Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck, Brian 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. UM. So we're talking Chuck about uranium mining, obviously, because anytime Jerry comes up, he goes pretty much hand in hand with uranium mining, right. Um. And like we talked about mining before, none of our finest episode, if I remember correctly from some of the listener mail corrections we got, you know, it's like underground mining. We're gonna secret around that. And um, uranium mining is like its own thing. Like all mining is pretty bears some resemblance to want a but uranium mining in particular, is um really heavily regulated. Um, the stuff that it produces, uranium appropriately enough, is a 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 and humans, which is a fairly recent history. Yeah, I mean, you know, it kind of depends on what era you're talking about. But um, uranium brings to mind a couple of things depending on when you're talking about. If you're talking about the fifties during the Cold War and the arms race, then you can only think about enriched uranium in nuclear nuclear war and nuclear bombs. If you fast forward to the seventies, you think about a kinder, gentler uranium, uh, still radioactive, but um one that would be used for energy production. And here's a pretty whopping stat on 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 eight pounds of coal and three and a half barrels of oil. I I love that too, So I fiddled with it on a calculator a little bit. So if you took about seventy fives of enriched uranium fuel, it would produce the same amount of energy as something like almost two million pounds of coal. Just just hundred and fifty pounds produces two million pounds of coal's worth of energy. And it's pretty amazing stuff. And it's because uranium is is radioactive, like it decays spontaneously over um 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 um, these these reactions where neutrons kind of bombard uranium atoms and create all sorts of energy release um, 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 roundabout 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 and 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 five cent um uranium two thirty five, 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, so you could get a lot of nuclear fuel out of ranium 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 um, you know, it can also be used for other stuff. It does, it's not just for making power super efficiently. Um. There's something called and 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 asylum and it's molly denom ninety nine or molly B denim, but I think they call it MO ninety nine, which is super useful. But it's this is a decay product, uh, one of the decay products of uranium. And it is really useful for medical imaging, like to see if your hard is bumping right, or to see if your cancer is metastasized and the kind of freaky thing is until it was actually made and used from weapons grade uranium UH, and then starting in two thousand ten, now that it's a low enriched version that they used for it, 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 or and still generate electricity from that UM, 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 UH 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 a 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 um fact about when they first discovered uranium as well as radium is that there really uses Radium was used to make glow paint, and UH, 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 no wonder, it glows and it makes a nice glaze. Yeah, there's there's also something called vasoline 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 weare like that celebrated twentieth century dinner ware the red um used uranium in its glaze until what's it called Fia you know, the really right colored play and bowls and everything that we're 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 uh, we have some of that stuff for like you know, barbecues and stuff exactly well instead of fine china and Chris right. Um, So if you if you got it in h nineteen seventy three or prior, you may want to just update your collection because that's stuff we we have like the new target versions of that. Okay, that's probably not radioactive so uranium. It was discovered in seventeen eighty nine by a subject of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which is present day Czech Republic. His name was Martin Claproth and he was actually a German chemist. I guess he liked Bohemia more. But um, he discovered it and named it uranium after the planet Uranus, which have been discovered earlier in the decade. And I guess it was still just the hot new thing everybody's mind, because that's what uranium is named after. Yeah, and there's you know, there's different kinds of uranium U. 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, each version is Some are more radioactive, some are more likely to uh, to produce nuclear fissions, some are less likely. I think you mentioned uranium two thirty five is the money when 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 to thirty eight stuff, but to thirty eight is the most abundant, so there is more of that stuff. Uh, And you don't even ask about thirty seven. So there's three that are naturally occurring to two thirty four And what's really cool about it is uranium two thirty five and uranium two thirty eight or what are called primordial um 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 and right exactly. And it's half life get this, chuck, is three thousand years, which is you know why it's been around for longer than Earth. Did you get that joke? I mean, someone's gonna be mad at us, but oh man, they're gonna be so man. Now. Actually, the half life of two thirty five is about seven million years and then two eight a half life. So if you take a gram of pure uranium two thirty eight 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. 