Greenland Repeals Radioactive Mining Ban 142
An anonymous reader writes
"According to the International Resource Journal, 'Greenland has voted to axe a long-enduring ban on mining for radioactive materials, reopening the market to uranium and rare earths mining. Yesterday's parliamentary vote passed the decision by a staggeringly close 15-14 votes. ... The ban has previously prevented the extraction of some major rare earth deposits, because they are connected to radioactive materials.' 95% of the world's rare-earth demand is currently supplied by China, but estimates indicate Greenland could produce enough to supply 25% of the demand. Greenland's Prime Minister said the decision was made because of financial reasons: 'We cannot live with unemployment and cost of living increases while our economy is at a standstill. It is therefore necessary that we eliminate zero tolerance towards uranium now.' Environmental groups, as you might expect, are not happy."
About bloody time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Resources exist to be exploited, albeit not indiscriminately. Zero tolerance ban is just as bad as gung-ho mining, they're both extremes of what otherwise should be "sensible mining".
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That's iceland. It's very easy to remember. Iceland is volcanic and least icy of the 2. Greenland is mostly icy white.
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Re:About bloody time! (Score:4, Informative)
Greenland is icy and Iceland is green.
(It's all the Vikings' fault -- those tricky bastards!)
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I genuinely lol'd at this.
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Resources exist to be exploited, albeit not indiscriminately.
So... you're a theist?
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with a half life of almost 4.5 billion years, the sun will expand into red giant and eat the Earth before Greenland loses 60 percent of its U-238
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The sun's half-life is 4.5 billion years?
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no, the U-238 has that. but thank you for the helpful editing suggestion, I shall remember it for the future
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No, the U-238 can fuel other smarter reactor designs than in common use today. Even in a conventional PWR one third the energy comes from breeding U-238 to plutonium 239.
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there are designs that burn the transuranics, google the phrase.
also worth pointing out some reactors don't need fissiles to start reaction with U-238 or even depleted uranium (which still has minute amount of U-235), heavy water and graphite reactors can pull that stunt.
Re:About bloody time! (Score:5, Interesting)
Though on a serious note, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, isn't it more environmentally friendly to mine uranium than coal? Even factoring all the energy spent in refining and all that, fissile fuel has energy densities many orders of magnitude greater than any fossil fuel.
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That probably depends largely on whether or not you consider the environmental costs of all of the equipment used to decommission the plant that burns it. Decommissioning a plant isn't free, and often times low level and medium level radioactive wastes have to be transported long distances to their final disposal site. The enviornemntal cost of extracting all of the petroleum (and potentially coal) used in the mining, transport, AND disposal of your fuel and contaminated materials has to be considered. The
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The soviet union used to just throw the whole reactor in the ocean. Fissile material and all.
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The US does as well. We call them submarines . . .
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References?
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Except for when it blows up.
See my comment above on the issue. A well built nuclear plant should withstand anything save for an event so catastrophic that it wouldn't matter if it resisted or not (e.g. 11 degrees earthquake or cometary impact or, oh, the irony!, nuclear warfare).
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Really? I didn't believe anybody would think that a nuclear power plant being significantly damaged due to a nuclear attack would even move the needle the next day, or even 10 years later [in retrospective accounts] [ignoring "trivial" radioactive attacks such as dirty bombs].
The impact from the bomb would just be so much greater, the reactor would be lost in the noise, even ruling out counterstrikes and global thermonuclear war. The direct bomb damage [expected to be in the middle of a large city], and th
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"English, motherfucker, do you speak it?" (Wesley Snipes)
Read again what I said. You somehow managed to argue with me while saying THE SAME THING I DID.
[picard_WTF.jpg]
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"blows up" was just a play of words. geez mate. RELAX.
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That also depends upon if you consider as part of the cost of decommissioning a plant the self inflicted political injuries that increase the cost. Little things like the "OMG, it's radioactive! We're all gonna die!" bullshit involving low level radiation. The danger is from high level radioactive material. And conveniently, such material has a short half life. Which means that it becomes harmless in a relatively short time. The indiscriminate treating of all waste as high level waste merely wastes money an
Re:About bloody time! (Score:5, Funny)
If you have that many fingers, you've been hanging around the radioactive materials way too long!
