Stuff You Should Know - How Uranium Mining Works

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Mining uranium is dangerous work. Not only does it involve mining, which is dangerous itself, uranium is also found alongside some very radioactive stuff. Learn the ins and outs of this thrilling endeavor in this episode of SYSK. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there and Jerry's over there, out there in the ether, but here still and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Jerry whom we love so much. So we're talking Chuck about uranium mining obviously because anytime Jerry comes up, it goes pretty much hand in hand with uranium mining, right? Sure. And like we talked about mining before, not our finest episode, if I remember correctly from some of the listener mail corrections we got. Was it coal mining? No, it was like underground mining. Okay. We're going to skirt around that and uranium mining is like its own thing. Like all mining is pretty, bears some resemblance to one another, but uranium mining in particular is really heavily regulated. The stuff that it produces, uranium appropriately enough, is a really regulated substance because it can do some pretty powerful stuff. And it's just kind of interesting,

especially considering the history of uranium in humans, which is a fairly recent history. Yeah. I mean, you know, it kind of depends on what era you're talking about, but uranium brings to mind a couple of things depending on when you're talking about. If you're talking about the 50s during the Cold War and the arms race, then you can only think about enriched uranium and nuclear war and nuclear bombs. If you fast forward to the 70s, you think about a kinder gentler uranium, still radioactive, but one that would be used for energy production. And here's a pretty whopping stat on the kind of punch it packs as far as producing energy. And this is startling, frankly, a seven gram pellet of uranium fuel produces as much energy as

almost 1800 pounds of coal and three and a half barrels of oil. Yeah. That's remarkable. I love that too. So I fiddled with it on a calculator a little bit. Oh boy. So if you took about 75 kilograms of enriched uranium fuel, it would produce the same amount of energy as something like almost 2 million pounds of coal, just 75 kilograms, 150 pounds, produces 2 million pounds of coal's worth of energy. And it's pretty amazing stuff. And it's because uranium is radioactive. Like it decays spontaneously over time, right? And when it does, it releases gamma radiation and energy in the form of heat. And if you can contain and kind of encourage this decay, these reactions where neutrons kind of bombard uranium atoms and create all sorts of energy

release. And it happens like trillions of times a second. You can generate enough heat to boil water to spin a turbine, which to me, still is one of the most hilarious things that humans have ever come up with. Using nuclear fuel to generate steam to turn a turbine to produce electricity is just as hilariously round about as it gets. But that's what nuclear energy does. That's how it produces electricity. Yeah. And kind of the cool thing about that production of electricity in regards to nuclear warheads is after the de-escalation, after the Cold War, and we could still go back and use that stuff, we could take that enriched uranium that was stored in nuclear weapons and reuse a lot of that stuff. In fact, most of it, I think, for reactors to

power reactors. Yeah. And you can get a lot of use out of it because typically the nuclear fuel, the enriched uranium that they use in a nuclear reactor to create electricity is about 5% uranium 235, which is that's the money isotope when you're creating nuclear power. That's right. If you're using it for military purposes like a nuclear bomb, it's like 90%. So you could get a lot of nuclear fuel out of uranium that was enriched for a nuclear bomb and reusing it for nuclear fuel. I think that's just such a great like, like swords to plowshares kind of, kind of fable. Yeah. And there's, you know, it can also be used for other stuff. It's not just for

making power super efficiently. There's something called, I don't know how it's pronounced, but it's M-O-L-Y-B Denim, D-U-D-E-N-U-M. So I don't know if it's the B is silent and it's Mollie Denim 99 or Mollie B Denim 99. But I think they call it Mo 99, which is super useful. Yeah, sure. But it's a, this is a decay product, one of the decay products of uranium. And it is really useful for medical imaging, like to see if your heart is pumping right or to see if your cancer is metastasized. And the kind of freaky thing is until 2010, it was actually made and used from weapons grade uranium. And then starting in 2010, now that it's a low enriched version that they use for it. Yeah. And I saw that there are nuclear reactors that produce electricity that don't have to use

enriched uranium. They can actually use like natural uranium ore and still generate electricity from that. Which I think that might be, I don't know if that's a trend or not, but I'd like to see it become one where it's like, if we can get away with nuclear enrichment and not do that anymore, it would save a lot of problems because nuclear in and of itself isn't necessarily problematic. And it is like low carbon or almost carbon-free form of energy. But there's a lot of problems with the byproducts of the enrichment processes we'll talk about. Yeah. And another cool little fact about when they first discovered uranium as well as radium is that there are early uses. Radium was used to make glow paint. And uranium was used as a glaze, a decorative glaze.