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. Uh. If you want to mind this stuff, Australia is number one in the world. I think about thirty percent of all uranium in the world is in Australia. Uh. Number two is Kazakhstan. Yeah, that was a terrible boor maybe the worst I've ever heard. Wow. Number three is Russia. I'm really ashamed of myself. And then number four is is Canada. It Russias got Canada beat Yeah, Russia's number three ahead of Canada this year. Okay, gotcha Gota? Yeah, because I know, I guess last year Kazakhstan came up in the last Within about the last decade, Canada's got the number one producing mind Cigar Lake mine. It produced something like thirtcent of the world's geranium single handedly in two thousand nineteen, just this one mine in can Nada. Um. And Canada's uranium is so rich. Remember we rich? Is it? I'm glad you asked Chuck. Um. 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. Well, yeah, 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. UM. 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's is interesting because there is UH in Grand Canyon National Park, there is uranium. And in twelve President Obama said, you know what, for twenty years, there's a ban on uranium 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 passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act to make that permanent. And I think it now goes to Senate committee. UH. 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 I saw a press release from Mark Kelly, who's now a Senator from Arizona, and he and I think Kristen Cinema um co sponsored a bill because they're both from Arizona to basically do what that House bill did was protect or make that band permanent. UM. And in this press release, he said that the the Grand Canyon generated 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 Senate. Can happen concurrent, 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 one point three billion dollars in tourist revenue for the state of Arizona every year, which is like, how long is it going to take you to to mind that much uranium? It just makes sense to protect the Grand Canyon and that just that case alone. Yeah, I mean, that was the point that 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 one percent of the total in the United States, and they were just saying the benefits just don't even come closed out weighing the risks here. Yeah, And I mean again, well, like I don't think I'm not, but I would say we're not here to just knock uranium as a as an energy source or even uranium mining when it's done correctly. But yeah, when 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 my take on it. Yeah, to squeeze just a little bit of urania there. Yeah, it's just so shortsighted. I'm so sick of shortsightedness. To um. There's a cool quote in here, and this this was from originally from the Housetop Works website, right ah, yeah, it was as a matter of fact, Laurel Bells uh and this guy, Michael Ahmandson, he's a historian on the atomic age. He's talking about, you know, basically World War two coming around and uranium being the hot ticket. And he said, uranium went from being a weed to a weapon. Uh, instead of serving as this useless pigment and glaze, became a strategic element of war. 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. And I mean, up to that point, uranium was like again there it was used for 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 in the United States one as much as it can get, not just even necessarily to build up its stock, poled to keep the other guy from getting his hands on it as well. So the the 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 to thirty five was what was used as the nuclear core for um Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. So it was like it was a very um memorable debut uranium had in the public mind for and it stayed that way for a while until it's sort to become associated more with nuclear energy. Did we take a break? I think we should take a break. Yeah, all right, let's do it. Stuff you should know, h and sh stuff you should know. Alright. So let's say you want to mind uranium. The first thing you have to do is find uranium. And you know you're looking for these large deposits. It's you know, 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 mind, and this is how much we can possibly get from this place. Is it worth it or not? Because I think one and every one thousand exploration sites of all metals and minerals are ever really used as the mining site. So they're just they're poking around at first, and they're using these Uh you can actually walk around with a Geiger counter on the on the ground and look for it close up after you have used something called a I'm gonna go with centilometer. Oh yeah, that's good. I was gonna say sentilometer because it's based on the word scintillating, like exciting. You can do that from further range and that picks up gamma rays at at bigger distances, so you'll use that at first. Then you'll zero in with that Geiger counter. 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 mind then becomes what's known as or bodies, which are deposits that are economically worth mining and extracting. Right, Um, and yeah, it does take a lot of time. I saw this article says between three and ten years to go from basically prospecting to production. I saw a ten to fifteen elsewhere, but right to add another year onto that one. But um, yeah, so say anywhere between three and fifteen years. I'm leaning more towards the ten to fifteen years 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. Um, it's there. It's rather involved. It's involved for any mind because you have to plan the mind too. Is You'll see in a second, like we've got to. You've got a plan what kind of mind you're going to build. You have to plan the mind itself. You have to figure out what to do with it, who you're gonna 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 a hundred people are less, yeah, total and run this mining. So the whole shebang, hundred people of the mine uranium, which I just thought that was really surprising. Yeah, and we should also mention too that, uh, they just don't go digging in there, like uranium could be mistaken for u when it decays. Their byproducts called daughter elements radon and radium, and that can also set off the Geiger counter. So well, yeah, they make they make super sure that it's uranium down there before they get coming. Right. Well, that's actually how they find it using the Geiger counters because because the uranium itself it has such a long half life, it decays so slowly that it's it's daughter isotopes or daughter elements that are the ones where 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 rate on. 