 producers were Canada (11,604 tons) and Australia (6,888 tons), according to the World Nuclear Association.


Hard to clean up

Uranium is mined three different ways. In open-pit and underground mines, uranium ore is removed and then milled, or crushed, to extract the uranium, which makes up only a tiny fraction of the ore. The extracted uranium is then put into a yellowcake, or uranium oxide concentrate -- the form sold on the market. A third mining option is in-situ leaching, in which a solution is pumped into the ground to dissolve the uranium ore and pump up the pure uranium.

Worldwide, 45 percent of uranium comes from underground mines, and 19 percent of sites use in-situ leaching.

Each of these processes, however, presents environmental problems.

Between 1962 and 1991, damage was caused by the waste stored at a 5.2-square-kilometer (2-square-mile) site that had been a former open-pit brown-coal mine at Mydlovary in south Bohemia. Soon after its launch as a dumping site, the mine was filled past capacity. The dirty result could be felt hundreds of meters away from the storage site, where groundwater was contaminated. Dust in the air was also a problem, sometimes at one to eight times levels considered safe.

In Jachymov, west Bohemia, site of the country's first and one of its most productive mines, levels of radon in surrounding homes are many times higher than normal.

Most environmentalists, though, agree that the area around Straz pod Ralskem in north Bohemia has the worst case of contamination. Because of the watery quality of the uranium ore in the area, officials in the 1970s tried combining underground mining with in-situ leaching -- a disastrous strategy.

According to an Environment Ministry report, contaminated water from this area then got into the Ploucnice river, which flows to the Labe (Elbe) river at Decin. As a result, a 6,768-hectare (16,700-acre) area was contaminated.

Peter Diehl, of the Dutch-based WISE Uranium Project, reports that 4 million tons of sulfuric acid were pumped about 200 meters (660 feet) into the ground around Straz pod Ralskem for 25 years as part of in-situ leaching. This work has left a large part of northern and central Bohemian drinking water unusable and has provided a challenging cleanup project for the government.

The cleanup will cost 40 billion Kc and will include a new water-treatment plant; the damage could take decades to reverse.


Historic value

Uranium, first discovered in 1789, is a common material in the Earth's crust and is its main source of heat. In 1938 it was demonstrated that uranium could be split into parts to yield energy. This led to important advances in nuclear weaponry as well as energy.

More than 18 times denser than water, uranium is the heaviest natural element, making it useful as a counterweight in airplanes and boats.

Uranium mining in the Czech Republic started with about 270 miners in Jachymov in 1946, when the material took on military importance. Seven years later, about 46,000 miners, many of them political prisoners, made Jachymov one of the most important mines in the world until it was closed in 1967.

By the 1960s Czech mines were producing 3,000 tons a year, a third of which was exported to the Soviet Union. Production was down to 2,400 tons annually in 1989.

After 1989 uranium mining was cut dramatically, dropping employment to 8,500 from 23,000. Since then six mines have shut; most of the other mines had already closed.

-- With wire reports.

Jason Hovet can be reached at business@praguepost.com




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