And then all of a sudden they're like, Hey guys, this stuff is actually nuclear. Yeah. No wonder it glows and it makes a nice glaze. Yeah. There's also something called Vaseline glass, which is a collector's item, but it has like a radioactive glow to it because it has uranium in it. And then fiesta wear, like that celebrated 20th century dinnerware, the red used uranium in its glaze until 1973. What's it called? Fiesta wear? Fiesta wear, yeah. You know, they're really bright colored plates and bowls and everything that were like really kind of big from the thirties until, I think it's still around today. You've seen it. Yeah. I like that stuff. That's, we have some of that stuff for like,

you know, barbecues and stuff. Exactly. Well, instead of our fine china and crystal. Right. So if you got it in 1973 or prior, you may want to just update your collection because that stuff's radioactive. We have like the new target versions of that stuff. I got you. Okay. Good. That's probably not radioactive. I hope not. So uranium, it was discovered in 1789 by a subject of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which is present day Czech Republic. His name was Martin Klepproth and he was actually a German chemist. I guess he liked Bohemia more, but he discovered it and named it uranium after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered earlier in the decade. And I guess it was still just

the hot new thing on everybody's mind because that's what uranium's named after. Yeah. And there's, you know, there's different kinds of uranium. It has different kinds of isotopes, which basically are the different forms with different number of neutrons. And depending on how stable each isotope is or each version is, some are more radioactive, some are more likely to produce nuclear fission, some are less likely. I think you mentioned uranium 235 is the money went for, you know, for nuclear war. And I guess for power production too, right? That's the one you want. You don't want any of that garbage 238 stuff. But 238 is the most abundant. So there is more of that stuff. And you don't even ask about 37 or 36.

There's three that are naturally occurring, 238, 235, and 234. And what's really cool about it is uranium 235 and uranium 238 are what are called primordial elements where they're like genuine real deal star dust. Like they were created in or shortly after the Big Bang. So the uranium around here on earth was like, was around at the beginning of the universe. It's way older than earth, hence the name primordial. If you believe that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And it's half life. Get this Chuck is 3000 years, which is, you know, why it's been around for longer than earth. Did you get that joke? I did. I mean, someone's going to be mad at us, but... Oh man, they're going to be so mad. No, actually the half life of 235 is about 700 million years.

And then 238, the half life. So if you take a gram of pure uranium 238 and store it in a container and you come back and check on it in four and a half billion years, only half of it will have decayed in that time. It is ancient stuff. And it's pretty cool that we figured out a way to use that primordial element, this ancient stuff that was created in the Big Bang to generate steam, to turn a turbine, to generate electricity. It's amazing. If you want to mine this stuff, Australia is number one in the world. I think about 30% of all uranium in the world is in Australia. Number two is Kazakhstan. Yeah. That was a terrible bore. Maybe the worst I've ever heard. Wow. Number three is Russia. I'm really ashamed of myself. And then number four is Canada.

Wait a minute. Russia's got Canada beat? Yeah. Russia's number three ahead of Canada. That must be Canada. As of this year. Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, because I know. Or I guess last year. Kazakhstan came up in the last, within about the last decade, Canada's got the number one producing mine, cigar lake mine. It produced something like 13% of the world's uranium single-handedly in 2019, just this one mine in Canada. And Canada's uranium is so rich. Remember we said- How rich is it? I'm glad you asked, Chuck. It's so rich that they have to use robots to mine it because the humans can't get near it. It's too dangerous. Oh, well, yeah. Put a pin in there. This will be talking about that a little

bit later. It's as rich as it comes, which is good for Canada. Sure. The US doesn't have a ton of it. I believe that there are currently six states that have mining operations. Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah have the bulk of it. And then there's also some in Arizona, Nebraska, and Texas. And Arizona is interesting because there is, in Grand Canyon National Park, there is uranium. And in 2012, President Obama said, you know what? For 20 years, there's a ban on uranium mining on this million acres of land around the Grand Canyon. And then just a couple of months ago, in February of this year, they passed the House Pass, the Grand Canyon Protection Act, to make that permanent. And I think it now goes to Senate committee. It passed generally,

of course, our long party lines with Democrats saying, you know, we got to protect our land, and Republicans saying, oh, it's fine. Right. I saw- Yeah, I saw- In so many ways. I saw a press release from Mark Kelly, who's now a senator from Arizona. And he and I think Kristen Sinema co-sponsored a bill, because they're both from Arizona, to basically do what that House bill did, was protect or make that ban permanent. And in this press release, he said that the Grand Canyon generated- A different one? I think it was a concurrent bill. Yeah, it was a different bill. I think that there was the House bill in the Senate bill. I think they do this sometimes. It makes it happen faster,