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 rate on is there? Because if you find a really really ancient deposit that's just been sitting undisturbed and it 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 raid on you don't want to have anything to do with, but not that much uranium to thirty five, you know. Yeah, So once you have found your stuff, you've got your permit, you're all ready to go. It's ten to fifteen years on. You need to figure out and you probably already figure out at this point what kind of mind you're gonna have. Uh, And there's a few different ones. I know, we've talked about mountain top removal mining and regular underground mining, um, but open pit mining is one 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? Uh, what's that saying? They have? That's kind of cool. So apparently the miners themselves like, if you're a if you're a uranium miner, you're not just an ordinary miner, in 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 and get as as much of the actual uranium as possible. So they do have this saying a mind is a terrible thing to waste. You want to get all the uranium out, and a waste is a terrible thing to mind. You don't want to mind 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 let's hear it. Oh, I thought you I thought you were gonna add even more. No, surprisingly, I wasn't uh the um, 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 fot of the surface. Um. But I think the big difference between those two, chucks, 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 use you know, you blasted in the rubble. But they're related, they're like, um, they're surface mining. I think they both qualifies that. Yeah. I mean then you've got underground mining, of course, which is just deeper and they you go down in those mine shafts or what's called adits, 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. Uh. So they would prefer out of those two two, probably open pit mine. Well, yes, but it also depends on you know who you're talking about prefers that. Like, if you're a miner, you probably prefer open pit because you're exposed open air. If you're um concerned agent of the e p A, you probably prefer a well run underground mind, because if it's done correctly and built properly, it's probably going to have less of an environmental foot print then blowing a huge pit into the earth and getting all the radioactive chunks out. Yeah, and I think the one that's has the least environmental impact is in situ, which means in the original place. And this is interesting and 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 they inject it into the rock through pipes and that separates that 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 like uranium can be kind of suspence ended in sand or sandstone or even gravel or near the water table. Yes, so that's the that's something that confounds it. Let's say you're going and you've got top soil and a little bit of bed rock, 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, and you've got another clay st're pulling that uranium deposits sand in between it. Right, your job is to drill down past that aquifer, past the clay into the uranium sand injected with all that stuff, and then leached the dissolved uranium out through a pump through that aquifer without leaking it into the aquifer, and then taking it off site for processing. And if you do it right, you don't pollute the groundwater, and you don't disrupt or make the the clay permeable so that you actually like let the uranium lead out of deposit. If you do it right, it would have the least environmental footprint. It seems to me, probably the trickiest version of it. Yeah, And I think sometimes when you combine too regular words, it just ends up sounding super gross. And I think leakey deposit fits into that category. Yeah, yeah, it definitely does, especially a moist leaky deposit. I'm sorry. Uh. Then there's heap leaching, which is terrible. It sounds like kind of the worst of the environmental as far as environmental impact goes. And 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. So it's almost like it's almost like institute, but above ground they're 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 bleaching a lot of times because you're taking those chunks that you blasted out of the earth, and you're you're pouring acid, spraying acid all over this pile, and the stuff that trickles down is caught by these these um pipes and your uraniums dissolved in there, or like you're saying, you're spraying it with hydrogen peroxide or club soda or something like that. So it's all kind of you know, 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 trying to 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 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 um it's very highly regulated, of course. UM. I think they like to put these mills pretty close by the minds themselves. I think the US Atomic Energy Commission really kind of aids people and saying, let's just bring it this all close together, and you take that dry uranium or or 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 know, you're basically just trying to separate all the byproducts that are not byproducts, but all the stuff that you don't want out of the way to get it gone. Yeah, that's that's what they're doing. They just it's just depending on what mineral you're after. Um, you're going to use different chemicals in um stages of chemicals in the process. Right, So yeah, when when you produce this yellow kike, 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 you you compress it into these yellow cakes and you send it off. So now you've got um milled and processed uranium, but it still isn't enriched. It's still in its natural form and in about its natural percentages. So natural uranium. If you have like a thing a yellow cake in your hands, again, don't eat it. It sounds delicious, it's just not it's not cheat cake. 