Re: Scare tactics

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 07:04 AM 2/10/99 -0600, you wrote:
>
>I agree with Holloway3 (?name?) that there is some uranium in the tailings
pile. In addition to the process not being 100% efficient, over the life of
a mill, various contaminated materials are placed in the tailings pile, and
some of these may contain significant quantities of uranium.

There should be no doubt that there will be SOME uranium among the tailings
at any old uranium mill (but few were less than 95% efficient at
extraction). However, since the mill was in the business of removing the
uranium, the residual amounts of uranium will be small in comparispon to
other isotopes, and particularly radium. If someone really is detecting
substantial amounts of uranium downstream of this mill site, they should
also be seeing large amounts of radium, or something is wrong with the
picture.
>
>For the Atlas Tailings site, the bigger issue related to contaminants in
the river is due to seepage containing ammonia

The chemistry of the tailings can be rather messy (when slime tailings sit
in the open sunshine of South Dakota for decades and never dry out, there
is something unusual involved). In that regard, there is legitimate reason
for concern over what may be leaking from the site into the river system.

---------
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu

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