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Will mining ore pollute our water?

Bill Harlan, Journal staff | Posted: Saturday, June 9, 2007 11:00 pm | (0) Comments

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buy this photo This drilling rig, about 15 miles north of Edgemont, is a sign of the soaring price of uranium - in demand now as oil prices soar and global warming looms. (Seth McConnell/Journal staff)

EDGEMONT - Three tall drilling rigs on a remote prairie north of Edgemont are responding to a rocketing commodity price: uranium oxide - less than $11 a pound in 2003 - top-ped $130 a pound this month.
"There's a great need for uranium today," Richard Blubaugh said during a trip to the drilling rigs last week. High oil prices and global warming fears have turned uranium into "green energy," he says.
Blubaugh is vice president of Powertech Uranium Corp., and his company has a state permit to drill 155 exploration holes in the Dewey and Burdock area of Fall River County.
The company hopes to eventually extract more than 7 million pounds of yellowcake (uranium oxide) by a method called solution mining, also called "in situ leach mining."
In solution mining, a mixture of water, bicarbonate and oxygen is pumped into "injection wells." The solution dissolves uranium into a "pregnant" solution, which is pumped out through nearby extraction wells.
"It's hard to imagine why people are upset about this," Blubaugh said. "It's clean and safe, especially for the workers."
But some local environmentalists disagree. "It's just beyond belief they can do that safely," Dick Fort of ACTion for the Environment said last week.
ACT and another group, Defenders of the Black Hills, are fighting Powertech's exploration permit, and they're certain to fight the later permits to mine from the state of South Dakota, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Last week, Powertech invited media to tour the company's exploration area, about 15 miles north of Edgemont on the southwest outskirts of the Black Hills.
The ore body here is about 400 feet wide and several miles long. It makes a wide, horseshoe-shaped loop about 600 feet under the dry, short-grass prairie just east of the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. The tracks are the main route for long coal trains hauling out of northeastern Wyoming's Powder River Basin.
So far, Powertech has drilled about 20 exploration holes into the ore body.
The ore is in two sandy aquifers called the Lakota and Fall River formations. The uranium came from catastrophic volcanic eruptions millions of years ago in Yellowstone to the northwest. The uranium was in the ash - called White River "tuff" - which settled throughout western South Dakota.
Water eventually washed away the tuff here. It also "oxidized" the uranium into a solution that sank into the Lakota and Fall River sands, where it precipitated out of solution in an "oxidation front."
Those fronts are what the Powertech drills are exploring, in one of South Dakota's least-populated regions.
"There is really very little population that will be affected," Blubaugh said.
There are, however, a few people.
Last week, for example, the drilling rigs were working a mile or so east of the old Burdock school house. Burdock was a true "jerkwater" town, built around a water tank from which Burlington steam locomotives "jerked" water. Nearby Dewey was also a "jerkwater," Powertech project manager Mark Hollenbeck said, but he said it with pride.
Hollenbeck grew up there. He got a degree in chemical engineering from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and he went on to represent a Rapid City district in the state Legislature, but now he's back home - running cattle and exploring for uranium where he grew up.
If the exploration is successful and if Powertech survives the long permitting process, the solution mines could employ 57 to 100 workers here for 12 to 18 years.
Then a few workers will spend four to five years restoring the fields.
Hollenbeck hopes the uranium boom lasts longer. "I think we'll find more ore," he said. He also points out that the United States is hungry for power, as evidenced by the continual parade of long coal trains just to the east of the exploration field.
Nuclear power, Hollenbeck points out, produces no greenhouse gases.
Hollenbeck thinks the Powertech uranium fields will be a benign and rich source of local employment. The surface disturbance will be minimal, he says - mainly well heads and power lines to run the wells.
He plans to continue running cattle during mining, on the same prairie where last week drilling rigs were exploring.
It's beautiful country - especially last week with the big yellow flowers of prickly pear cactus in bloom. But the cactus and sage are strong competition for the western wheat grass and sedges.
It takes 30 to 50 acres to support a cow on this dry prairie, Hollenbeck said, and he runs an outfitting service for hunters to supplement his ranch income.
After mining, the holes will be plugged, just as the exploration holes will be plugged.
"You won't even know they were here," Hollenbeck said.
Still, there will be opposition.
Fort and Charmaine White Face of Defenders of the Black Hills are still appealing the exploration permits.
A hearing date could be set soon. If that attempt fails, the two groups likely will challenge the mining permits.
Fort and White Face worry, for example, that the mining solution will seep from the Lakota and Fall River formations into the deeper, broader Madison aquifer, a water source for much of the region.
Blubaugh calls the chances of that "vanishingly small," and he says monitor wells and electronic sensors will help Powertech keep the pregnant, uranium-bearing solution in the "production zone."
White Face is skeptical. "How do you clean up an aquifer?" White Face asks in an essay on the Defenders' Web site. "You don't. Monitor wells only tell you how far out the pollution is going; they don't stop it."
Hollenbeck, whose brother and father also ranch here, said he would never work for a mining company that would ruin this land for cattle or for wildlife. "I'd be strung up if I did," he said.
Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com

Posted in Top-stories on Saturday, June 9, 2007 11:00 pm

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