The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generation Station is located in Lacey Township of New Jersey. It is a General Electric Type 2 boiling water reactor that generates  six hundred forty five megawatts. It gets cooling water from Barnegat Bay, an estuary that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the oldest operating reactor in the United States.             Around 1990, it was discovered that the drywell lining of the reactor containment vessel was corroding. The exterior of the drywell shell was cleaned of corrosion and a new coating of epoxy was applied. There has been no further report of corrosion problems.

              The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a ten mile radius contains about one hundred thirty thousand people. The NRC ingesting pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles contains about four and a half million people. The biggest concern about the safety of the plant has to do with the possibility of flooding.

             The Oyster Creek reactor was put into operation in 1969 with a forty year license. Jersey Power and Light owned by General Public Utilities merged with Free Energy in 2001 and sold the plant to AmerGen for ten million dollars in a transaction that was challenged by the NRC who feared that AmerGen was not competent enough to successfully and safely run the reactor. Exelon purchased AmerGen in 2003 and currently owns and operates the plant.

              In 2005, Exelon applied for a twenty year extension of the operating license which was eventually granted after contentious hearing. Both Exelon and the NRC were criticized because they used environmental studies that were thirty years old in considering environmental impacts of the extended license. During the relicensing hearing, anti-nuclear groups complained that the metal in the core of the reactor had not been tested for brittleness that often results from long exposure to super hot water and intense radiation. The license was granted in 2009.

             Shortly after the new license was granted a tritium leak was found in two buried pipes that had not been insulated correctly in 1991 when the pipes had been worked on. Then a second tritium leak was discovered in August of 2009. For the last twenty years tritium has been contaminating the ground water and has flowed into Barnegat Bay. The tainted water has spread to an aquifer in the area and will reach public wells within ten years. They are working on dealing with the problem.

            In late 2010, Exelon stated that it would be closing and decommissioning the Oyster Creek reactor in 2019, ten years before the expiration of its new license. If they continued to operate past 2019, they would have to build expensive new cooling towers. There are also the cost of repairs and remediation due to the contaminated water to consider.

           When Hurricane Sandy hit last year, the rising water threatened the reactor and it was shut down. There is speculation that if the water had risen a few more feet in the estuary, the reactor site could have been flooded.

           The Oyster Creek situation includes lack of regulator vigor on the part of the NRC, siting issues, poor original design, and incompetent contractors causing damage that leads to leaks of radioactive water.

              The Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Crystal River Energy Complex eight miles north of Crystal River, Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. The reactor is a pressurized water reactor capable of generating eight hundred and sixty megawatts. It shares the complex with four fossil fuel power plants.

            The Crystal River plant was constructed by Florida Progress Corporation and went into operation in 1977. It was operated by a subsidiary, Florida Power Corporation. In 2000, it was purchased by Carolina Power & Light and a new company called Progress Energy was formed. In 2012, it was bought by Duke Energy which now operates it. Duke controls around ninety percent and the other ten percent is owned by nine municipal utilities. Its license was scheduled to run out in 2016.

             In September of 2066, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake occurred about three hundred miles to the southwest of the plant but no damage to the plant occurred. The odds of an earthquake powerful enough to damage the reactor are estimated to be very low. The NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles contains more than twenty thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a fifty miles radius contains over one million people.

              In September of 2009, the plant was shut down for refueling and to increase the power output. A hole was cut into the containment vessel to replace the steam generators but it turned out that the concreted of the containment vessel had been overstressed by the workers cutting the hole and the concrete was damaged. That section was repaired but the repairs caused problems in other areas of the concrete shell. The plant had been scheduled to restart in April of 2011 but in June of that year, the restart was put off until 2014.

             The initial estimate of the cost of repairs was between nine hundred million dollars and one billion three hundred million dollars. In October of 2012, that estimate was revised by an independent review to between one billion five hundred million and three billion four hundred million dollars. In February of 2013, Duke Energy announced that the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant will never be restarted. They are going to shut it down permanently. It may take up to sixty years for the site to be dismantled and decontaminated.

             Duke will provide eight hundred and fifty million dollars in  settlements to the customers who had to purchase electricity at a higher cost. Duke claims that the Nuclear Electric Insurance company shortchanged Duke customers for the more expensive electricity. Duke will also try to recover the one billion six hundred and fifty million dollars that it paid for the purchase of the plant from its customers.

