Utah Corp. Importing 136 Tons of Radioactive Material from Japan; Public Comment Not Allowed

(EnviroNews Utah) — Blanding, Utah — Energy Fuels Resources USA Inc.’s (Energy Fuels) White Mesa Mill is importing 136 tons of radioactive material from Japan, and the public has no say in the matter, according to the Salt Lake Tribune – Utah’s most widely circulated newspaper. The shipment was approved without the need to open it to commentary from interested parties beyond the government and the corporation. Curtis Moore, Vice President of Marketing and Corp Development for Energy Fuels told EnviroNews it is scheduled to arrive “within a year.”

When applying for the permit, Energy Fuels asserted the materials from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency should be treated as ore and not waste. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality’s (DAQ) Uranium Mills Radioactive Materials program agreed and the go-ahead was given.

Because the White Mesa Mill already has a permit to process ore, it wasn’t required to submit the plan for the 136 tons of Japanese material for public comment. It is allowed to treat this load the same way it treats imported ore from Canada. The shipment contains uranium-loaded sands, resins and carbon left over from experimental uranium extraction techniques, and natural uranium-bearing ores.

“Calling it ‘radioactive material’ is a little misleading,” Moore said in an email to EnviroNews. “It is classified as uranium ore, and it contains recoverable quantities of natural (unenriched) uranium… Because it is not enriched, it is only mildly radioactive.”

As reported previously by EnviroNews, the late Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkley, Professor Edward P. Radford, physician and epidemiologist, and Jeff Patterson, DO, former President of Physicians for Social Responsibility are just a few amongst countless health experts who agree: there is no “safe” level or dose of ionizing radiation. The ingestion or inhalation of internal particle emitters is known to be especially hazardous.

“The reason this waste from Japan was able to be accepted without any type of public hearing is due to the specific classification,” Grace Olscamp, Communications and Outreach Associate for HEAL Utah, wrote in an email to EnviroNews. “Usually, citizens can provide input on these decisions during a public process — like the one that happened this summer when Energy Fuels wanted to import waste from Estonia and thousands of citizens commented in opposition. But without a public process, there’s no way to have that direct input,” she continued. “Right now, citizens can ask and pressure their Utah state legislators to take action on transparency issues like this.”

White Mesa Mill, the only conventional uranium mill in the U.S., is just south of Blanding, Utah, near the original boundaries of the Bears Ears National Monument. It produces yellowcake uranium for commercial nuclear plants. The importation and processing of hazardous materials so close to sacred ground has activists up in arms.

“Indigenous communities on the Colorado Plateau have been unknowingly and unwillingly bearing the brunt of pollution from uranium mining and milling for far too long,” said Talia Boyd, Cultural Landscapes Program Manager for the Grand Canyon Trust. “Now Energy Fuels wants to ship in radioactive contaminants from Japan and Estonia. Our communities have rights to clean air, land, and water and to our cultural landscapes.”

“For Energy Fuels to say ‘just accept it’ highlights the true exploitative nature of the industry and ongoing nuclear colonialism of indigenous communities,” Boyd concluded.

While the Colorado Plateau produces ore with a similar concentration of uranium, low global prices for uranium make it less profitable to process than these “alternate feeds.” According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the White Mesa Mill rarely processes traditional ore anymore. Instead, it seeks out opportunities to recycle materials that have already gone through some processing. Often, the company is paid to take these materials, which environmentalists say makes the mill a waste disposal facility.

This episode wouldn’t mark the first time the company has imported radioactive substances from Japan though, albeit before the triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. In 2005, Energy Fuels, under different management, imported 500 tons of uranium-contaminated soil from Japan. It, too, was labeled as “ore” when both companies involved in the transaction confirmed that it came from a mine and not from tainted tailings. The distinction seems arbitrary to many opponents, who still call it “waste.”

“Oaktree’s principles and policies for responsible investing call for Oaktree’s opposition to this waste-disposal plan, for it is fraught with environmental racism and injustice,” Kamran Zafar, Field Attorney with the Grand Canyon Trust, wrote in a letter. Oaktree Capital Group owns a majority stake in Neo Performance Materials (Neo) — a company that has partnered with Energy Fuels to help the White Mesa Mill begin refining rare earth minerals. Neo has signed the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment.