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Shortly put, no.
The abundance of Uranium versus sterile earth is same orders of magnitude below Coal versus Sterile earth.
The environmental friendly part exists, though, in theory, but in practice it's dwarfed by cost cutting and incompetence from whoever builds, maintains and decommissions the nuclear plant. there is such a thing as a nuclear plant "as safe as possible" (without becoming ridiculously expensive), but that rarely, if ever, is met. That's the environmentalists' concern (save for the nutty fan
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There's another side to this story. What's the tWh output of a uranium mine vs a coal mine?
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That's true, we should have drilling rigs in every back yard and school playground! I'm sure there is some oil under those Great Lakes as well. If only we could get rid of that pinko commie muslim non-American guy who keeps getting elected President!
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Obama must be a bad sabotager since oil and gas production have increased every year he's been President.
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Right. Because of all his hard work out there roughnecking.
Or... the US isn't the USSR yet, and the government doesn't drive all aspects of life. Oil production is up because economics have created conditions where companies, landowners, and states have started exploiting more.
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Did you read the parent post?
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Did you notice gas prices in the USA are still among record highs?
No. I have not noticed that because it's not remotely true. Have you been outside in 2013?
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if one thinks oil prices are high in the States, he should come to Europe and drive around for a bit.
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I'm fully aware of the price differences, which have a lot to do with taxes.
The parent post claims that prices in the US are at "record highs", when current prices are more than 30% lower than they were in 2007.
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Is my ass a resource? like water? Would you drink it?
Well... have fun.
Environmental groups (Score:1)
Will NEVER be 'happy'. So you can pretty much ignore them.
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*where "environmental groups" includes nutbag organizations like Greenpeace.**
**Which is always, apparently :-(
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Maybe those environmental groups ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... could arrange a couple billion dollars donation every year to the Greenland government to bring the bans back.
Re:Maybe those environmental groups ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they could create some of those "green jobs" we're always hearing about.
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They tried that in Greece, how's that economy doing these days anyway?
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Germany's green jobs are very heavily subsidized by the government. Jobs are certainly being created, however the cost is enormous [csmonitor.com] to their economy. The latest figures show Germany has spent over $130 Billion dollars for 6000 green jobs. That is a cool $20 million [notrickszone.com] per job created. Each consumer subsidizes these jobs to the tune of an extra $260 [slate.com] per year making German electricity among the most expensive in the world. To quote that hard core leftist site Slate
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Please don't give them ideas. They will "arrange" by lobbying for a "Keep Greenland Green" tax to be paid by the rest of the world to collect those billions.
Hazaa! (Score:4, Insightful)
A country repealing environmental regulation made for a mythical world and replacing it for real world environmental concerns. The current process of mining rare earths in China is horrendously bad for the environment, however because of Greenpeace inspired laws almost no else would do it. Rare earths aren't rare, but environmental laws that actually have anything to do with the environment are.
It's time to put the rest of the Greenpeace inspired FUD laws about radiation and all other things nuclear out to the FUD farm where they belong. The laws were written for one purpose only, and that was to prevent anything relating to nuclear from ever being viable. It's idiots like these why an MRI doesn't use nuclear in the name even though that is what the technology is based on.
It's like the opposition to any form of Nuclear power or gas power plant, the net real world result was that for decades we built coal power plants instead. It's time to replace fear mongering with science and start to look out for the environment instead. Nuclear energy is the greenest form of energy we have, and it will remain so until Fusion is up and running.
Fukishima, Sellafield, 3 mile island (Score:2)
You'd rather kill them with coal? (Score:1)
Coal has killed far more people than all nuclear events - accidental and intentional - combined. By a factor of 1.000.000.
Idiot.
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Why mark parent as troll? He's right (other than the "idiot" remark).
I'd love to see Thorium replace Uranium as a fuel source but I'd prefer to see the Gen. 1 and 2 nuclear reactors replaced with newer (safer) reactors instead of Greenpeace tarring everything with the same brush scaring the populace and leaving us with reactors past their best before date.
Instead of bitching here, how about working towards educating everybody with regards to the pros and cons of each and every option available to us? We nee
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there are other ways to mine uranium than strip mining. they don't have to do things the American (numb from the neck up) way
Re:Fukishima, Sellafield, 3 mile island (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?
Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills [yale.edu]? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very [columbia.edu] rare earths that come from these types of mines.
Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly [time.com].
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In the long term, putting megatons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far more damaging than nuclear. At least with nuclear power, the accidents are localized. If we fuck up our atmosphere with too much CO2, the consequences will be global.
Wait, so why Uranium? (Score:2)
The current process of mining rare earths in China is horrendously bad for the environment, however because of Greenpeace inspired laws almost no else would do it. Rare earths aren't rare, but environmental laws that actually have anything to do with the environment are.
Why didn't Greenland just amend the legislation to remove rare earths from the ban? Or put in place a gradual effort to also mine uranium?
My guess: Rare Earths are a red herring. The real issue is uranium mining, which would have never passed, but because of "rare earths" and "scary China" and "jobs!!!" the extraction industry got exactly what they wanted - sensible sounding repeal, hiding their intentions to pull up lucrative but environmentally damaging uranium mining.
Look for massive contributions to r
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The rare earths and the uranium occur together. No reason to not extract both. Red herrings aren't necessary.
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FUD laws about radiation and all other things nuclear out to the FUD farm where they belong.
I know it's the popular internet "groupthink" to assume radiation poisoning/fallout/exposure is all BS because independent studies [theage.com.au] on the Fukishama disaster show nobody has died from it. A word of caution: radiation induced cancers can take a long time to develop [wikipedia.org]. 40 years in some cases. That's long enough to completely screw up the planet for the course of your lifetime and many of your descendents lifetimes. Nuclear energy's biggest problem is that it leaves no room for error - and humans are full of e
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The current process of mining rare earths in China is horrendously bad for the environment, however because of Greenpeace inspired laws almost no else would do it.
The Mountain Pass mine in California produced a majority of the world's rare earth minerals in the 80s. Then China got into the game and since they didn't have the added costs associated with environmental or worker safety regulations, they undercut the price of every other mine and put them out of business.
Since China started limiting exports of their rare earth elements, the Mountain Pass mine is being reopened. I drove past it last week and there are at least 100 cars in the parking lot. It's on the n
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I had heard they were trying to reopen it, but haven't heard it was successful. It's a good step in the right direction for components that are vitally necessary for modern society. Hopefully this time they wont be shut down as easily by price competition from Chinese companies that don't have to worry about environmental regulations.
Double Hazaa! (Score:3, Informative)
ON RARE EARTH ELEMENTS
A Rare Earth Element revival in the United States could help to bring industry and real manufacturing back to our shores. It goes right along with the promise of Thorium to satisfy all grid and process heat requirements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8 [youtube.com]
Here Stephen Boyd tells us what "rare earth elements" are, and why they are vital to modern technology: He is incredibly hyper and excited about them, as you should be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16IpITWBQ8 [youtube.com]
While everyone
Re:Double Hazaa! [OOPS: =~20%] (Score:1)
[nuclear] if you're in North America ~30% of your electricity comes from it.
I meant to type ~20%. The actual figure is 19.7% in 2011, it has been as high as 20.6% in 2001.
Source: EIA Annual Energy Review 2012 [eia.gov]
Re:Hazaa! (Score:4, Informative)
He means the kind that pollutes the environment the least. Your solar panels are dirty to create, ditto on battery technology. Coal is one of the worst polluters because they just throw everything into the atmosphere. There is no clean up costs yet everyone pays for it.
Nuclear is the most viable. Even with ever nuclear disaster that has ever occurred including testing and bombing, it has harmed less people than coal. You're literally burning millions of tons of crap into the atmosphere. Also coal is partially radioactive. Since it's so hard to correlate as a causation, it's hard to put a number on direct linkages to lung cancer, but i'm sure it doesn't help.
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Not everything goes up into the atmosphere, don't forget the enormous mountains of fly ash and clinkers that have to be disposed of as well.
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I did a similar calc for nuclear vs. wi
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The point is that the FUD has become so think about anything Nuclear that even something as benign as an MRI had to renamed to remove the word Nuclear. It's an example to illustrate just how bad the FUD has gotten.