              Here we have a case of an old nuclear power plant that may have had a poorly constructed containment vessel in the first place and had the containment vessel damaged by incompetent contractors. It would seem a poor decision on the part of Duke Energy to purchase an old reactor near the end of its license that was in the middle of expensive and problematic repairs. There are also issues with the integrity and/or competence of the company insuring in the customers of a nuclear power station. And finally, I question whether or not a company with the poor judgment of Duke Energy will actually be able to survive long enough to oversee the sixty year process of decommissioning the power plant.

Picture from Nuke plant:

 

              The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is located on the Pacific Coast of California near San Diego. SONGS is owned and operated by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company and has supplied as much as 20% of the power to areas of Southern California.

               Unit 1 is a first generation Westinghouse pressurized water reactor that was constructed in 1967 by Bechtel Corporation, operated for twenty five years and then was permanently shut down in 1992. The reactor has been dismantled and the building is used to store spent nuclear fuel. Units 2 and 3 are Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactors that each generate about one megawatt of electricity when operating at full capacity. There are four thousand tons of waste stored at the plant.

              SONGS was designed and built to be able to survive a seven magnitude earthquake under the plant and there is a twenty five foot tsunami wall to protect against tidal waves caused by the active fault five miles offshore. The plant uses ocean water for cooling the reactors but may have to build huge cooling towers if new regulations restrict the direct use of sea water for reactor cooling.

              There are about ten thousand people in the NRC emergency plume exposure pathway zone within a ten mile radius of the plant. They might be exposed to airborne radioactive particles in the event of a leak at SONGS. About eight and one half million people live in the ingestion pathway zone within a fifty mile radius of the plant. The main risk for them is possible ingestion of radioactive particles from food or water within the zone.

               SONGS has been plagued by problems since it was built. There have been major and costly mistakes made in the installation of equipment. The NRC has issued multiple citations for such things as failure of emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsification of fire safety data. A recent NRC reports stated that there had not been sustained improvements in the performance of the staff at the plant.

               Both Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors have been shut down for the past year due to the discovery of unexpected corrosion in pipes resulting in leaks in the steam generators. The operators promised not to restart the reactors until the cause of the problem had been found and corrected.  Critics claim that there were many changes in design and equipment that were not properly reviewed by the NRC.

                By the middle of 2012, the cost of the shutdown had risen to one hundred and sixty five million dollars, one hundred and seventeen of which had to be spent to buy power from other sources to replace the lost of power from the plant. Reactor 3 may not be restarted because of extensive and expensive repairs that would be required. By late 2012, the cost of the shutdown had reached three hundred million dollars and talks with the NRC over restarting Reactor 2 had been postponed.

                Considering what the shutdown has already has already cost and what additional cost might lie ahead for repairing Reactor 2, it may turn out that San Onofre may never be restarted. Hundreds of millions of extra dollars will have to be spent to decommission Reactor 3 at the least and more if Reactor 2 is not restarted. This appears to be a case of incompetence and refusal to follow regulations on the part of the operators resulting in the closing of a nuclear power plant.

Picture from awnisALAN:

         I have discussed the United States nuclear reactor fleet in previous posts and have also dealt with problems with specific U.S. reactors. This post is going to be the first of a series that highlights each of the U.S. reactors in turn with emphasis on problems.

         The Kewaunee Power Station has one Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and is located on a nine hundred acre site in Carlton, Wisconsin, just southeast of Green Bay. It was constructed in 1972 and was originally owned by Wisconsin Public Service and Alliant Energy. Nuclear Management Company operated the plant from 2000 to 2005. Dominion Resources currently owns and operates the plant. In 2008, Dominion applied to the NRC to extend the license to operate the plant for an extra twenty years until 2033 and the license request was granted.

          The NRC regulations define two risk zones around nuclear power plants. There is a ten mile in diameter zone around a reactor where the main risk is that a plume of radioactivity leaking from the plant would threaten people with the possibility of the inhalation of airborne radioactive particles. There are about ten thousand people in that zone at Kewaunee. The second zone is a fifty mile radius and contains the risk of ingestion of radioactive particles from eating contaminated food and/or drinking contaminated water. The second zone around Kewaunee contains about over three quarters of a million people. The Kewaunee plant has had coolant leaks but a good safety record overall. There is minimal risk of an earthquake in the area of the plant.