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 nine three percent uranium two thirty eight, 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 point seven percent uranium two thirty five. And again there's at least one Canadian reactor that supposedly can create electricity through yellow cake. Um. Yeah, yeah, that's how I was saying before that, that it can in its natural form, which is great because all of this mining and processing it's 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 point seven percent in its natural state and the Yeah, the goal is to get it and it's not like it has The goal is to enrich it to about two to five, 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 point seven percent of uranium to thirty five up to and 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. UM 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 the all the uranium that's not uranium to thirty five five And so it takes a lot of yellow cake to get uranium to thirty five in enough abundance to actually produce fuel, like for example, if you are if you're upgrading yellow cake a thousand pounds of yellow cake from points a thousand pounds of yellow cake, if you're if you're enriching it up to five per cent. At the end of that, you would have I think of fifty pounds of uranium two thirty five, the stuff you could actually use to make pellets out of in fuel and yeah, and then you'd have nine and fifty pounds of what's called depleted uranium, which is mostly uranium to thirty eight, some uranium two thirty five 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 fiesta air. When you're enriching to what your byproduct is going to be ultimately is called hexa uranium hexafluoride gas UH, 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 know, you can press it down and you've got your little fuel pellet and that interesting. They go from powder to gas too solid to fuel pellet, And so when you take that 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 the uranium, and then as it passes through hands to hands, you it's just getting more and more specialized. Uh. And then finally you have either enriched uranium for nuclear fuel or enrich uranium to um 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 I if they just have a fee that they charged to mill and a fee to enrich, or if they're like, no, we're all in this together and you know, we we get ultimately part of the profits. I honestly don't know to tell you the truth. I mean, I'm 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. Um. Right, Oh that's not true. The market would have to be regulated, But I don't know if there's if it's regulated in the sense that like it's it's not capitalists or there's there's not a capitalist drive pushing it out. 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. Huzzah him. Stuff you should know. Okay, so we've got this stuff, we mind it. First of all, we found it. I was really proud of us or 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 fabricated 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 a rich, enriched or if it's used as spent fuel. Um, that's a whole other podcast that I would really love to do someday totally, and our particular the stuff you should know operation it's very fishing because we sent Jerry out ahead and her hair glows green. Then where we've had her, we've got our spot. She's like Hamana hammana hammana plus tax. Oh Man. My friend Meredith, by the way, told me someone alerted her to that, and 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 Hameda hammana hammeda and a super hot guy would be Hameda hammeda plus tax. That's pretty great. So it's just a designation. I think. I gotta love Bob. He lives in New York. 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 actually, because I associate him with New York for some reason. Well, he always due to Portland is a I'm not sure why Bob moved to Portland, because he's a very New York guy. 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 right home. Alright, So health concerns for humans, you know, we there. You know, people can debate whether or not we should mind 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 that co occurs with its daughter um isotopes or its daughter elements, and in particular, raid on is a real problem because rate on is a daughter of radium two twenty six rate on gases. Radium to comes from uranium to thirty eight decay. Right, there's I think fourteen daughters and they follow this predictable stage is uranium decays. Rate On gases 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. You It's the problem with it is you can inhale it, and when you inhale it into your lungs, it becomes I believe, polonium um, 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 rate on once in a while um, because it's possible there's a a uranium deposit under your house somewhere and that radon has made its way up. When you crack open the earth to get to purposefully get to a uranium deposit, radon is gonna 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 gonna be I don't know how often, but they're gonna be checking and testing for rate on gas all over that work site. It's not just like right where they're they're digging or whatever blasting. It's gonna be in the in the break room, It's going to be in the kitchen, in the in the office trailers. Like they're they're testing for rate on gas everywhere at least here in the US it will be man, I A'm gonna eat none of those os, maybe some cheat cake from publisher. I don't even start draw the line. Um, uranium itself actually is it's it's toxicity is really the biggest danger there. Uh and like ingesting that you can have serious kidney problems. Um, but like you said, usually radium and radon are the biggest. I mean that stuff can get in your bones. Yeah, yeah, it's a real problem. Um. The thing is so like uranium, when it releases alpha particles, those things kind of tend to bounce right off for your skin. So with with uranium, remember how it's not particularly radioactive. That's if it's just sitting there outside, like even if you're holding in your hands. It becomes particularly problematic when it's broken and you either inhale it like you're inhaling rate on 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 reeks havoc in 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. Um, it might even say Hamana hameda hammeda 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, Uh, then you know it's it's a it's an issue. But also it also is problematic with depleted uranium two, which again is the byproduct of uranium enrichment. It's a big, big, old dense hunk of uranium two thirty