Wednesday, May 6, 2015

There’s nuclear gold in this sand. And it’s being sent out with impunity

VV MINERAL, a two-decade-old company, has been mining beach sand that includes radioactive minerals on the Kanyakumari coast. The company says it doesn’t have the technology to separate thorium from monazite, a rare earth ore found in the area — a claim verified by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). It admits it extracts and exports garnet and ilmenite to 20 countries, including Australia and the US. The question is: what happens to the four percent monazite known to be present in the sand? Since uranium is scarce in India, nuclear scientists have been working on an indigenous technology to utilise thorium, widely available on the southern sea coast, in nuclear power plants.
Though VV Mineral claims it doesn’t process monazite, it would be automatically generated during the mineral separation process in the form of tailings. AERB recommends that when the quantity of tailings generated is large and the monazite content in the tailings is relatively low (less than 5 percent), the tailings have to be disposed of by mixing with silicarich sand and backfilled at the mined out site. If the monazite content in the tailings is high (more than 5 percent) and the quantity of tailings generated is comparatively less, then it has to be stored in trenches and topped with silica-rich sand to bring it to the background level.
It is precisely this that worries Dr RS Lal Mohan, former principal scientist at Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi. “Indian Rare Earth Ltd (IREL), Manavalakurichi, uses the sand from the same area and produces thorium, so what happens to the monazite in the VV mines? Does the company follow the procedure recommended by the AERB?” he asks.
A REPORT by a committee of top district officials constituted by the District Collector of Kanyakumari, Rajendra Ratnoo, has in fact concluded that VV Mineral has been mining without proper regulatory clearance and has been involved in mineral separation, a process that emits high radiation, without fulfilling AERB norms. “Based on the report, we stopped issuing permits to the company. However, they have challenged the matter in the High Court,” says Ratnoo. The committee, which included the assistant director of mines, tehsildars of Vilavancode and Kalkulam and Revenue Division Officer (RDO) Padmanabhapuram, found out that the company has no plan for the safe and scientific disposal of waste from the mineral separation facilities.
VV Mineral, however, rubbished all these grouses as a ‘set-up’ by officials of IREL’s local unit in connivance with the district collector. “We have established a mineral separation plant and approached the AERB for a licence, which is awaited,” says S Vaikundarajan, Chairman and Managing Director of VV Mineral. He even claims that IREL has illegally mined in VV Mineral’s land and has indulged in other questionable practices. “No authority is ready to take action based on our complaint. Hence we approached the High Court,” he adds. In an email to TEHELKA, the regulatory body gave a clean chit to the company in this respect.
The effect of sand mining on the environment and people has been a major issue along the coastline of southern Tamil Nadu and Kerala for the past few decades. VV Mineral has been active in five seaside villages — Kurumpanai, Keezhmidalam, Midalam, Melmidalam and Helen Nagar — in the Vilavancode taluk of the Kanyakumari district.
“From 2004, it started buying and leasing hundreds of acres in these areas. The villagers initially had no clue that their seashore land was productive. Much later, they realised their land was worth crores,” says a church official.
The company is storing sand mined from the shores of Keezhmidalam in its separation facility in Midalam. “We do get jobs due to mining,” concedes Thankappan, former president of the panchayat, “but there are health issues involving radiation from the minerals.” Church records show an average of 10-15 cases of cancer in every village. “It’s absolutely not true that this area already had high levels of cancer. It has increased in the past few years since the increase in illegal sand mining,” says a church official. Cases of Down’s Syndrome and impotence have also been reported.
But money power is making a dent on the villagers’ ability to put up a united fight. Some of them told TEHELKA that mining companies have divided the villagers by hiring the powerful elite of the villages as sub-contractors. “We never had cases of violence before,” says Subha (name changed), “But nowadays, whoever disagrees with the company faces violent attacks.”
The traditional livelihood of the sea coast has also been hit. “There is no place for spreading our fishing nets or equipment. We can’t even dry our fish. The sea has eroded our village as sand is being removed from the shore,” says Meiyance (name changed).

Meanwhile, VV Mineral has filed two writ petitions on the matter, which are pending in the Madras High Court. Locals fear this could become another ‘green case’ caught in a vicious cycle of allegation and counter-allegation.