           At the end of 2012, Dominion Resources announced that they would shut down the plant and decommission it starting in 2013 although they were licensed for another twenty years. Dominion Resources had planned to add additional reactors to power stations that it owned in the Midwest to take advantage of the existing infrastructure. However, falling natural gas prices and the resultant dropping prices of electricity in the Midwest made their plans impractical from a strictly economic point of view.

          Two hundred eighty million dollars will be spent shutting down and decommissioning the Kewaunee reactor. This is sixty million dollars more than it cost Dominion Resources to purchase the plant in 2005. The site is supposed to be returned to what is called a “greenfield condition” within sixty years. I wonder what the odds are

          Many different options for the generation of electricity are being explored and the cost of some of them other than nuclear power and fossil fuels such as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and biofuels will become more competitive as time passes. Nuclear power stations have huge startup costs. The price of uranium is unstable. The problem of waste has still not been solved. There are many possible reasons to shut down nuclear plants but this particular plant is being closed because it just can’t compete on the open energy market

               Environmental damage, energy prices, accidents, accumulating waste, extreme weather, availability of cooling water, and other problems are threatening the viability of using nuclear energy to generate electricity. Various metaphors have been used recently in discussing what is happening to the world nuclear industry in general and the United States nuclear industry in particular.

               A book that just came out used the metaphor of roulette to refer to the gamble that the world is taking with the risk of another major nuclear accident. I don’t know if that is really applicable because the odds of hitting the winning number in roulette are pretty bad. Maybe it should be Russian roulette. We know that another accident is coming but we don’t know exactly when.

                An article just published today suggests that the situation is like a bunch of dominos stood on edge. The writer says that more and more dominos are falling as old nuclear power plants are being shut down because they are non profitable or they are falling a apart and are too expensive to fix. The problem with this metaphor is that while the shutting of one plant does have an effect on the viability of other plants, one plant shutting down does not cause the one next to it to be shut down

                I have personally referred to the situation in the nuclear industry as being like a house of cards. The whole edifice is shaky and the disturbance of individual parts may cause the whole structure to fall apart if and when a sufficiently big shock occurs. While this might be true, it would take something really major like the nuking of a city or the spectacular failure of a nuclear power plant that required the evacuation of a major city to deliver such a fatal shock.

                Another metaphor would be that of a death spiral. This is a term used to indicate that as one thing leads to another the system becomes less and less viable until it perishes. That may be a little too dynamic and kinetic for what is happening to the nuclear industry. The original situation that gave rise to that metaphor is that of an airplane that is spiraling down to crash and cannot pull out of the dive. That does not really seem to be a good fit for a metaphor.

               Another better metaphor might be that of an aging person. As a person gets older and older, regulatory systems gradually break down and stop doing their job. Organs deteriorate, joints become less flexible, etc. There can be a fatal event like a heart attack but if that does not happen, the whole system degrades over time until it just cannot continue to function. That is what is happening to the nuclear industry. On a number of different fronts, things are wearing out and breaking down. Minor crises and major crises arise which require complicated and expensive actions to repair. The industry is aging and there does not seem to be sufficient motivation and resources to renew it. It would appear that it is only a matter of time before nuclear energy is retired as a source of electrical power generation.

             With the fall on the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War around 1991, a great deal of radioactive material was left in the former members of the Soviet Union in the form of missile and artillery warheads, uranium, plutonium, and waste from processing and other military and industrial activities. A great deal of this material was sent to Russia but not all of it. Some of it remains unaccounted for. In the social, political and economic turbulence following the breakup of the Soviet Union, concern grew that nuclear materials would find their way into the black market and be purchased by terrorist organizations bent on wrecking havoc with dirty bombs or actual atomic bombs.

                In the mid 90s, the Center of Strategic & International Studies created the Transnational Threats Project (TNT) This Project was set up to assess a variety of international threats to the security of United States including terrorism, insurgencies and criminal networks trafficking in people, narcotics, weapons and other illegal commodities. There is increasing cooperation and overlap between ideological organizations such as terrorist networks and insurgencies and criminal networks.