because when it goes through committee, it gets- They come together and work out the differences rather than, you know, it goes through the House, and then it goes to the Senate can happen concurrently. Yeah, concurrently. I think that's what was going on. But anyway, the upshot of it is that the- In the press release, Mark Kelly said that the Grand Canyon generates something like $1.3 billion in tourist revenue for the state of Arizona every year, which is like, how long is it going to take you to mine that much uranium? It just makes sense to protect the Grand Canyon, in just that case alone. Yeah, I mean, that was the point that they were making on the Democrat side, is the amount of uranium was, I can't remember, but it

was not that much. I think it was like less than 1% of the total in the United States, and they were just saying the benefits just don't even come close to outweighing the risks here. Yeah, and I mean, again, well, I don't think I'm not, but I would say we're not here to just knock uranium as an energy source or even uranium mining when it's done correctly. But yeah, when it butts up against maybe the most celebrated natural treasure in an entire nation, on an entire continent, maybe just skip that one, I think, is kind of my take on it. Yeah, to squeeze just a little bit of uranium out of there. Yeah, it's just so short-sighted. I'm so sick of short-sightedness.

Me too. There's a cool quote in here, and this was originally from the House of Works website, right? Yeah, it was, as a matter of fact, my old pals. And this guy, Michael Amundsen, he's a historian on the atomic age. He's talking about basically World War II coming around, and uranium being the hot ticket. And he said, uranium went from being a weed to a weapon. Instead of serving as this useless pigment and glaze, it became a strategic element of war. Right. And I think that happened pretty quickly when the arms race heated up. At like Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States were really, really moving fast to get as much uranium as possible on their hands. Yeah, and I mean, up to that point, uranium was like, again,

it was used for a pigment, a ceramic glaze, not for much. And then the Manhattan Project happens, and all of a sudden, it's like every country in the world is looking to see whether they have uranium deposits or not, because the USSR and the United States want as much as it can get, not just even necessarily to build up its stockpile, to keep the other guy from getting his hands on it as well. So the human introduction, the general public's introduction to uranium was kind of jarring in that sense, because it came hand in hand with the atomic age. Uranium-235 was what was used as the nuclear core for Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. So it was like, it was a very memorable debut uranium had in the public

mind. It stayed that way for a while until it started to become associated more with nuclear energy. Should we take a break? I think we should take a break. Yeah. All right, let's do it. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology,

but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a

skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So let's say you want to mine uranium. The first thing you have to do is find uranium. And you're looking for these large deposits. You don't open up a mine unless you do the math. And you figure out that, hey, there's enough. I mean, it's a really simple math formula, basically like this is how much it costs to mine. And this is how much we can possibly get from this place. Is it worth it or not? Because I think one in every 1000 exploration sites of all metals and minerals are ever really used as the mining site. So they're poking around at first and they're

using these. You can actually walk around with a Geiger counter on the ground and look for it close up after you have used something called a, I'm going to go with Centilometer. Oh yeah, that's good. I was going to say Centilometer because it's based on the word scintillating like exciting. You can do that from further range and that picks up gamma rays at bigger distances. So you'll use that at first, then you'll zero in with that Geiger counter. Or you'll check out the landscape and see how viable it is. And, you know, you'll just enter that all into your little spreadsheet or however you're determining that equation. And if it spits out, yes, good place for a mine, then they'll go through this really long,

arduous process of getting permitted. Yeah. And the stuff that you're going to mine then becomes what's known as ore bodies, which are deposits that are economically worth mining and extracting, right? And yeah, it does take a lot of time. I saw this article says between three and 10 years to go from basically prospecting to production. I saw 10 to 15 elsewhere. To bombing somebody. Right. Add another year onto that one. Right. But yeah, so say anywhere between three and 15 years. I'm leaning more toward the 10 to 15 year side just because of the permitting, having to deal with the public saying like, you're not going to do that in my backyard kind of thing. It's rather involved. It's involved for

any mine because you have to plan the mine too. As you'll see in a second, like we've got to, you've got to plan what kind of mine you're going to build. You have to plan the mine itself. You have to figure out what to do with it, who you're going to sell it to. Then you have to go through the permitting process. Then you have to actually start to extract it. And one of the things that really jumped out to me, Chuck, was how few people it actually takes to mine. Yeah. I mean, this article made it sound like kind of a full scale operation. I'm sure they range in size, but it has to be a certain size to make it worth your while, like we said. So it seems like 100 people or less can run this mining site. The whole shebang, 100 people, the mine uranium,