Randal Reid, Neo’s Chief Legal Officer, said the company is committed to sustainable and environmentally responsible principles and practices:

We are proud of Neo’s decades-long history of producing advanced materials that form the building blocks of many sustainable, clean energy, and greenhouse gas-reducing technologies, and of the fact that we carefully follow all applicable laws and regulations as we produce our advanced materials. We believe that recycling this material is supportive of these goals given that it ultimately enables climate-friendly nuclear energy, lessens the need to mine uranium, reduces the need for direct disposal of this material, and helps to accelerate the world’s migration away from coal-fired power generation.

Japan’s own history with radioisotopes, including being blasted with American atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns, makes it easy to see why the country might want to export them. But with Utah’s downwinders and a checkered history with uranium mining, environmentalists wonder why the state would want to accept more of the dangerous elements – elements that have already devastated a portion of the state’s population. Olscamp summed up the problem with radioactive materials in Utah this way:

Here in Utah, every part of the nuclear fuel cycle has hurt our people and natural world. From the nuclear testing in Nevada that blew radioactive fallout into southern Utah and created downwinder communities, to the uranium mining that sickened families and uranium milling — like at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill, that has poisoned the groundwater. Utah’s Native communities have often shouldered the brunt of these impacts as well.

White Mesa Mill’s original 15-year permit in 1980 from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) allowed the mill to process domestic uranium ore according to KUER. The NRC relicensed the mill in 1987 and in 1997. In 2005, the mill was licensed by the State of Utah. Between 2007 and 2017, the mill operated without a license according to The Salt Lake Tribune; the delay in processing the company’s permit came from state bureaucracy, building an in-house computer model for the White Mesa Mill site, and negotiations between the entity and the state.

“If you lived in White Mesa or Blanding … in 1979, you would have thought that by 1994 the trucks going to and from the mill would be gone, that the mill wouldn’t be running, that it wouldn’t be putting out smoke,” said Aaron Paul, an attorney with the environmental advocacy group Grand Canyon Trust, at a hearing in May. “Yet here we are in 2020 [and] it’s continuing to operate.”

Many opponents are afraid of another Monticello, where a mill producing uranium and vanadium operated from 1942 to 1960. Thousands of cubic yards of uranium and heavy metal waste left residents with contaminated water, air, and buildings. Residents experienced elevated cancer rates. Declared a superfund site in 1986, taxpayers were left with the cleanup bill.

Another scenario that residents and environmentalists fear is the example of what happened at the Moab mill-tailings site. The cleanup was initially supposed to cost $6 million but ballooned into a billion-dollar project. The owners “declared bankruptcy and walked away” leaving taxpayers to pay for it and residents to deal with the toxic legacy, Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates explained to EnviroNews in a video interview about abandoned uranium mines.

For a company that has applauded the Trump Administration’s efforts to revive the U.S. uranium industry, opponents say these imports from foreign countries are dubious at best. Still, Energy Fuels persists. “We think it’s certainly beneficial to recycle [these] materials that have already been mined out of the ground [and] try [to] make something useful out of it,” said Moore.

OTHER GREAT NUCLEAR REPORTING FROM ENVIRONEWS

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – More than 170 million Americans, or around 52 percent of the entire population, may be at risk of radiation exposure through their drinking water, according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), one of the country’s leading water testing organizations. The EWG published its…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Radioactive particles of uranium, thorium, radium, cesium, strontium, polonium, tellurium and americium are still afloat throughout Northern Japan more than six years after a tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant causing three full-blown nuclear meltdowns. That was the conclusion reached by…

(EnviroNews World News) – Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – On February 5, 2018, a mere seven years after a disastrous triple nuclear meltdown, Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture is once again harvesting and shipping green laver seaweed as a food product. An article in the Japan Times cited “officials” as having…

(EnviroNews Wyoming) – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has said no punishment will be levied against Cameco Corporation for spilling radioactive waste along a 600-mile route between eastern Wyoming and Blanding, Utah – not once, but twice. Cameco was facing a $35,000 fine for the mishaps, but won’t…

(EnviroNews World News) – Berne, Switzerland – On December 20, 2019, Switzerland shut down its Mühleberg Nuclear Power Plant as part of a move that will put an end the country’s dependence on nuclear energy. Even though the station was only in operation for 46 years, it created the equivalent…

