http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopher ... r-uranium/
I don't know if you've seen "Gasland", the documentary where one guy actually lights his tapwater on fire, but fracking isn't nice. Even without gas or oil, just pumpin all those chemicals into the ground is a pretty bad idea if you like groundwater to be, you know, drinkable. It's not just oxygenated water, there are thousands of additives involved, top secret and largely unregulated. You can't tell me this variant of fracking somehow works without all these additives, but apart from that... doing it where there are radioactive minerals in the ground, and doing it so that it is optimized to dissolve those radioactive minerals?Christopher Helman on forbes.com wrote: Energy's Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium
...
Adnani insists that he can close the yellowcake gap through a technology that is similar to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has created the South Texas energy boom. Fracking for uranium isn’t vastly different from fracking for natural gas. UEC bores under ranchland into layers of highly porous rock that not only contain uranium ore but also hold precious groundwater. Then it injects oxygenated water down into the sand to dissolve out the uranium. The resulting solution is slurped out with pumps, then processed and dried at the company’s Hobson plant.
If you had, in the past, tried to come up with some way how fracking could be even worse, surely that would have been what have sprung to mind.
Yes. Let's not just pollute the groundwater, let's pollute it with radioactive materials!
True, natural Uranium emits only alpha radiation, which can't even penetrate skin.
But when it gets into the body, where it can get directly at the more squishy cells, into them even, that's where an alpha emitter gets dangerous.
The thing is, getting into the body is what drinking water tends to do sometimes, I hear.
I'm all for finding new energy sources, but destroying the number 1 necessity for life itself, clean water, that's not worth it. You can have all the air conditioning and TVs and cars and what you will, if you have no clean water to drink, you're still fucked.
I know there are natural background levels of radionuclides in the drinking water as it is, but that is when we are not actively dissolving radioactive material into the water on purpose and with great industrial efficiency.
As to why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
Back when everyone was building as many nuclear reactors as they could, in the seventies, before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, people were already talking about how known Uranium reserves wouldn't keep up with demand for long. The massive drop in nuclear power use since these events have decreased demand enough to postpone the peak form the 1980s to 2035 or so. This technology may move that peak further down the road. I can't find the source now, but someone once crunched the numbers how long known Uranium reserves would last if we started replacing all coal fired power stations in the industrialized world with nuclear power. Not even involving India or China. As I recall, they came up with 20 to 30 years, most of those new power stations wouldn't even be online when reserves would not just peak but would be utterly exhausted. This technology might push that down the road a bit. But that doesn't make it any more sane.
Considering we haven't even figured out what to do with the waste (which is much more radioactive than the fresh fuel), even if you disregard the safety concerns of piling a few tons of highly radioactive material into a bit pressure cooker, this doesn't strike me as a good development.
The onus of proving a new technology is sufficiently safe is on those who want to use it to make money. While they surely can bribe enough lawmakers and enough lobbying work to get permission to do this, that is nowhere near actually proving the safety of a technology.
Hurrah, Uranium in the drinking water! Radon seeping in through the foundations won't be so lonesome anymore.