eight and a bunch of other heavy metals. And they use that for all sorts of stuff. They use it for UM shielding to shield out other other radiation. They use it as weights and airplanes, they use it um for bullets. It's like tank piercing bullets. And I was reading a V. A Um post about how some Gulf war veterans may have been exposed to depleted uranium UM toxicity because if they came under friendly fire because some of the shells were coated and 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 a it's toxic just because it's a heavy metal as well, which you don't want anywhere in your in your body. Yeah, and this is you know, we haven't even really touched on the environmental impact. Obviously. These minds that were around and then abandoned before you know, the sort of mid nineteen seventies 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 nine five or so, an abandoned uranium mind was not cleaned up very well. Um, 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 and stuff up, but it's um, you know, the wind and the rain carries the stuff away, it gets into the water supply. Uh. And it's like I think they said something like, you know, it takes forty years to restore the environment back to its natural state. And I hear that, I'm like, no way, man, you can. You can never restore it to its natural state, like as if it had never happened. I don't I don't buy I'm with you. I don't buy an either. That seems a really short time for a radioactive substance contaminating groundwater for pize's sake, you know, but this is something that's especially affected uh Native American population and even more specifically the Navajo Nation, because a lot of uranium minds are in the you know, hundreds of thousands of acres of the Navajo land. I think seventy million pounds of uranium reserves in the nineteen seventies were on Navajo land. And in on July six, nineteen seventy nine, there was the biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the history of the United States when a dan broke at the church Rocky Ranium Mill operated by the United Nuclear Corporation under uh, Well, I say, Andrew Jimmy Carter's watch. It's not like it was his fault or anything, but he is the one of the people who first said, hey, we should really use the 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 happened four months after Three Mile Island and three Mile Island that 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 powder power. But with the the Church Rock release, it just dwarfed Three Mile Islands released, and still I hadn't heard of it until two days ago when I started researching this, And it's like it was a huge deal, like people dying, well, like going It contaminated the river, like ninety three million gallons of toxic radioactive sludge tailings from uranium mining just contaminated the river. And they did tests of the drinking water eighty miles downstream of this release, and they found that it had seven thousand times the acceptable radioactivity of drinking water, the acceptable drinking water standards, seven thousand times eighty 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 as 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 eighty 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 because from this Yellow River all of us. Yeah, 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 Exon Valdis 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. 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 sledge and all gets combined. And if you don't design your damn right, your damn is gonna fail. But even if you do design your damn 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 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 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, already forgot have moist in it? Well you added moist, but I don't know, I always add moist. Uh, just to put a tag on all this. They do require companies, I believe, to um engage in what's called the reclamation bond, which basically says, hey, we're set us setting aside so much of our budget to come back and clean this up, so they can't at the end say 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 um, you know, if you break these land management rules. So they you know, all the incentive is there for them to do a good job, and their reputation is at stakes. So we don't want to make it appear like it's just willy nilly, they're just doing whatever they are. Accidents and they they a company wouldn't work again if they have one of those accidents. So but but it's you know, it's also it's just one of those things. Well, it's also a demonst station of like 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 accident you know. Ye, so you got anything else, I got nothing else? A little bit of contempt but I I have 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. Thanks. I think so too, Chuck. Uh well, thanks, thanks? Yeah, Okay, how about thanks for the last one. Thanks for nothing for this one. I guess 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 mayo, I'm gonna call this from a teacher. Hey guys, my name is Emilyam, 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 stitchous 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. Uh. As teachers We've gone from me honored thank to Dedmired a year ago for all the quick work we are 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 I have for knowledge is the only thing my brain seems to up space for these days, especially as of late, I found myself literally laughing out loud more often at your jokes and one liners. Uh, at least truly tired obviously. Uh. This is so invaluable to me, as most days end with me feeling like crying or calling in to 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 that means more to us than you will ever understand, So thanks for sending that. Let's also really well said. I'm glad that this is like a teacher totally and uh 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 don't see a picture of Jerry. Yeah, people tape over her mouth, over it, scowling at her, and she looks sheepish. People really did lose their minds to see Jerry's face, her beautiful face. Um, so okay. If you want to get in touch of this, like ms Gunch did right, Yes, gunch rhymes with lunch. She's so nice. I nailed it, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.