(EnviroNews Oregon) – Tillamook County, Oregon – Seaborne cesium 134, the so-called “fingerprint of Fukushima,” has been detected on US shores for the first time researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said this month. WHOI is a crowd-funded science seawater sampling project, that has been monitoring…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – “It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses,” says the late Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkley, in the book Nuclear Witnesses: Insiders…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Park City, Utah – Is nuclear power the answer to global warming? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doesn’t think so. In this interview with EnviroNews Editor-in-Chief Emerson Urry, the well-known environmental activist explains his position on the contentious issue. “I’m all for nuke if…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Washington DC – Building nuclear bombs is a nasty business that leaves behind a lethally toxic waste-stream, whether the bombs are ever detonated or not. After generating tons upon tons of hot nuclear waste during World War II and for many years after,…

(EnviroNews World News) – On February 13, 2018, France’s Institut de Radioprotectionet de Surete Nucleaire (IRSN) reported airborne particulate matter containing radioactive iodine 131. Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) issued a press release on February 19, saying it also found iodine 131 in the air over…

(EnviroNews World News) – An airborne plume of radioactive ruthenium 106 from a nuclear accident was detected “in the atmosphere of the majority of European countries,” from late September through mid-October, according to France’s Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute (IRSN) – but the source is still unknown. As…

(EnviroNews Alaska) – A consortium of researchers announced this week that back on August 3, 2016, for the first time in two decades of atmospheric observations by plane, they discovered enriched uranium 235 (U-235) in the troposphere. The submicron aerosol particle, found 7 km (4.3 miles) above Alaska’s…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – EDITORIAL: A repeated theme in the legendary and utterly hilarious cult classic film The Big Lebowski features the character of a belligerent Vietnam veteran, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), yelling at his bowling mate and buddy Theodore Donald Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi), “Shut the fuck…

(EnviroNews California) – The infamous accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power facility is typically the first meltdown that comes to mind when people think about nuclear disasters in America. While journalists and editors at CNN have reported it was the worst nuclear meltdown ever in the United…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Washington D.C. – President Trump’s preliminary 2018 budget proposal was released in March and along with many cuts to environmental programs, it includes $120 million to restart licensing operations for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository (Yucca Mountain). This currently unused underground facility…

(EnviroNews Nevada) – Washington D.C. – On April 26, 2017, the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, chaired by Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), held a hearing to examine a “discussion draft” called, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 (the 2017 Act). This measure…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Spring City, Tennessee – On March 23, 2017, after less than six months of operation, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Watts Bar 2 nuclear power unit (Watts Bar 2) was shut down. Failing components in the condenser caused America’s first 21st Century nuclear…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – EDITORIAL: Sometimes large segments of the human race seem to contract collective amnesia. That is apparently the case with the already-approved, Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project on India’s west coast. But if one thing’s for sure, it’s that greed for electricity profits knows no…

(EnviroNews USA) – San Luis Obispo, California – On Thursday evening, Jan. 25, 2018, a fire erupted at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant on the facility’s water intake valve. PG&E Media Relations Representative John Lindsey blamed the episode on an overheated pump used to clean kelp and ocean…

(EnviroNews World News) – Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – Radioactive wild boars are running amok near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant on the eastern coast of Japan. The animals have migrated down from the mountains into the virtual ghost towns surrounding the site of the world’s worst nuclear…

(EnviroNews World News) – Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – EDITORIAL: THE TRUTH: Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) knew within hours following the 3/11/11 tsunami that a full-scale, multi-reactor nuclear meltdown was underway. THE LIE: TEPCO waited nearly two months to inform the public. Those were the staggering admissions handed…

(EnviroNews Idaho) – Boise, Idaho – Donald L. Gillespie, indicted CEO of the now defunct nuclear power penny stock scam Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI), jumped bail today in Boise, Idaho. In November of 2014, Gillespie and Jennifer Ransom, Senior Vice President of the company (and also Gillespie’s…

(EnviroNews Idaho) – Boise, Idaho – Plans to build a nuclear power plant in southwest Idaho may be bust as a federal investigation spanning several years culminated with a grand jury handing down 14 criminal indictments against former executives of Idaho-based Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI). Donald Gillispie…

(EnviroNews Washington) – Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Washington – At about 8:30 a.m. on May 9, 2017, an emergency alert was activated at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Hanford) in southeastern Washington after a tunnel containing nuclear waste collapsed. Workers were evacuated after the tunnel, which holds railcars full of…

