NRC says mine opponents’ contentions merit attention
http://www.thechadronnews.com/
articles/2008/05/14/chadron/headlines/news969.txt
By GEORGE LEDBETTER, Record Editor Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Plans for expansion of the Crow Butte uranium mine to a 2,100 acre near the cemetery north of Crawford will face additional scrutiny by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the result of a ruling released April 29.
After considering issues raised at a January hearing in Chadron, a three member panel of NRC administrative law judges concluded that concerns about potential contamination of groundwater supplies and threats to human health raised by opponents of the mine expansion deserved further consideration and oral arguments.
The panel also agreed to hear additional arguments on the opponent’s objection to issuing a permit for uranium mining to a foreign owned corporation. Mine owner and operator Cameco Corp., is a Canadian company and the world’s largest uranium producer.
As part of the ruling, the judges said that the Western Nebraska Resources Coalition and Owe Aku/Bring Back the Way, a non-profit Lakota cultural group from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, have legal ‘standing’ to challenge the issuing of permits for the mine. The other participants in the January hearing, Tom Cook of Chadron, Debra White Plume of Pine Ridge, and the Slim Butte Agricultural Cooperative, were dropped from the administrative hearing process, but the board agreed to consider participation by the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
The Crow Butte mine, which has been in operation since 1991, uses an ‘in situ’ process of pumping a solution of bicarbonate into the underground sandstone layer of ore, then recovering the dissolved uranium. It produces about 800,000 pounds of uranium ‘yellowcake.’ each year. The material is sent to Canada and used for power generation.
The expansion is expected to produce 500,000 to 600,000 pounds of yellowcake annually, with active mining continuing for 11 years. The ore body to be mined is 400 to 800 feet below the surface and water for the mining process would come from the shallow Chadron aquifer.
One of the opponents main objections to the plan is the possibility that underground faults and fractures could allow mine process water to coontaminate the deeper High Plains or Brule aquifers, which are extensively used for irrigation and human consumption.
A letter from the Department of Environmental Quality to Cameco, submitted in evidence at the January hearing, backs up that concern, and, although submitted late, should be allowed in the hearing because it was not made readily available to the opponents, the NRC judges ruled. That document faulted some of the geological information used by Cameco in its application to the state for an aquifer exemption for the expansion project. In portions of its NRC license application “a lack of relevant knowledge about faults and fractures that might allow for the mixing of the water is different aquifers is essentially acknowledged,” the board wrote.
The issue of foreign ownership may be significant because of a provision of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act which provides that the processing of nuclear material must be regulated in the national interest and to provide for the common defense and security, the NRC panel said. While some other regulations appear to prohibit licensing of foreign corporations for source material processing, the matter is unclear, it said.
In total only three of the six arguments advanced against the mine expansion were judged admissible by the NRC panel. Additional hearings and conferences to rule on those issues have yet to be scheduled, and a final decision on the project could take several months.
According to a report in the Omaha World Herald, Cameco has recently announced its intention to seek two more mine expansions near Crawford. One would be south of Fort Robinson State Park and the other northeast of Marsland, the paper reported.
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