which I just thought that was really surprising. Yeah. And we should also mention too that they just don't go digging in there. Like uranium could be mistaken for when it decays their byproducts called daughter elements, radon and radium. And that can also set off a Geiger counter. So they make super sure that it's uranium down there before they get going. Right. Well, that's actually how they find it using the Geiger counters because the uranium itself, it has such a long half-life, it decays so slowly that it's its daughter isotopes or daughter elements that are the ones that are setting the Geiger counter off. But then you have to say, okay, well, how much uranium is in here? Because I don't want that radon. That's just

a hazard to our health. Even though we use it to find the uranium, how much uranium is here and how much radon is there? Because if you find a really, really ancient deposit that's just been sitting undisturbed and has been slowly, but surely decaying, all of those daughter isotopes are going to keep building up. So you might find a deposit that's a lot of radon. You don't want to have anything to do with it, but not that much uranium 235, you know? Yeah. So once you have found your stuff, you've got your permit, you're all ready to go. It's 10 to 15 years on. You need to figure out, and you probably already figure out at this point, what kind of mine you're going to have. And there's a few different ones. I know we've talked about

mountain top removal mining and regular underground mining, but open pit mining is one thing they can do, which is basically they blast away, land and create a big pit, and then they go in there and they remove big uranium or chunks and say, here you go. Go process it. Go crush it up and slurry. And what's that saying they have that's kind of cool? So apparently the miners themselves, like if you're a uranium miner, you're not just an ordinary miner and no disrespect to ordinary miners, but you're especially trained, especially to recognize uranium because it's up to you in an open pit process to pick the stuff out and get as much of the actual uranium as possible. So they do have this saying, a mine is a terrible thing to waste.

You want to get all the uranium out and a waste is a terrible thing to mine. You don't want to mine the stuff that's not uranium. And so I added a little bit of extra to that saying. It's a lot more succinct than that, but I think you get the answer. All right, let's hear it. Oh, I thought you, I thought you were going to add even more. No, surprisingly I wasn't. I think you can also strip mine. Is that true? Yeah, open pit and strip mining are like within, if you've got the deposit within like 400 feet of the surface, but I think the big difference between those two trucks, strip mining is just like taking the layers of soil off the top until you reach the deposit. Whereas open pit, like you were saying, you blast it in a rubble, but they're related.

They're like surface mining. I think they both qualify as that. Yeah, I mean, then you've got underground mining, of course, which is just deeper. And you go down in those mine shafts or what's called addits, which are the vertical and horizontal tunnels. And it's just way more labor intensive. It's obviously a bit more expensive. It's a bit more dangerous, higher health risks. So they would prefer out of those two to probably open pit mine. Well, yes, but it also depends on who you're talking about prefers it. Like if you're a minor, you probably prefer open pit because you're exposed to open air. If you're a concerned agent of the EPA, you probably prefer a well-run underground mine because if it's done correctly

and built properly, it's probably going to have less of an environmental footprint than blowing a huge pit into the earth and getting all the radioactive chunks out. Yeah. And I think the one that has the least environmental impact is in situ, which means in the original place. And this is interesting in that they basically, you know, they don't take these big chunks out of the ground and process it. They use chemicals. They use baking soda and sort of like a club soda mixture solution and they inject it into the rock through pipes. And that separates the uranium from the rock, but it turns it into a solution that they then pump back up to the surface. Yeah. There's injection wells that go down into the deposit

because sometimes the uranium can be kind of suspended in sand or sandstone or even gravel. Or near the water table. Yes. So that's something that confounds it. Let's say you're going and you've got topsoil and a little bit of bedrock, and then you've got a nice aquifer of fresh, unpolluted drinking water. Then below that, you've got a big clay strip of impermeable clay. Then you've got the uranium. Then you've got another clay strip holding that uranium deposit sand in between it. Your job is to drill down, pass the aquifer, pass the clay into the uranium sand, inject it with all that stuff, and then leach the dissolved uranium out through a pump through that aquifer without leaking it into the aquifer and then taking it off site for processing.