New Fukushima Radiation Study Looks Ahead To Future Cancer Risks

A new study of Japanese communities near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant shows a lingering risk of radiation exposure remained more than a year after the March 2011 meltdown.
For the study, a group of Japanese scientists led by a team from Kyoto University recruited 483 people living within 20 to 50 kilometers (12 to 31 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. For two months in 2012, participants wore personal devices called dosimeters that measured their radiation exposure from the ground, air, and food. (While the Fukushima accident ended up releasing large amounts of radioactive water into the ocean, this would not have been a significant exposure risk for people living near the plant, since fishing operations in the area have been suspended -- and may remain so after additional leaks.)
The scientists calculated that in 2012, the study participants received an average radiation dose of anywhere between .89 and 2.51 millisieverts per year (mSv/y) as a consequence of the radioactive cesium released by the Fukushima accident. That’s fairly close to the estimated 2 mSv/y level of background radiation that the average Japanese person is exposed to from natural sources, but above the usually permissible dose of 1 mSv/y. For comparison, a head CT scan exposes a patient to about 2 mSv of radiation; the maximum yearly dose permitted for U.S. radiation workers is 50 mSv.
So, what does the future hold? The researchers project that by 2022, radioactive cesium will break down enough that the average annual dose rate in their three study areas will stay below 1 mSv/y.
“The extra lifetime integrated dose after 2012 is estimated to elevate lifetime risk of cancer incidence by a factor of 1.03 to 1.05 at most, which is unlikely to be epidemiologically detectable,” the authors wrote in a paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For instance, in the Tamano area, located in the city of Soma, researchers expected that the incidences of all solid cancers will increase by 1.06 percent in the lifetimes of participants as a result of post-2012 radiation doses. Leukemia and breast cancer incidences are expected to jump by .03 percent and .28 percent, respectively, thanks to post-2012 radiation doses. Females and infants are expected to be more at risk for cancers thanks to the accident than males and young adults.
The study does have some limitations.
“This assessment was derived from short-term observation with uncertainties,” the researchers noted.
The study also did not measure exposure to radioactive iodine, or factor in the effect of radiation doses within the first year of the accident. Though radioactive iodine is a serious health hazard, it has a half-life of just eight days, making it much harder to detect a year after the accident (radiocesium, by contrast, has a half-life of about 30 years).
The study population is also relatively small, as Greenpeace nuclear expert Rianne Teule noted.
“Large cities like Fukushima City and Koriyama City have also been exposed, and hence a large population is being exposed to low dose radiation,” Teule wrote in an email. “Whether any health effects will be detectable on the long term, will only become clear after many years.”
Though the average radiation dose for a Fukushima-area resident was relatively low, the radioactive material is expected to linger in the ground for some time. If residents venture into the most contaminated areas near the plant, or eat plants or animals from those areas, their risk for radiation exposure may spike.
“Food supply and associated regulations are considered effective in the study areas in Fukushima thus far,” the authors wrote. “However these [radiation dose] levels can be easily elevated when residents preferentially take contaminated mushrooms and wild boar meats from the field, as in the case of the Chernobyl accident.”
SOURCE: Harada et al. “Radiation dose rates now and in the future for residents neighboring restricted areas of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published 24 February 2014.

Monday, May 4, 2015

A Study On Background Radiation Sources And Assessment Of Concentration Of Radionuclides In Soil Samples Of The South West Coast Of Kerala


Radiation is present in every environment of the Earth’s surface, beneath the Earth and in the atmosphere. According to UNSCEAR (1993), about 87% of the radiation dose received by mankind is due to natural radiation sources and the remaining is due to anthropogenic radiation .It is observed that most of natural radioactive elements present in soil are primordial radionuclides from the uranium series, thorium series, and 40K.

 

Beach sand or soil is mineral deposits formed through the weathering and erosion of rocks. These deposits found at different levels within the sand contain natural .radionuclides that contribute to ionizing radiation expo-sure on earth Karunagapally is one of the attractive tourist places in Kerala. An attempt has made in this study to determine the concentration of 238U, 232Th, 40K and 137Cs in beach sand and soil samples collected from Karunagappally using gamma ray spectrometry.