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The original term "Nuclear Magnetic resonance" was used as it made a distinction between the technique that analysed the atomic nucleus and the similar form that analysed the state of the electron orbitals (Electron paramagnetic resonance, or electron spin resonance).
When NMR chemical analysis technology move to Magnetic resonance imaging, the distinction was to separate the technique from true medical radiation imaging techniques. Up to that point much of medical imaging involved xrays, which IS ionizing r
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I thought NMR was the technology included MRI, but didn't necessarily involve imaging. (For instance finding rates of metabolism.) MRI uses NMR to produce images.
Humans are Locusts (Score:2)
We're locusts. We exhaust the available resources until they are no more.
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bullshit, we're not close to exhausting anything. not helium, not fossil fuel, not "rare earths".
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Meh, all life uses resources. Humans are just so damn adaptable that they haven't reached an equilibrium (just like what happens temporarily with locust swarms). It's all going to stabilise
What a minute... (Score:1)
Whoa whoa whoa... hold on...
Greenland has a prime minister and a parliament?
Pivotal argument in parliamentary debate (Score:5, Funny)
Pedantic Bitch (Score:2)
Yesterday's parliamentary vote passed the decision by a staggeringly close 15-14 votes.
Staggeringly* (Score:1)
Spelling nazi aside, where is it that you're from where you use don't use 1 as the statistical unit of measurement for counting votes? I guess you could have 73-72, and divide by 5, but that's still a 1 unit deviation. 1/29 does carry more weight than 1/145, but either way, both are quite close. Although I'm not sure what statistical unit you were using in "14.6-14.4," but compared with "15-14," one vote is the most minimal statistical unit that can be used to express the data. The usage of staggeringly see
If only North Carolina would follow their lead... (Score:4, Insightful)
...and open up thorium mining in the western part of the state, ideally while pushing hard for LFTR or other thorium based meltdown proof non-pressurized-vessel nuclear. NC alone could supply the entire energy needs of the US for the next 17,000 years, according to one assessment I've read, while yes, producing lots of rare-earth metals. Currently they don't mine the rare earths because the admixed Thorium is viewed as toxic waste!
Yeah, the most valuable toxic waste in the world.
rgb
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If you think the rare earth mines in China are environmentally bad, just imagine how bad that operation would be run in North Carolina.
Users (Score:4, Funny)
Environmental groups, as you might expect, are not happy."
Probably posting about it on the lithium battery powered laptops or phones.
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Lithium ion cells don't have rare earths in them, that I'm aware of.
NiMH does use them, though. Ain't seen a laptop or phone with NiMH cells in a long time...
Cyan Land (Score:1)
Hi.
Finally... (Score:2)
Think of it as an environmental cleanup (Score:3)
Nature has deposited all of these radioactive toxic chemicals all over the place. Mining is just cleaning up this mess by taking the material out of the ground to purify the ground.
Inevitable (Score:1)
See, this is why any kind of conservation efforts will fail in the long-term; humanity will, in the end, strip the face of the planet entirely bare. When things get a little tough we'll always raze a forest, mountain, or species to feed ourselves and our kids for a couple months longer. Broadly similar to personal data at a company: no matter what promises they made early on, when the company starts to go down the drain they'll whore out that data in a last-ditch attempt at monetization of everything they h
They wont get the jobs (Score:1)
The Chinese will move in like they did in Africa, bring in all the high and mid level people, import some cheap labor to supplement the local labor pool, then take all the profits back to Beijing. Cue Greenlandian outrage on 10-20 years.
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The same reason why Slashdot hides all the other breaking news: The Jewish Conspiracy.
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uranium mining makes low-level waste, not that big a deal
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Oddly enough, uranium mining produces noticeably radioactive waste. The ores are radioactive mostly because of decay products from the uranium built up over hundreds of millions of years. After the ore is processed and the long half-life uranium is extracted those decay products are more concentrated in the spoil. It's not much of an increase but it is noticeable. There's also a noticeable release of radon gas into the atmosphere during the mining process.
The good news is that there isn't a lot of waste sin
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the waste is easily dealt with, it is not a problem for a country with people who have more than two neurons in their head to rub together. they can just avoid doing things the US way.
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well they can just move to other side of the island.
and clean up how? by dumping it into a volcano spewing the stuff out anyways?