If you do it right, you don't pollute the groundwater. You don't disrupt or make the clay permeable so that you actually let the uranium leak out of the deposit. If you do it right, it would have the least environmental footprint. It seems to me probably the trickiest version of it. Yeah. I think sometimes when you combine two regular words, it just ends up sounding super gross. I think the leaky deposit fits into that category. Yeah, it definitely does, especially a moist leaky deposit. I'm sorry. Then there's heap leaching, which is terrible. It sounds like the worst of the environmental as far as environmental impact goes. That is when it sounds like, unless I'm reading this wrong, they extract all the ore from the ground, the big

chunks. They bust it up on the ground, above ground, and then they leach that pile with chemicals to separate it. It's almost like in situ, but above ground. They'll just like, hey, let's just take it up here, then leach it. Yeah. A lot of these have a lot to do with one another. I think with open pit, you actually end up using heap leaching a lot of times because you're taking those chunks that you blasted out of the earth, and you're pouring acid, spraying acid all over this pile, and the stuff that trickles down is caught by these pipes, and your uranium's dissolved in there. Or like you're saying, you're spraying it with hydrogen peroxide or club soda or something like that. You can do some of them in conjunction with one

another, but the point is you're getting that uranium out of the ground somehow, and then you're starting the process of extracting it from the ore as best you can. That's right. Then you've got your stuff, then you need to make it into different stuff. You need to mill it at a uranium mill, and what you want eventually to get to is, and it's pretty funny that they name it this, it's uranium powder, but they call it yellow cake, which just sounds delicious. It says, but if you ate that, you would be in big, big, big trouble. Yes, very big trouble, and it's very highly regulated, of course. I think they like to put these mills pretty close by the mines themselves. I think the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission

really kind of aids people in saying, let's just bring this all close together, and you take that dry uranium ore and you just you mill it up, basically. I mean, it's not unlike a lot of mining operations at the end of the day. You're basically just trying to separate all the byproducts, or not byproducts, but all the stuff that you don't want out of the way and get it gone. That's 100% what they're doing. It's just depending on what mineral you're after, you're going to use different chemicals and stages of chemicals in the process. When you produce this yellow cake, what you've basically done is separated natural uranium away from the ore, the rock that it was part of, or the sand that

it was part of, and you compress it into these yellow cakes, and you send it off. Now you've got milled and processed uranium, but it still isn't enriched. It's still in its natural form, and in about its natural percentages. Natural uranium, if you have a thing of yellow cake in your hands. Again, don't eat it. It sounds delicious. It's just not. It's not public's sheet cake. No, which even if I knew that was radioactive, I would still, I wouldn't be able to help myself. I would still eat it. So you've got the yellow cake in your hands. What you're holding is 99.3% uranium 238, which is the one with the very, very long half-life that's not very radioactive. As far as humans are concerned, just holding things. And then it's 0.7%

uranium 235. And again, there's at least one Canadian reactor that supposedly can create electricity through yellow cake. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was saying before, that it can use it in its natural form, which is great because all of this mining and processing, it's potentially harmful enough to the environment. But wait until we tell you about enrichment, right? Right. Yeah, because what did you say it was 0.7% in its natural state? Yeah. And yeah, the goal is to get it. And it's not like it has to be 50%. The goal is to enrich it to about 2% to 5%. Right, which is still, that's significant. But that's for if you want nuclear fuel. If you want it for military purposes, you have to enrich that 0.7% of uranium 235

up to 90%. Oh, really? Yes. So that's what I was saying. If you get your hands on some military enriched uranium, you could fuel a lot of nuclear reactions with that. Yeah. And the point of enrichment, enrichment is just another word for concentrating, basically, where you're stripping out now from the yellow cake, not just the other stuff that's not uranium, but all the uranium that's not uranium 235. And so it takes a lot of yellow cake to get uranium 235 in enough abundance to actually produce fuel. Like for example, if you're upgrading yellow cake, 1,000 pounds of yellow cake from point... Sounds so delicious. I know. 1,000 pounds of yellow cake.

Oh my God. If you're enriching it up to 5%, at the end of that, you would have, I think, 50 pounds of uranium 235, the stuff you could actually use to make pellets out of in fuel. From 1,000? Yeah. And then you'd have 950 pounds of what's called depleted uranium, which is mostly uranium 238, some uranium 235 that you couldn't get out of there, and all sorts of other heavy metals and potentially radioactive impurities. And you can use that for your glaze, your pottery glaze. You can. Your fiesta ware. When you're enriching, too, what your byproduct is going to be ultimately is called uranium hexafluoride gas.

