Uranium mining and the enviorment

Uranium mining: bad for the environment.

Uranium is an unstable element on its own. This is why in nature its found as a compound mixture containing many other radioactive elements. When people mine for uranium they must separate the uranium from the rest of these useless chemicals. This procedure produces a lot of waste material. This waste material itself is radioactive. This waste comes in two forms, both liquid and solid, they are called tailings. The solid tailings deposit themselves into the bottom of the sludge while the liquid produces a kind of radioactive lake. The radioactive lake is eventually packaged into barrels or it leaks into the enviorment, contaminating water supplies and other bodies of water. The solid tailings are eventually built over and cause a contamination of water in the building its under. So in the end it all comes back to if the waste was disposed of better, the contamination of water supplies would lessen.

There where no words that I didn’t understand. This was a fairly simple article.

Personally I feel that there is no real need to mine for uranium in the first place. Its used to produce energy at a great cost to the environment. If not used to produce energy its harvested for weapon purposes. So either way if humanity stopped mining for it, we wouldn’t really be at much of a loss in my opinion.

Baird C. Chemistry in your life “17.11 Uranium mining contaminates the environment” Pg’s 637-638. W.H. Freeman and Company: New York, NY, 2006.