              In 1996, the TNT set up a task force on the nuclear black market and the report of the task force was the first report issued by the newly formed TNT. The report was well received and was often quoted in discussions of the threat of black market trafficking in nuclear materials. It was cited in Congressional hearings which resulted in legislation that led to the Defense Preparedness Act. The DPA is dedicated to helping one hundred and twenty cities prepare to deal with nuclear terrorist attacks.

              The main focus of the report was the threat posed by nuclear materials in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries with regard to supply, illegal trafficking and demand for nuclear weapons and weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. The report dealt with possible involvement of organized crime in the FSU in the nuclear black market. The first step in dealing with such threats lies in strict security at facilities which contain such materials. Capabilities for detecting nuclear materials, seizing such materials in transit and prosecuting smugglers was analyzed. Anticipating the failure to prevent such materials from falling into terrorist hands, measures to prevent their use in terrorist attacks are also covered in the report.

              After producing the report, the task force created scenarios and a game called Wild Atom to give participants experience in dealing with such threats. Wild Atom was hosted by CSIS and the National Defense University in 1996 and was consider to be huge success by the participants. The seventy participants were drawn from law enforcement, the intelligence community, experts in the technology of sensors, nuclear forensics experts, legislators and private businessmen.

             The threat of a nuclear black market in the FSU countries continues to be a grave concern for U.S. security and the focus of ongoing investigations.

             I have written a number of posts about nuclear weapons for this blog. The focus was on high-tech atomic and hydrogen bombs that require great expertise and expensive equipment. There is another type of radioactive bomb that I have not dealt with. This is called a “dirty bomb” and consists of radioactive material and a conventional explosive. The idea is to spread radioactive material over an area in order to terrorize the inhabitants and force evacuation and abandonment of the contaminated land. If such a bomb were set off in a city, at the very least, it would cost billions to clean up if that were even possible. And, in the long run, cancers and other illnesses might result affecting the health of thousands.

             The first step in constructing a dirty bomb is to obtain radioactive materials. In general, the more radioactive a material is, the more difficult it would be to get it. Plutonium would be ideal because it is so radioactive but it is also very well guarded. U-235 would be second choice. There is a lot more of it around in the form of fuel pellets intended for nuclear reactor fuel but the security is high at uranium processing plants. Uranium ore and mine tailings are radioactive but much less so than U-235 and plutonium. They would be much easier to get but it would require a lot more to make an effective dirty bomb. Then there are various types of radioisotopes that are used in industry such californium used in neutron analyzers, used in consumer products such as the americium in smoke detectors and used in medicine such isotopes as Co-60 used in sterilizers. It would be possible to obtain sufficient radioisotopes for a dirty bomb either from the manufacturing facility or from the devices themselves.

             Then you need a good conventional explosive. There are a lot of places that explosives are used in industry. Dynamite and TNT are used in mining among other things and could be easily purchased or stolen. There are tons of plastique explosive such as SEMTEX that are unaccounted for and available on the black market. Grenades, mortar shells, land mines, etc. are also available on the black market. And finally, there are a number of recipes floating around for brewing up your own explosives from readily available commercial products such as fertilizer.

             When an explosive device has been obtained or assembled, the next step is to create a “jacket” of the radioactive material surrounding the explosive core. Add a detonator which can be purchased, stolen or built and you have a dirty bomb. The detonator could utilize either a timer or a remote detonation system over a radio link or a cell phone. Once the bomb is placed in an area where it can do maximum damage such as some open area near a dense population center, financial district or industrial zone, it can be detonated from a safe distance.

            Everything I have written in this post is widely available in print or online for anyone who wants to know about dirty bombs. I wrote this post not to encourage anyone to build and detonate such a bomb nor to provide any critical information for anyone wishing to construct one. I wrote this post to show how simple and easy it would be for any hostile party to create such a bomb if they had the dedication, the motivation and relatively few resources. It is something of miracle with all the hostile groups, hatred and radioactive materials in the world that no one has built and detonated such a device yet. However, I feel that it is only a matter of time.

 

    From time to time proposals are put forward by various companies and countries to create a nuclear waste dump that other countries could ship their nuclear waste to. There are justified concerns about the transport of waste, the safety of the storage and the security of nuclear materials when this waste disposal option is discussed.