Yes. And that will go into a cylinder, and then as it cools, it becomes a solid. And that's where you have your, ultimately, your solid little, you compress it down, and you've got your little fuel pellet. Isn't that interesting? They go from powder to gas to solid to fuel pellet. And so when you take that enriched uranium, you turn it into pellets, that's the fabrication process. And I believe yet another company is responsible for that. You just get increasingly more specialized. And you even start out, again, with specialized miners who are mining their uranium. And then as it passes through hands to hands, it's just getting more and more specialized.

And then finally, you have either enriched uranium for nuclear fuel or enriched uranium to explode significant portions of the planet up with. Yeah. What I'm curious about is if it's all a group profit share, or if they just have a fee that they charge to mill and a fee to enrich, or if they're like, no, we're all in this together, and we get ultimately part of the profits. I honestly don't know to tell you the truth. I mean, I... Someone will know. Yeah. Somebody will know. I'm guessing because it's... Even though there's federal regulations,

I don't think the market itself is necessarily regulated. Right. Well, that's not true. The market would have to be regulated. But I don't know if it's regulated in the sense that it's not capitalist, or there's not a capitalist drive pushing it. I'm not sure. So we need to talk about health concerns for humans and then the environment. So should we do health and then break or break and then do both? I say break and do both, Chuck, because I think we've come to a pretty good breaking point.

Okay. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages,

K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we've got this stuff. We mined it. First of all, we found it. I was really proud of us for even finding it, Chuck. And then I was astounded that we were able to not only mill the stuff, but also enrich it and then fabricate it into nuclear fuel. And if you combine all those processes together,

you have what's called the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle. And that's basically what we're talking about today. The back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, which is basically what you do with this stuff once it's enriched or if it's used as spent fuel, that's a whole other podcast that I would really love to do someday. Totally. And our particular, the stuff you should know operation is very efficient because we send Jerry out ahead and if her hair glows green, then we've got our spot.

If she's like, homina, homina, homina. Plus tax. Oh man, my friend Meredith, by the way, told me someone alerted her to that because she was the one who used to say that. Her and my friend Bob and she told me what it meant. And now I can't remember. I think it was just some, I think Bob said it was like someone, he would say it when he saw a hot guy or whatever. And if he was, you know, a hot guy would be homina, homina, homina. And a super hot guy would be homina, homina plus tax.

That's pretty great. So it's just a designation, I think. You gotta love Bob. He lives in New York, right? Bob's the best. You know, Bob moves around between New Jersey and Portland. I think when you met him, it was in Portland, but you may have met him in both. Yeah, because I associate him with New York for some reason. Well, he, I always do too.

Portland is a, I'm not sure why Bob moved to Portland because he's a very New York guy. Yeah. He grew up in the New Jersey area, but I'm not sure where he is right now. I need to get in touch with Bob. Bob, right home. All right. So health concerns for humans. You know, we, you know, people can debate whether or not we should mine uranium all day long, but there's neither side that says it's fine for people.

It's good for a water supply. Like everyone acknowledges that it has serious health impacts for us and our planet. Yeah. And one of the big ones is again, remember, it occurs or it co-occurs with its daughter isotopes or its daughter elements. And in particular, radon's a real problem because radon is a daughter of radium 226, radon gas is, radium 226 comes from uranium 238 decay, right? There's I think 14 daughters and they follow this predictable stage as uranium decays. Radon gas is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking tobacco.

It's the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers. And you can actually get it from just sitting around in your house. It's the problem with it is you can inhale it. And when you inhale it into your lungs, it becomes, I believe, polonium, which decays itself in your lungs and releases gamma radiation and alpha particles and beta particles and does all sorts of terrible stuff to you, which can give you lung cancer over time. But like I said, you can get it from sitting in your house. You should actually get your house check for radon once in a while.

Because it's possible there's a uranium deposit under your house somewhere and that radon has made its way up. When you crack open the earth to purposefully get to a uranium deposit, radon's going to come out in aces, which makes it a very hazardous thing for uranium miners. Yeah. And if you work at an underground mine, especially, they're going to be, I don't know how often, but they're going to be checking and testing for radon gas all over that work site. It's not just like right where they're digging or whatever or blasting.

It's going to be in the break room. It's going to be in the kitchen, in the office trailers. Like they're testing for radon gas everywhere, at least here in the US. It's going to be in the whole hose in the vending machine. It will be, man. I ain't going to eat none of those whole hose. Yeah. Maybe some cheat cake from Publix. Sure. I don't even care.

