Lynas thorium waste : A real health threat
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- SM Mohd Idris
- 5:12PM Jun 11, 2012
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During
the last few weeks the public has heard the wildly positive and
optimistic views of both the government and some local scientists
concerning the Lynas plant in Gebeng, Kuantan.
On 20th March, the
Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (Mosti), Dr Maximus
Ongkili, told the Dewan Rakyat that the Lynas plant is safe and not
harmful to public health.
He said that the effluent
from the plant contained low radioactive material. He explained that the
effluent was not categorised as a radioactive material waste by the
International Atomic Energy Agency, as it contained natural radioactive
material ('Ongkili: Proposed Gebeng Rare Earth Plant Is Safe', Bernama,
23 March 2011).
Unfortunately, he failed to give the effluent the
proper name: Technologically-Enhanced, Naturally-Occurring Radioactive
Material (Tenorm).
Tenorm and Fallacy of Molten Salt Reactor (MSR)
Tenorm
is produced when activities such as uranium mining, or sewage sludge
treatment, concentrate or expose radioactive materials that occur
naturally in ores, soils, water, or other natural materials.
In
other words, this natural radioactive material has been made dangerous
because it was removed from the ground and concentrated by mechanical
and chemical processes.
It has been exported by Australia and will be left in Malaysia as waste by Lynas.
The
radioactive material does not disappear once it reaches and is
processed in Malaysia, and this dangerous material will be left in
Malaysia.
Malaysians will need to keep this securely away from humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
Lynas
and AELB have made the Tenorm sound like low level waste by merely
diluting the waste until it conforms with IAEA regulations.
Diluting
does not make the radiation ‘go away', and if the diluting liquid
evaporates, you will again have concentrated radioactive material very
harmful to people. The uranium and thorium will not evaporate with time.
Bear in mind that Australia has categorically stated that it will refuse to receive radioactive materials from other countries.
During
the recent parliamentary select committee (PSC) public hearings on
Lynas, nuclear physicist Dr Abdul Rahman Omar reportedly praised the
value of the thorium wastes i.e. one tonne of thorium "can generate 1
gigawatt of electricity a year which is worth RM 1 billion to RM 2
billion, multiply this by 2,000 tonnes a year that the factory will
produce, then it is worth between RM2 trillion to RM4 trillion in
electricity". (Read nuclear energy and nuclear reactor).
He added
that this technology dubbed Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) was mooted by the
Americans at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, between 1968 to 1972 but
was abandoned in favour of uranium due to its abundance. "China is now
working very hard on using thorium for energy generation".
Alternatively,
the gypsum by product produced from Lynas could be sold to China which
would extract the thorium for energy production", he said ('Lynas'
thorium can generate RM4 trillion in energy', Nigel Aw, Malaysiakini,
May 21, 2012).
However, according to an article published in the UK Guardian
(23 June 2011), debunking thorium as a greener nuclear option, it
states that "There is a significant sticking point to the promotion of
thorium as the ‘great green hope' of clean energy production: It remains
unproven on a commercial scale. While it has been around since the
1950s (and an experimental 10MW LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor)
did run for five years during the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in the US, though using uranium and plutonium as fuel) it is still a
next generation nuclear technology - theoretical".
The article
further states that although China has announced that it intends to
develop a thorium MSR, nuclear radiologist Peter Karamoskos of the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), says "the
world shouldn't hold its breath".
He added that "Without
exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor
do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like
all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies;
the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors
these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government
has ever continued their funding".
The article states that "Those
who support renewables say they will have come so far in cost and
efficiency terms by the time the technology is perfected and upscaled
that thorium reactors will already be uneconomic. Indeed, if renewables
had a fraction of nuclear's current subsidies they could already be
light years ahead".
Health risks of thorium and other tenorms
All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say
environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic by-products
and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives.
Oliver
Tickell, author of ‘Kyoto2', says the fission materials produced from
thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but
‘"nclude many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters".
Anti-nuclear
campaigner Peter Karamoskos goes further, dismissing a ‘dishonest
fantasy' perpetuated by the pro-nuclear lobby. "Thorium cannot in itself
power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough
fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it
must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive
isotope uranium-233 - "so these are really U-233 reactors'," says
Karamoskos.
"This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used
in conventional reactors", he adds, "because it produces U-232 as a side
effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission
by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and
iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).
"Add in
actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon
becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still
depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive
waste".
Referring to the UK, The Guardian article says
that "with billions of pounds already spent on nuclear research, reactor
construction and decommissioning costs - dwarfing commitments to
renewables - and proposed reform of the UK electricity markets
apparently hiding subsidies to the nuclear industry, the thorium dream
is considered by many to be a dangerous diversion".
Citing Jean
McSorley senior consultant for Greenpeace's nuclear campaign: "Even if
thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be
commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional
nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively
connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none
of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a
distraction".
According to Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who is a
radiation expert, thorium reactors also produce a lot of Americium,
which is much more toxic than plutonium. "I do not think that, even if
thorium some day becomes a viable option, they will ever want to
separate out the thorium from the Malaysian waste, where it has been
significantly diluted so that it appears to be below regulatory concern.