          Normally, nuclear waste is kept in the countries of origin and stored on or near the reactors where it was generated, if possible. There are exceptions to this practice for countries that lack the necessary geology for storage, countries that pose a risk of proliferation and/or countries which have small nuclear programs.

          In 2002, Thomas B. Cochran made a presentation to the MIT Security Studies Program with the title of The Nonproliferation Trust Proposal: Managing Spent Fuel and Nuclear Waste in Russia. The proposal urged the raising of billions of dollars to secure fissile material, end new commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing, build a geologic repository, clean severely contaminated site, provide alternative jobs for nuclear workers and support pensioners and orphans. The plan was to raise fifteen billion dollars by storing ten thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in Russia that came from other countries (excluding the U.S.).

           Non-Proliferation Trust, Inc. (NPT) would head the project with the participation of several Russian Trusts including Minatom Development Trust. There would be a Russian subsidiary and an international subsidiary which would deal with the contractors who would carry out the actual work. Letters of intent from major contractors were included in the presentation.

            The people involved in NPT include Daniel Murphy, former deputy director of the CIA, Bruce Demars, former head of the Navy’s nuclear program, and William Webster, former director of the CIA. Even though NPT was set up as a non-profit these principles would make a huge amount of money of the project. The head of MinAtom, Russia’s ministry of nuclear power, estimated that the project could yield revenues of over one hundred and fifty billion dollars.

            Critics of the NPT proposal point out that there are alleged connections between MinAtom and the Russian Mob. The NPT proposal which would last for forty years would establish an international market in radioactive waste. Weapons grade plutonium was included in the proposal and could possibly find its way into the hands of private groups which do not have government oversight. With the proceeds from this project, MinAtom would become one of the most powerful entities in Russia, able to operate with little control from the rest of the Russian government.

            Although laws were passed through the Russian Duma to allow for the importation of spent nuclear fuel, the resistance of government agencies and citizen groups in the United States prevented implementation of this project. There are a lot of poor countries in the world and such a business would be worth billions of dollars so it is likely that eventually such a waste disposal facility will be constructed somewhere.

Shady adventures of Minatom and Non-Proliferation Trust…by Anatoly Saman from cartage.org.lb:

    The United States Federal government passed the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act in 1957. It covers the issue of liability for nuclear accidents and problems for non-military nuclear facilities. Prior to the passage of the act, there was a liability coverage of sixty million dollars per reactor which was considered to be inadequate by the industry.

              Under the Price-Anderson Act, each owner of nuclear reactors in the United States is required to carry the maximum available private insurance for each reactor they own. Currently the private insurance carriers will only provide three hundred and seventy five million dollars per reactor. The Act then requires each reactor owner to contribute a maximum of about one hundred and twelve million dollars per reactor following an accident that exceeds the three hundred and seventy five million dollar insurance threshold. The owners are obligated to pay up to seventeen million five hundred thousand dollars per reactor per year until the ceiling of one hundred and twelve million dollars is reached or until the cost of the accident is paid off.  In order to pay off claims under the Act, the administrators of the fund are allowed to borrow money following an accident.

             When an incident occurs, the NRC has to submit an estimate of the cost of the incident and plan to deal with payments to claimants. If the cost exceeds the insurance coverage and the money in the fund created by the Act, then Congress must submit a plan to recover the additional money from the owners of nuclear reactors. If Congress fails to act, the federal government can be sued by the claimants under the Tucker Act. In this case, or in the case of default on the obligated funds by reactor owners, the U.S. tax payers would be liable for the remaining money owed to claimants.

             The Price-Anderson Act provides for changes in normal civil court proceedings. It moves jurisdiction to federal court, consolidates all claims and claimants for a single incident into one suit, states that companies cannot deny responsibility, allows claimants three years to join the suit and prohibits punitive damage awards to individuals.

              The Price-Anderson Act was considered to be necessary in order to convince the nuclear industry to proceed with the construction of nuclear reactors. It was first intended to last for ten years until 1967. By 1966, it was decided that it was still needed to support the nuclear industry. The Act was extended in 1975 for 12 years, in 1988 for 15 years, in 2003 it was extended to 2017 and in 2005 extended to 2025. The required donations to the pool and the maximum insurance coverage were expanded several times to reach today’s numbers. The Price-Anderson Act has survived court challenges to its constitutionality.