I'm going to draw the line. Uranium itself actually is, its toxicity is really the biggest danger there. And like ingesting that, you can have serious kidney problems. But like you said, usually radium and radon are the biggest, I mean, that stuff can get in your bones. Yeah. Literally. Yeah. It's a real problem. The thing is, so like uranium, when it releases alpha particles,

those things tend to bounce right off of your skin. So with uranium, remember how it's not particularly radioactive? That's if it's just sitting there outside. Like even if you're holding it in your hands, it becomes particularly problematic when it's broken and you either inhale it like you're inhaling radon or you ingest it. It just gets on your fingers or your food or something. It's this invisible thing, but it goes into your body

and it wreaks havoc and particular kidney damage because it gets into your blood. Your poor kidneys have to filter it out of the blood. And it's like, I'm not equipped for this kind of thing. It might even say hamana, hamana, hamana itself. And then you have real serious kidney problems after that. Yeah. And since part of the process involves breaking it up, like that's the whole goal, then, you know, it's an issue.

But also that also is problematic with depleted uranium too, which again is the byproduct of uranium enrichment. It's a big, big old dense hunk of uranium 238 and a bunch of other heavy metals. And they use that for all sorts of stuff. They use it for shielding to shield out other radiation. They use it as weights and airplanes. They use it for bullets.

It's like tank piercing bullets. And I was reading a VA post about how some Gulf War veterans may have been exposed to depleted uranium toxicity because if they came under friendly fire, because some of the shells were coated in depleted uranium, because it's so dense, it'll go right through a tank. But it also has this terrible secondary side effect where that means that the depleted uranium breaks up

and it can be inhaled, it can get ingested, it can go into your skin. So even if you weren't killed by the depleted uranium shell piercing the tank that you're in, you may actually get cancer later on or kidney failure down the road because of that depleted uranium. So there is like a real problem with it. And then above all that too, or in addition to it,

it's toxic just because it's a heavy metal as well, which you don't want anywhere in your body. Yeah. And this is, you know, we haven't even really touched on the environmental impact. Obviously, these mines that were around and then abandoned before, you know, the sort of mid 1970s are super dangerous places because they leave behind something called tailings.

These are those leftover pieces of ore that they don't use. And they have those byproducts that we were talking about like radon and radium, but also polonium and sometimes even arsenic. And if it was pre 1975 or so, an abandoned uranium mine was not cleaned up very well. Yeah. They've had to do a lot of work since then to clean this stuff up.

Like things are way different now and they've gone back to try and clean stuff up. But it's, you know, the wind and the rain carries this stuff away. It gets into the water supply. And it's like, I think they said something like, you know, it takes 40 years to restore the environment back to its natural state. And I hear that. I'm like, no way, man.

You can never restore it to its natural state. Like as if it had never happened, I don't buy it. Yeah. I'm with you. I don't buy it either. It seems a really short time for a radioactive substance contaminating groundwater for Pete's sake, you know. But this is something that's especially affected Native American population and even more specifically the Navajo Nation.

Because a lot of uranium mines are in the, you know, hundreds of thousands of acres of the Navajo land. I think 70 million pounds of uranium reserves in the 1970s were on Navajo land. And then on July 16th, 1979, there was the biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the history of the United States when a dam broke at the Church Rock uranium mill

operated by the United Nuclear Corporation under, well, I say under Jimmy Carter's watch. It's not like it was his fault or anything, but he is one of the people who first said, hey, we should really use this stuff for nuclear power. Yeah. And I mean, this happened while everybody was thinking about Three Mile Island and still no one ever heard of it.

It happened four months after Three Mile Island. And Three Mile Island, you know, I think we should do one on like nuclear releases, a whole episode on that. But Three Mile Island scared the bejesus out of everybody because all of a sudden this green nuclear energy was really threatening and scary and it really put a dent in the public opinion

on nuclear power. But with the Church Rock release, it just dwarfed Three Mile Island's release and still I hadn't heard of it until two days ago when I started researching this and it like, it was a huge deal like people dying, people like going, it contaminated their river like 93 million gallons of toxic radioactive sludge tailings from uranium mining

just contaminated the river. And they did tests of the drinking water 80 miles downstream of this release and they found that it had 7,000 times the acceptable radioactivity of drinking water, the acceptable drinking water standards, 7,000 times 80 miles downstream. And just because it happened on this Navajo land,

everybody's like, I hadn't heard of that. Well, and they, I mean, all of it is a crime, but the real crime at the center of it is, is they didn't even notify them hardly. They did a really bad job of even letting them know. So like that's 80 miles away, you're getting radioactive fallout in the water, but right there where it happened, they were walking into the river like they always do.

