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Piling it up

Another four years of uranium mining means another delay in dealing with the environmental cost
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March 14th, 2007 issue

By Jan Haverkamp
While the nuclear industry for the past five years has claimed uranium was such a good resource because its prices were so stable, reality has overhauled that theory. Uranium prices at the moment are skyrocketing — going within a decade from $10 per kilogram (214.50 Kč per 2.2 pounds) for uranium oxide to now well over $100 per kilogram. This is not happening because there is a current increase in demand worldwide — in reality the amount of nuclear power stations in the world is slowly decreasing — but because the cheap uranium stores are running out.
Nevertheless, the immense investments in nuclear reactors need to be recovered, so, no matter what the market price of uranium is, nuclear utilities will continue to buy. It is therefore also not a surprise that the Czech government wants to prolong uranium mining in this country for another four years: There are nice profits to be made. But is a short-term profitable investment also a wise one?
Uranium mining in Žďár in the Czech Republic began in 1957. First the uranium was mainly meant for the Russian nuclear program and later also for Czech nuclear power stations.  Žďár was not producing cheap uranium — costs were always well above world market prices, but it was a secure source, and the cost-price relationship in a central planned economy was not the first worry. Aside from underground mines such as Žďár and Jáchymov, the Czech Republic also had so-called in-situ leaching mines, in which the uranium was leached out of the earth with a sulphuric acid solution, like in Stráž pod Ralskem. The underground shafts in Žďár are now the site of the only ongoing mining operations in the Czech Republic, directly employing around 400 miners. Operations are carried out by Geam, a subsidiary of the state company DIAMO, which is also responsible for the cleanup of the mess left over from former Czech uranium mining operations.
The desire for a fast buck in the exploding uranium market may not come as a surprise. What is surprising, however, is the difference in eagerness with which the Czech authorities approach the cleanup of former mining operations and the prospect of new investments in mining. While the former leaching operations in Stráž pod Ralskem still endanger one of the largest underground drinking water reservoirs in Central Europe, DIAMO does not get the budget for a strategy to deal with the heavily polluted fluids underground. Its annually defined(!) budget is just enough to keep the pumps running to avoid leakage from the old leaching mines into the aquifer … and it has to struggle every year to get this funding on the table.
There are insufficient budgets to clean up the mines and tailing ponds once and for all in places as infamous as Jáchymov, Mydlovary and others. This is all in stark contrast to eastern Germany, where the former Russian/German “state within a state” WISMUT uranium mining company has been transformed into the largest cleanup operation in the uranium mining industry’s history at the expense of tens of billions of taxpayers’ Deutschmarks and later euros.
If there is anything lacking in the present discussion about prolonging uranium mining in the Czech Republic, it is a clear vision on what to do with the environmental effects of the mining. The Industry and Trade Ministry argues that two more shafts mean prolonging existing activities, all started well before something like an environmental-impact assessment was compulsory for new projects. But continuing uranium mining will mean more tailings to be stored and more years of exposure for miners to radioactive radon and other isotopes. It will mean the creation of four years worth of a legacy that the same ministry is unwilling to face as related to past activities.
Exactly because Germany took its cleanup seriously, there is no discussion in Thuringia or Saxony about reopening uranium mines. It is also not for nothing that preliminary plans to open new uranium mines at Jahodná near Košice in Slovakia are currently creating landslide protests. The experiences in the former Czechoslovakia with what uranium mines do to regions that normally would be able to flourish because of a profitable tourist industry are still well known among our eastern neighbours. It is also interesting to see how tourism is now taking over as largest source of income from the recultivation and cleanup work in the former mining regions in Thuringia and Saxony.
The Industry and Trade Ministry only looks at the investments into two new shafts and a ballooning world market price. If the Czech Republic ever wants to make a rational decision within the nuclear chain, it should start to set its priorities straight. The 400 employees in Žďár are highly needed to deal with the devastation that uranium mining has already left behind over the last decades. Those four extra years in their current position and a few weeks’ worth of uranium for Dukovany and Temelín are not worth the extra pollution that ongoing operations in Žďár would cause.
— The author is a specialist in nuclear energy issues in Central Europe, currently working mainly for the World Information Service on Energy and Greenpeace. Born in the Netherlands, he has lived in the Czech Republic for 10 years.


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