"You cannot say it is a valuable commodity and also
release it as of no concern! Moreover, you are not dealing with pure
thorium, but with radioactive material with a long list of radioactive
decay products some of which are very radioactive. New reactors will get
their thorium from India or Australia. Malaysia would be considered a
secondary or tertiary source," she states.
In other words, there
is no economic possibility or feasibility that anyone will use the
Malaysian waste for thorium when there are large direct sources of
thorium to be had immediately in Australia or India.
Dr. Bertell
is a nuclear health expert who has done extensive research on nuclear
health impacts all over the world including the Marshall Islands, India,
Germany, Ukraine, US and Canada. She has been a consultant to the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Environmental Protection
Agency. She was a key witness during the Bukit Merah court hearings.
However,
contrary to the world experts, the local medical and nuclear so-called
experts have recently testified to the PSC that the thorium produced
from Lynas was too low to pose significant health dangers.
In
contrast to what the PSC has been told by the local so-called experts,
the health impacts of radiation are not benign. In a comparative study
by V. T. Padmanabhan et al of inhabitants of regions of normal
and high background radiation in Kerala from 1988 - 1994, the
researchers showed that thorium health damage from monazite sands was
evident (International Journal of Health Services Vol. 34 No. 3 pp483-515, 2004).
The
study revealed that there was a high incidence of heritable anomalies
in the high background region (HBRR). There was a statistically
significant increase of Down syndrome, autosomal dominant anomalies and
multifactorial diseases and an insignificant increase of autosomal
recessive and X-linked recessive anomalies in the HBRR.
The main findings of the study have been summarised as follows:
- The relative risk for chromosomal, autosomal dominant, and multifactorial anomalies is higher in the HBRR.
- For
congenital anomalies (WHO's International Classification of Diseases,
ICD 740-757), there is no difference between the areas. Within the study
and control areas, ‘nonmigrant' couples have 51 percent and 61 percent
excess relative risk (ERR), respectively, in comparison to ‘migrant'
couples. The ERR among the related versus the unrelated couples is 96
percent in the HBRR and 41 percent in the NRR (normal radiation region).
- Rates of multifactorial anomalies and multiple deaths
are higher in the HBRR. Again, the related and the nonmigrant couples
have higher risk than the migrants and the unrelated, respectively. The
rates among the migrants in both areas are more or less the same.
- If
all untoward outcomes other than Down syndrome and Mendelian anomalies
are grouped together, 6.4 percent of the unrelated ‘migrants' in the NRR
are affected versus 16.4 percent of the related couples in the HBRR.
The
authors suspect that exposure to radiation was genetically significant.
"Besides the external radiation from beta particles and gamma rays from
the soil, there is the possibility of internal exposure through air,
water, and food. Soman (27) estimated the per capita daily uptake of
radium-228 by the study population as 4.72 Bq.
"Based
on the average consumption of sardines, Van de Laar (18) estimated the
daily intake as less than 0.01 Bq per person. Since the coastal land is
less fertile and farming and husbandry are restricted to small pockets,
the internal exposure is mainly from poultry products, fish, and
accidental ingestion of fine grains of monazite in childhood."
They
revealed that the mean cumulative exposure to external radiation during
the reproductive life of people living in the high-background radiation
regions is 18 rads for women and 22 rads for men, six times the
exposure in the normal radiation region.
Conclusion Thorium from Lynas is Tenorm and a radioactive waste which has serious health risks.
We
urge the PSC and the government to seriously weigh the published and
reviewed scientific findings and views of the international experts
quoted above before decisions on Lynas are made.
We strongly urge that Lynas be NOT allowed to operate in Malaysia. -
Malaysiakini, Letters Section, 11/6/2012, Lynas thorium waste : A real health threat
Topping
the list was skin itchiness and rashes (50.1 percent), followed by
eyesores/itchiness/dimness (43.9 percent), dizziness/headache (35
percent), fatigue (34.5 percent) and cough (33.4 percent).
Analysing
the survey results, environmental and occupational safety consultant
Tan Hui Chun said the figure of skin disease and coughing is “alarming”
because it is 10 times higher than the normal rate, which is usually 5
percent.
“It
is quite clear that more than 50 percent of people facing itchiness
means that there is something in the air irritating to the eye and the
skin... It is worse on the expose parts of the skin.
“Ng (right)
is our representative in parliament, she should have listened to our
voice and talked about the Bukit Koman issue. But unfortunately, she has
always said this is a political issue, not a health issue.
Also
present during the press conference were fellow committee member Chong
Choy Yen and Bukit Koman villagers Hue Ah New, Woon Soon Fatt and his
seven-year-old son Woon Chee Hua.
However,
deputy speaker Wan Junaidi Jaafar reminded that the report is embargoed
until 11.30am tomorrow to allow the Dewan Rakyat to debate its findings
on whether the rare earths refinery posed hazards to health and the
environment.
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