And they were, their skin was literally burned on contact and they were getting boils. Cause from this yellow river all of a sudden, it's just, it's so shameful. And it's, and whoever wrote this article, I think was from the Navajo Nation and they said, yes, it was an accident, but Exxon Valdez was an accident. And they're always accidents.

Three Mile Island was an accident, but that's kind of the point. It's like accidents happen. And when an accident happens at a uranium operation, it's catastrophic. Yeah. And I mean, like even the best designed mine operation has to figure out what to do with those tailings, all that toxic sludge and radioactive sludge,

and all gets combined. And if you don't design your dam right, your dam's going to fail. But even if you do design your dam right, how long is it going to stick around even under the best of circumstances? You know, this is not just your normal stuff. This is stuff that's going to be radioactive

for a very long time. So it's a real problem. Like figuring out what to do with this on the back end is a huge problem that humanity just keeps kicking down the road. You know what, other two words sound gross together? Let me hear it. Nuclear release.

That's not as bad as what was the other one. I don't even remember. I think it was like... I already forgot. It had moist in it. Well, you added moist, but yeah, I don't know. I always add moist. Just to put a tag on all this,

they do require companies, I believe, to engage in what's called a reclamation bond, which basically says, hey, we're setting aside so much of our budget to come back and clean this up so they can't at the end say, oh, we went broke, sorry. So they set aside that money up front, supposedly.

And the fines are pretty steep, up to a quarter of a million bucks. If you break these land management rules. So all the incentives there for them to do a good job and their reputation is at stake. So we don't want to make it appear like it's just willy-nilly, they're just doing whatever. They are accidents and a company wouldn't work again

if they have one of those accidents. For sure. But it's just one of those things. Well, it's also a demonstration of it matters who is in charge of the country at any given point in time because you have to have a will to enforce those regulations that are meant to keep communities safe. Or you don't and you just let business do its thing

and that seems to go hand in hand with an increase in accidents, you know? Yep. So you got anything else? I got nothing else, a little bit of contempt, but... I have hope that we can figure it out because I think that nuclear energy is not inherently problematic.

It's just our understanding of how to use it is. Yeah, we did a good episode on that. Thanks. I think so too, Chuck. No, I mean, before. Oh, I get you. Well, thanks. This one was terrible.

Thanks. Yeah, okay. How about thanks for the last one? Thanks for nothing for this one, I guess. Sure. If you want to know more about uranium and uranium mining and all that jazz, go onto the internet and then keep an ear out for our episode

on accidental nuclear releases sometime in the future. Since I said sometime in the future, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this from a teacher. Hey, guys, my name is Emily. I'm a full-time high school teacher from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I want to thank you for a number of things. First of all, your podcast on stamp collecting was hilarious.

I was in stitches thinking about Josh's joke about FDR coming up with terrible stamp ideas for the postmaster general. Additionally, as you know, this pandemic has been so hard on nearly everyone, but I think maybe hardest on students and teachers. As teachers, we've gone from being honored, thanked, and admired a year ago for all the quick work we were able to do when we first shut down

to being vilified for not doing enough. It's been exhausting. At the end of the day, it's been hard to find much joy in anything, the exception, your podcast. The excitement and enthusiasm you have for knowledge is the only thing my brain seems to have space for these days, especially as of late. I found myself literally laughing out loud,

more often at your jokes and one-liners, and at least truly tired, obviously. This is so invaluable to me as most days end with me feeling like crying or crawling into a ball and sleeping. Also, your most recent post on your respective Instagram accounts showing you all together give me hope that things are returning to normal soon. All this to say, you're providing such an essential service

to people around the globe. For most of us who have been confined to our homes and towns, you bring the world to us. I am and will forever be grateful. That is Emily Gunch, a truly tired teacher. And Emily, that means more to us than you will ever understand. So thanks for sending that in. Plus, also really well said.

I'm glad that this is like a teacher. Totally. And if you don't know what she's talking about, we posted photos of the three of us together again, including a picture of Jerry at Josh McClark's Instagram and at Chuck the Podcasters. Wow, nice, Chuck. I didn't know we were going to get an Insta shout out.

We never plug our Instagrams, but why not? Why not? Why not? You just did. You don't see a picture of Jerry. Yeah, people went with a duct tape over her mouth. With a zerk over it. Yeah, that's right.

It's really scowling at her, and she looks sheepish. People really did lose their minds to see Jerry's face, her beautiful face. It's great. So, OK, if you want to get in touch with us like Ms. Gunch did, right? Yes, Gunch rhymes with lunch, she says. Nice. I nailed it.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out, astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.