(EnviroNews World News) – Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – Dismantling the crumpled reactors and recovering the melted fuel at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant in eastern Japan now relies on technology that hasn’t even been invented yet, as Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) flies blindly into an abyss…

(EnviroNews World News) – Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – On February 2, 2017, radiation levels in the Reactor 2 vessel at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 power plant in eastern Japan, were measured at the highest levels since the triple reactor core meltdowns on March 11, 2011, The…

(EnviroNews California) – At a jammed packed Green Fest in San Francisco, California the likes of which we have never seen before, we were able to catch up with legendary news anchor and investigative reporter Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Ms. Goodman was rushing to catch a flight…

(EnviroNews World News) – A new photo released this week starkly demonstrates how severe the radioactive water storage crisis on the ground at Fukushima Daiichi really is. Published in The Asahi Shimbun, the aerial photo shows a scene resembling that of a “giant integrated circuit board” comprised of…

(EnviroNews World News) Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – From the air, it’s been said that the areas directly surrounding the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant resemble a multi-colored “giant integrated circuit board.” That’s because more than 1,100 various and sundry tanks, housing radioactive water from the ongoing nuclear crisis,…

(EnviroNews World News) – EDITORIAL: On November 18, 2016, Tokyo Electric Power Company, a.k.a. TECPCO, took a group of 13 students wearing dosimeters from Fukushima High School into the exclusion zone around the hobbled Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant for an educational tour. It is the opinion of the…

(EnviroNews World News) – Tokyo, Japan – Nearly five years in to what has unfurled as arguably the worst manmade environmental catastrophe in history, Japanese prosecutors are set to hand down the first criminal indictments over the nuclear reactor meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. Former Chairman of Tokyo Electric…

(EnviroNews World News) – Nearly five years after the tsunami and subsequent triple nuclear reactor meltdown that rocked Fukushima Daiichi in eastern Japan, for the first time, criminal charges have been filed, in what is still unfurling as arguably the worst manmade environmental disaster in history. Three former…

(EnviroNews World News) – Chornobyl, Ukraine – As the 30-year anniversary of the catastrophic nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl rapidly approaches, the site still remains a huge threat to Ukraine and bordering Belarus, but also to the planet at large, though many people remain very unaware of that ominous…

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

NUCLEAR POWER IN OUR WORLD TODAY — 15-PT. ENVIRONEWS MINI-SERIES FEATURING ARNIE GUNDERSEN:

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the seventh in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the sixth in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to…

(EnviroNews DC Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the fifth in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to the…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the forth in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to…

(EnviroNews DC News Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the third in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to…

(EnviroNews DC Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the second in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to the…

(EnviroNews DC Bureau) – Editor’s Note: The following news piece represents the first in a 15-part mini-series titled, Nuclear Power in Our World Today, featuring nuclear authority, engineer and whistleblower Arnie Gundersen. The EnviroNews USA special encompasses a wide span of topics, ranging from Manhattan-era madness to the…

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

TAGSAaron Paul, Arnie Gundersen, Bears Ears, Bears Ears National Monument, Colorado Plateau, Curtis Moore, DAQ, Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Downwinder, Downwinders, Dr. Jeff Patterson, Dr. John Gofman, Edward P. Radford, Edward Radford, Energy Fuels, Energy Fuels Resources, Energy Fuels Resources USA Inc., Enriched Uranium, Fairewinds, Fairewinds Associates, Fukushima, Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Meltdowns, Grace Olscamp, Grand Canyon Trust, HEAL Utah, Internal Emitter, Internal Particle Emitter, Ionizing Radiation, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Jeff Patterson, John Gofman, Kamran Zafar, Neo Performance Materials, NRC, Nuclear, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Waste, Oaktree Capital Group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, President Donald J. Trump, President Donald Trump, Radiation, Radioactive, Radioactive Waste, Randal Reid, Rare Earth Minerals, Talia Boyd, Trump, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Uranium, Uranium Mill, Uranium Milling, Uranium Mine, Uranium Mines, Uranium Mining, Uranium Ore, Uraniums Mills, Utah DAQ, Utah Department of Environmental Quality, Utah Downwinders, Vanadium, White Mesa Mill, Yellowcake Uranium