Funny—unlike the Nelson/Goodwin “Patriots”, Dakota Rural Action and the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance are fighting a real threat to our well-being, mining pollution in Black Hills water, and they don’t feel the need to recruit militia members to stand watch against “the forces of evil” at their rally.
DRA and CWA will celebrate World Water Day at the Dahl Arts Center on Saturday, March 31, at 6 p.m.:
A local celebration of international World Water Day, a day to celebrate fresh water, will be held at Dahl Arts Center, 713 7th Street, on March 31, 2018 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. This free event will include a concert, a silent auction with unique items to bid on, and delicious snacks from Breadroot Coop. Vibrant, foot-stomping performances by musicians and spoken-word poets will be interspersed with brief information sharing about how South Dakotans can protect our precious water supplies.
The River Liffey Boys will begin the celebration with throbbing bluegrass and Celtic rhythms, followed by performers Steve Thorpe, and then Linda Boyle whose songs that will inspire your deepest connection to the land and water. Spoken word poets from Pine Ridge will illuminate the connections between clean water and Indigenous rights, which will weave together past resistance to oppression with future tasks, and singer Anna Robbins will celebrate the spirit of water in all of us to inspire your inner water protector [Dakota Rural Action & Clean Water Alliance, press release, 2018.03.19].
Azarga/Powertech is still waiting for final approval to inject lots of water into the ground in the southern Black Hills to squirt uranium to the surface.
I wonder if there will be any discussions regarding the release of naturally occurring radionuclides from the extraction of natural gas, or the amount of those isotopes and other heavy metals left in coal fly ash, or those radionuclides and heavy metals left in the renewable wastes that wind up in the dump.
Seems like metals and radionuclides have a higher probability of being emitted into air, water, and soil from those paths due to their greater volume and the lack of interest in regulating them.
The latter occurs because if those releases into the environment were regulated and monitored as tightly as nuclear is today, the cost of wind and solar with fossil fuel back-up would increase.
Other places would enjoy clean energy from nuclear due to uranium mining here, but any impacts stay here. We enjoy clean energy from solar and wind that require critical elements mined elsewhere, but those impacts stay over there.
Hmmm….I don’t think the latter is any better than the former.
The focus should really be on reducing the impacts that inevitably occur when generating all forms of carbon-free energy. And there are ways for wind, solar, and nuclear to work together in this regard.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35092#
Uranium prices have been pretty low lately, but what I find interesting is the following:
“During 2017, a significant portion of domestic uranium concentrate came from alternate sources such as conversion facilities and various clean-up sites.”
We need to see the Pennington County “MINING ORDINANCE” which appears nowhere on its website and I understand is composed of multiple changes to present ordinances or other laws. Seems kinda like Trumps tax bill which nobody got to read, osubstantively. BTW Trump also took GOAC’s republican lead to spare Rounds from any kind real EB5 investigation. Mueller said no.
SD is not much different than the con-administration of con-artist trump.
Ironically, many of the critical elements needed to make renewable technologies go, from solar to wind to batteries to LEDs, can be found in mining wastes.
However, it is more expensive to extract them from such a feedstock because they exist at much lower concentrations. So you either need to apply a lot of acid leaching in the process, or you need to invest in greener chemistries.
West Virginia is actively studying the extraction of rare earth metals from mine drainage.
http://ohiovalleyresource.org/2017/12/15/rare-opportunity-researchers-see-potential-mining-coal-waste/
“The acid mine drainage production in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and eastern Ohio can supply anywhere between 800 tons per year to maybe 2,200 tons per year of rare earth elements,” he said. “Now 800 tons a year is basically what the military needs for defense purposes.”
North Dakota and Wyoming are also studying this extraction from coal fly ash.
https://www.energy.gov/fe/articles/doe-announces-nine-new-projects-advance-technology-development-recovery-rare-earth
Since the convo surfed far away from clean water, might I add- Uber got the first civilian fatality for self driving vehicles. Can the rest be far behind? Sort of a futuristic one upsmanship.
I don’t think it’s moved away from clean water….clean the water, extract the beneficial elements, and separate out the bad ones. Find the best way to reduce the final wastes and isolate them.
Power the monitoring systems for any isolated wastes with stand-alone wind and solar.
Seriously, Doc. From what little I have read about in situ unranium extraction, the massive amounts of water used can never be cleaned enough for human consumption. AmIwrong?
Aren’t they supposed to be using water sources that are not fit for human consumption nor accessible to human drinking sources in the first place? And most of that water is recycled.
If they restore the water body to a similar condition, it couldn’t be suitable for human consumption. How you measure “similarity” is often where the rub is. You are extracting various elements, changing solubilities of others, and not putting the residues back where you got them in the first place.
Nevertheless, evaporation to solid residues is often part of the back end of the cycle, so either that water is being recycled, or it enters the biosphere as water.