             Critics of the Act say that a major nuclear accident could cost more than five hundred billion dollars. This is over ten times the combine insurance and federal pool of the Price-Anderson Act. There could very well be a domino effect from a major nuclear accident in the United States. First a cost in the hundreds of billions could be estimated. This would have to be borrowed by the Federal government. Insurance would have to be paid out which could result in the bankruptcy of insurance companies, cancellation of nuclear insurance policies and/or steep rises in insurance premiums. Payment to the pool, cancellation of insurance or higher premiums might result in nuclear companies declaring bankruptcy and defaulting on their Act obligations. And when the dust settled, hundreds of billions might be drained out of the U.S. government’s general fund resulting in the cutting of funding to import programs and an increase in the deficit. There could be a collapse in the nuclear industry which would result in the reduction of electrical generation capacity in the United States.

             Fracking has been in the news a lot recently. Basically fracking is the process of injecting fluids into holes drilled into underground zones containing oil and natural gas. The purpose of this procedure is to fracture (hence the name) the rock strata to release the oil or natural gas which is then pumped to the surface. Primitive fracking began in the mid 1800s and was used to extract oil in a number of states. Pressurized fracking began in 1947 in the United States and eventually spread across the world. The modern technique called horizontal slickwater fracturing was developed in 1988 in the United States. Fracking requires huge quantities of water and a variety of proprietary chemical mixtures to aid the fracking process.

              Hundreds of chemicals have been used in fracking including acids, alcohols, ammonium compounds, benzene compounds, formaldehyde, kerosene, nitrogen, potassium compounds, salt, salt, sodium compounds and many other chemicals currently labeled as toxic. These additives may be surfactants, friction reducers, emulsifiers and other things to help get the oil or gas out of the rock. Fracking fluid also contains substances called proppants that are used to keep the fractures in the rock open after the injection of pressurized fluid is stopped.  

              Proponents of fracking point to the huge deposits of oil and natural gas that are now available for exploitation in the United States. The supply of natural gas has rise and the cost has fallen due to fracking. Many people in rural areas are receiving income from fracking operations on their land, bringing much needed economic development to their areas.

           Opponents of fracking point to the environmental and health impacts of the process. The huge amounts of water drawn from the aquifers and rivers to feed the fracking operations are contaminated and cannot be used for consumption and irrigation. Despite efforts to contain and isolate this contaminated water, some of it still leaks out into the environment. Ground water and surface soil is contaminated when the fracking fluid leaks out of the wells. People living in the areas where fracking is taking place are reporting serious health impacts from drinking well water. There is some evidence that large scale fracking operations can aggravate faults in the earth and trigger earthquakes which can expel water from the fracking into the environment. Recently, in Pennsylvania, the issue of radium and radon gas injected into drinking water by fracking has been raised and efforts are underway to measure public exposure.

           The main use of fracking is for gas and oil productions. However, there are a number of other uses such as stimulating groundwater wells, preconditioning rock strata for mining, disposing of waste water and other fluids by injecting them into deep rock strata, measuring stresses in the earth, geothermal generation of electricity and the sequestration of carbon dioxide to reduce global warming.

           Back during the Soviet Union’s flirtation with the peaceful use of nuclear explosions, there were plans put forward that were later abandoned to use nuclear bombs for natural gas fracking.

           Recently a United States company, Uranium Energy Corporation (UEC) in Texas, has announced that it is exploring a solution to the uranium supply problem in the U.S. Domestic production of uranium is down in the U.S. The uranium and plutonium that we have been getting from dismantling Russian nuclear weapons will no longer be available for conversion into reactor fuel. Other countries are competing for uranium on the international market. UEC wants to use fracking to dissolve uranium in rock strata and pump it to the surface for extraction and refinement. Opponents of the plan point out that while oil and natural gas fracking takes place miles down, below the aquifers that supply water to Texans, the uranium fracking would be less than one thousand feet below the surface and would pollute the ground water with uranium and other substances lock in the rock. UEC has responded that it is doing everyone a favor by pumping out water that is already contaminated and injectioning cleaner water into the aquifer. Critics are not comforted by this claim.

Hydraulic fracking diagram from Mike Norton: