Study: 2 major US aquifers contaminated by natural uranium
Naturally occurring uranium is being mobilized by farm-related pollution
From the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Nearly 2 million people throughout the Great Plains and California above aquifer sites contaminated with natural uranium that is mobilized by human-contributed nitrate, according to a study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Data from roughly 275,000 groundwater samples in the High Plains and Central Valley aquifers show that many Americans live less than two-thirds of a mile from wells that often far exceed the uranium guideline set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The study reports that 78 percent of the uranium-contaminated sites were linked to the presence of nitrate, a common groundwater contaminant that originates mainly from chemical fertilizers and animal waste. Nitrate mobilizes naturally occurring uranium through a series of bacterial and chemical reactions that oxidize the radioactive mineral, making it soluble in groundwater.
UNL researchers Karrie Weber and Jason Nolan found that the High Plains aquifer contains uranium concentrations up to 89 times the EPA standard and nitrate concentrations up to 189 times greater. The uranium and nitrate levels of the California-based Central Valley aquifer measured up to 180 and 34 times their respective EPA thresholds.
The authors published their findings in the August edition of the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. Their research was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey.
“It needs to be recognized that uranium is a widespread contaminant,” said Weber, assistant professor of biological, Earth and atmospheric sciences. “And we are creating this problem by producing a primary contaminant that leads to a secondary one.”
Prior research has suggested that prolonged drinking of uranium-contaminated water may lead, or make people more susceptible, to kidney damage and elevated blood pressure. According to Weber, peer-reviewed studies have also indicated that food crops can accumulate uranium when irrigated by water containing high concentrations of it.
The High Plains aquifer — the largest in the United States — provides drinking water and irrigation for an eight-state swath that stretches from South Dakota through Nebraska and into northern Texas. As California’s largest reservoir, the Central Valley aquifer sits beneath some of the state’s most fertile agricultural land. According to a 2012 census from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the two aquifers irrigate cropland that accounts for one-sixth of the annual revenue generated by U.S. agriculture.
The researchers also determined that only one of the six wells located near a former or current mining site was contaminated. This finding counters the notion that uranium contamination stems primarily from mining operations or spent nuclear fuel, Weber said.
“We hope that this study serves as a catalyst to get other people interested in this issue,” she said. “If the problem is this widespread, more research needs to be done. We’re limited by the data that’s been collected, and uranium isn’t often monitored.”
Weber said the expense of water treatment plants — specialized facilities that can cost tens of millions of dollars — often puts them out of financial reach for smaller and rural communities. Addressing the issue might require managing groundwater and focusing on the aquifers’ sediment, which houses bacteria that can help control uranium by breathing and eating it, she said.
Regardless of the approach, Weber said it is important for decision-makers and researchers to account for the presence of uranium in U.S. water sources.
“When you start thinking about how much water is drawn from these aquifers, it’s substantial relative to anywhere else in the world,” Weber said. “These two aquifers are economically important — they play a significant role in feeding the nation — but they’re also important for health.
“What’s the point of having water if you can’t drink it or use it for irrigation?”
###
One wonders how much real risk there is here. For example, we get more radiation in a banana (due to radioactive potassium drawn from the soil) than we’d get from exposure to Fukashima’s supposed radiation releases. Along those lines, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta has this to say about natural Uranium exposure:
Root crops such as potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and sweet potatoes contribute the highest amounts of uranium to the diet. The amount of uranium in these foods is directly related to the amount of uranium in the soil in which they are grown.
Just think of all those radioactive french fries and sweet potato fries (the new craze) Americans consume.
The ATSDR goes on to say in the toxicology report:
The general population is exposed to uranium via ingestion of food and drinking water and inhalation of air, with food being the primary contributor to body burden. The daily intake of uranium from food sources ranges from 0.6 to 1.0 pCi/day (0.9–1.5 µg/day). Uranium from soil is not taken up by plants, but rather is adsorbed onto the roots. Thus, the highest levels of uranium are found in root vegetables, primarily unwashed potatoes. Populations living near uranium mills or mines or other areas with elevated uranium in soil may be exposed to higher levels of uranium from locally grown vegetables. Uranium levels in drinking water vary widely, with a mean population-weighted average of 0.8 pCi/L. Compared to the ingestion route, the intake of uranium via inhalation is small; intakes range from 0.0007 to 0.007 pCi/day (0.001–0.01 µg/day).
Uranium is poorly absorbed following inhalation, oral, or dermal exposure and the amount absorbed is heavily dependent on the solubility of the compound.
It is important to note that this report doesn’t assign public health risks and says nothing about the background radiation count prior to the study because they appear to have no historical research to look at previous levels. if water examples from those aquifers exist from 50 or more years ago, they might be able to quantify how much if any increase in Uranium solubility there is.
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Fear and ignorance is the key that allows political control of a gullible public obsessed with their “modern” and “polluted” society…Chicken Little is alive and well.
A movement towards ying/yang is a great medicine for life that does not require any prescription.
Just rational thought and common-sense practice
I worked on a Uranium mine in Northern Territory of Australia some years ago. At the time it was built it was the most heavily regulated mine in the world, controlled by its own Act of the Australian Parliament. Part of the Act required the mine to monitor every drop of water that left the mine site and report on any contaminates in the water including uranium. They did these reports on a regular basis and contaminates were detailed in ‘PPM’ = parts per million, uranium was not always present in measurable amounts!. The mine was also charged to monitor the radiation of the local area including the nearby creek which would only flow during the wet season with several monitoring stations along the creek bed. These figures were always reported in kilograms per mega litre and the numbers were always eye opening!
We are always led by what is written and it is hard to sit back sometimes and balance information with rational though and question.
Atmospheric nitrate is fixed by plants/bacteria in the soil….
Why can’t you just suggest we peel our potatoes and other root vegetables before they are processed and consumed? Should we avoid Potassium-40 as well?
Confused? Are there not two paths for damage, radiation or standard heavy metal type poisoning. Does the study claim the harm is from radiation? If not the banana example may be irrelevant.
The radioactive aspect will probably be the ‘really scary’ meme that will be used as the call to action.
been waiting for nuclear to hit the radar – have to scare out that nasty clean, green, abundant energy –
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/japan-heads-toward-nuclear-unknown-with-post-fukushima-restarts
“Japan’s restarts are being closely watched as the Fukushima disaster snuffed out what was then called a global nuclear renaissance. Success in Japan might allow the industry to re-emphasize nuclear as carbon-free energy before international climate talks in Paris this year, where almost 200 nations will negotiate emission standards.
This week, the Obama administration outlined a limited role for U.S. nuclear plants in its carbon reduction rules, withdrawing some credit for existing nuclear units while giving credit to new reactors under construction.
The first Japanese reactor to restart is at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai plant on the southern island of Kyushu. It could be back online as soon as Aug. 10, according to the company.”
What about the Major US aquifer contaminated with heavy metals by direct action of the EPA.
When is somebody; such as the EPA director, going to get fired for that screw up of incompetence ??
This is scary. Need more research money.
Only for those who glow in the dark.
Ocean is full of Uranium. Before I started swimming in the ocean, I had three bald patches on my head. Now I have only one.
Maybe Uranium, is a cure for unsightly hair growth.
g
My wife tells me, if I come home glowing in the dark, I have to sleep in the garage… However, she does like my night light.
Nuts! Now I.’m going to have to worry about these mineral supplements:
http://www.naturessunshine.com/us/product/trace-mineral-maintenance-360-tabs/4205/
Ingredients:
Aluminum, antimony, barium, beryllium, bismuth, boron, bromine, cadmium, calcium, cerium, cesium, chlorine, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, erbium, europium, fluorine, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, gold, hafnium, holmium, indium, iodine, iridium, iron, lanthanum, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, neodymium, nickel, niobium, osmium, palladium, phosphorus, platinum, potassium, praseodymium, rhenium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, samarium, scandium, selenium, silicon, silver, sodium, sulfur, tantalum, tellurium, terbium, thallium, thorium, thulium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zinc and zirconium.
Thought you might like this from us on the other side of the pond Windscale is the town near the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant.
James Bull
This strikes me as another overhyped press release. EPA guidelines for Uranium are 30uG/L according to this link, http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/#Radionuclides.
Naturally occurring radioactive carbon-14 in *ALL* foods (about 1 part per trillion) continues to be the major source of radiation damage to DNA. It will remain so for several reasons: shorter half-life (5730 years rather than 4.5 billion years) means higher specific activity (4.6 Ci/g for C-14, 3.3×10^-7 Ci/g for U-238, about 14 MILLION times higher!), it incorporates itself DIRECTLY into the DNA rather than shooting blindly at it from a distance as other radioisotopes do, and when a C-14 atom incorporated into a DNA molecule decays it is 100% efficient at causing damage to the DNA.
See, carbon IS evil!
😉
But coal is pure natural organic C12. By burning it we lessen the risk of breathing C14.
http://gettingstronger.org/hormesis. Website numerous studies outlining benefits of lower exposure radiation. Dr. Art Robinson in ACCESS TO ENERGY sited a study where recycled iron ( Hiroshima & Nagasaki ) in rebar used in Japanese apartment buildings resulted in NO CANCER in occupants. Just sayin’.
The toxicity of uranium (as opposed to the toxic effects of the radioactivity it generates) doesn’t seem to be well understood. The “Gulf War Syndrome” may be a consequence of the large amounts of depleted (i.e. almost totally non-radioactive) 238U used in armor-piercing shells, and there is a lot of that stuff lying around Iraq (and there are anectdotal reports of large increases in cancer occurrences there too, which may or may not be related). As I say, it’s not well understood (mainly because all the toxicology has focused on the radioactive aspect and not the chemical toxicity), but I’d be cautious about saying uranium is non-toxic in low doses.
Also, when you talk about the low levels of radioactivity from uranium, don’t forget that the overwhelming amount of radiation coming from natural uranium actually derives from its decay products, and some of these are quite nasty. You can sit on bags of yellow-cake in a uranium refinery and receive an utterly minimal dose of radiation, but the raw ore that produced that yellow-cake would knock your socks off (and maybe other body-parts too). Of the daughter products 218Po is particularly nasty because it is an alpha emitter with a very short half-life. The Russian government uses it to assassinate people who say bad things about Putin. Alpha particles are way worse than gamma rays because they are absorbed by tissue, while the gammas mostly go right through you without doing too much damage on the way.
So this article should not be dismissed as shrill eco-nonsense. It may well point to potential health and environmental problems down the road, and if there is a problem developing, there may be simple ways to mitigate it.
BTW I have spent a substantial part of my career doing uranium exploration. I’m about as pro-nuke as they come, but I have learned to respect uranium, and treat it with care.
The main point to take home from this article is this quote
“We hope that this study serves as a catalyst to get other people interested in this issue,” she said. “If the problem is this widespread, more research needs to be done. We’re limited by the data that’s been collected, and uranium isn’t often monitored.”
They have learned well from the Climate Changers. Research should only break ground so that more research is needed. Make a 30 year career of it.
I would rather my tax dollars go to fund this kind of research, and far less into renewable energy research of wind and thermal solar.
Jared
With the increasing age of the population, may I suggest: –
“They have learned well from the Climate Changers. Research should only break ground so that more research is needed. Make a FIFTY year career of it.”
Doesn’t that look better?
Auto
Gee, there ought to be some way to give CO2 a bit part in this to get a bigger grant. Maybe if the aquifer is somehow warming and becoming acidic?
{Igor! Close the SARCophagus!}
And let’s not forget that anyone who lives in a granite area is certain to have uranium in their groundwater and radon gas in their basements – and that is a significant percentage of the population.
Thankfully, the levels of contamination are usually insignificant.
For the record, the world’s most naturally radio-active food is usually the brazil nut.
[snip -insults -mod]
I don’t have anything more than the memory of reading an article in a UK paper about researchers who sent their findings to some of the Greenblob groups showing increases in child cancer near military installations but not giving the locations of said installations. When the recipients of the report started kicking off and demanding action and making claims of a cover up the researchers gave the location of said military installations which were all medieval castle ruins on granite bedrock. It was the granite not the “evil” military causing the increase.
James Bull
It isn’t just the food… In about 1971 I had a front tooth capped. The enamel ceramic on it was colored with Uranium. The dentist assured me it wasn’t very radioactive… Lasted about 30 years… slightly irradiating me and my food the whole time. Now banned, along with uraniun glazed dishes once common… but I am still doing fine…
Color me unconcerned about the water…
Look at the map, Northern Minnesota is all granite covered with varying degrees of glacial drift, don’t see much uranium contaminated water there.
This is what happens in science when there seems to be little left to discover. They gotta do something. Red and pink granites which occupy ~3/4 of the Precambrian shield are sub-economic sources of uranium (stay away from the counter top!) at around $100-150/lb. France is electrified 75% or more with nuclear and they have had only one death in the industry since its inception – it was a guy moving spent rods – maybe he was hit with a forklift. We will be getting used to a lot more uranium/thorium around in the not too distant future – it is the only choice for power in the future, not matter what.
Instead of suggesting what will happen to kidneys and blood pressure (probably from an overdose), why don’t they measure the longevity of the population in those regions. I’m sure an alarming drop in longevity would have been noticed before now. I’m still actively consulting in the mining exploration, mineral processing and mine development business, which has included uranium deposits, rare earths with elevated thorium and uranium, and phosphate with elevated uranium and radium and I’m closer to 80 than I am to 70. People I know in uranium exploration are busy working to have an inventory for this slam dunk market of the near future.
Pre-Cambrian granites are one thing, younger ones another. I have sat my tired posterior on 2b.y.+ old granites and heard my scintillometer go click-click after all these aeons. My advice to anyone around the much younger granites in such places as California, Idaho, Nevada, heck, just about anywhere there are intrusive rocks; if you are really afraid; don’t sit on an outcrop. And, as noted, watch out for counter tops (especially those zircons!).
Nuclear alarmists always say that while external radiation is not dangerous anymore when the source disappears, the real danger is in ingested or inhaled particles that are alpha emitters, such as uranium, or plutonium. These are supposed to bombard the victim and then cancer is the logical enpoint. It is however not easy to get a substantial amount of uranium or plutonium inside your body this way, and if there is one group of people who experienced that it is the workers that were involved at los Alamos in the development of the A-bomb. As pioneers they received sometimes huge internal doses, and several of them have donated their bodies to the USTUR institute at U Seattle. Here they tried to correlate cause of death to exposure and this has so far resulted in nothing: no excess cancer that could be linked to the exposure.
The late prof Bernard Cohen (Pittsburgh) as well as other have tried to defuse this panic, but so far alas in vain.
Cohen’s book:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/
and another valiant attempt to defuse radiation alarmism:
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Public_Trust_in_Nuclear_Energy.pdf
Scare the peoples some more.
The number of people that died from evacuation of the Fukushima reactor: 20,000
Number of people who died from radioactive fallout: 0.
Dig a deep hole in the ground where uranium is located and guess what you might find.
Where did they get their training from? Cracker Jack School of no Common Sense.
The lies about fracking causing contamination of drinking wells was just not enough.
Scaring people and nudging them on nuclear was not enough.
Pretty soon, EPA will require all private wells to be closed and everyone purchase water.
Europe has milk with a two month shelf life. Carter made sure no one could ‘radiate’ milk and give it a shelf life. The leftists Franken Scare the People crowd have to keep their income stream.
We had 34 nuclear permits under process 9 years ago. Then it dropped to 4. Now they are slow walked and on hold. I guess it will take a hunger games catastrophe of starving energy away from California and DC before the idjits get a clue. How sad.
.
“Then it dropped to 4. Now they are slow walked and on hold.”
Don’t know which you are talking about, but there are 4 in the southeast that
are quite active, and should be going on line within 5 years.
empiresentry,
In the following phrase, I believe you mean prefecture.
“The number of people that died from evacuation of the Fukushima reactor:”
Some 300,000 people evacuated their homes in the prefecture
deaths relating to this displacement – around 1,600
Close to 16,000 people were killed across Japan as a direct result of the earthquake and tsunami
Ref: source
It always gets me that people talk as if the Fukushima incident was as a result of something going wrong at the plant not that it was swamped by a big wave that did much damage to all the safety and backup equipment. Ok they might have built the emergency gens uphill of the plant rather than nearer the sea but hindsight is a great thing.
If you don’t learn from the past you repeat it’s mistakes.
James Bull
“For example, we get more radiation in a banana…”
The press release doesn’t mention radiation hazard. It says:
“Prior research has suggested that prolonged drinking of uranium-contaminated water may lead, or make people more susceptible, to kidney damage and elevated blood pressure.”
Uranium is a heavy metal. Biologically, its oxidised chemistry is likely similar to hexavalent chromium.
They don’t mention heavy metal damage either.
No. Likely not.
Uranium is in the dull f-block, Chromium is in the more exiting d-block. Different as chalk and cheese.
Hexavalent Chromium is toxic because it traverses the cell membranes and is then trapped inside the cell after being reduced to lower valent states. This property means [Cr51] is in fact routinely used in biological assays as a measure of cell integrity:chromium release is an indicator of cell death or membrane disruption.
Uranium nitrate may show (chemical) toxicity at high doses (above 450 microg U L(-1) in one study* but rapidly rapidly washes out of tissue, as expected.
*http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20012274
If it glows in the dark, it might not be safe.
If it glows in the dark and is unshielded, run away.
With a quick look, I didn’t find 50-year-old samples, but here’s mention of 1970s samples:
http://www.kgs.ku.edu/HighPlains/atlas/atgwql.htm
The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was built in 1949 on the northeast edge of the Snake River Plain. The Site lies near the base of the Pioneer, Lost River, and Lemhi mountain ranges. People have lived in the area for 10,000 years, and INL is on a part of the indigenous lands of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples, who have ceremonial sites there still.INL sits on the upstream end of the Snake River Aquifer. The aquifer, which underlies 10,000 square miles of Idaho’s high desert, holds as much water as Lake Erie. After it flows beneath the Site, it continues westward, providing water for the Magic Valley, one of the state’s richest agricultural regions with a growing population and diversifying economy.
Two of the greatest threats to the Snake River Aquifer are direct results of Idaho’s participation in the nuclear weapons production complex.
Plutonium-contaminated waste from the Rocky Flats trigger factory was buried in unlined pits at INL and has been a matter of public concern since the 1960s.
The other major threat now being addressed is from liquid high-level waste stored in buried tanks above the aquifer. High-level waste comes from reprocessing irradiated nuclear reactor fuel and contains 99% of the radioactivity that results from nuclear bomb production.
All told, cleanup at the Idaho National Laboratory will cost more than $22 billion and take about half a century. Even after all of that, Idaho’s land and drinking water will be polluted with nuclear contamination until the end of time.
http://snakeriveralliance.org/inl-waste-cleanup/
Roommate in college lived on the south side of the Snake River Canyon and pointed out the springs feeding out the the aquifer in 1979. A lot of testing for rates, flows and exposure. All this and it only rates a ‘yellow’ on the map?
Here is another source:
pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0426/report.pdf
If the wells have too much uranium, then just use surface water. Ahem, if EPA has not destroyed it.
In most cases the problem is that the measuring equipment has improved more than common sense.
I was just reading somewhere that among the predictions that Dr. Ehrlich made back in the 1970’s was that human life expectancy would drop to 47 years by the year 2000. Just what is the current life expectancy in the areas where all the supposed contamination in the food supply and water needing to be watched? I also note on the map that over there in the east near New York and Pennsylvania there are a whole lot of the little red dots without those alarming blue dots that are supposed to “activate” the solubility of the uranium. Hmmm maybe that Granite that GPearse referenced above is a more telling predictor of concentrations of soluble uranium?
47! OMG, I’m over due!
The Ogallala (name of the High Plains system) is a very slow recharge aquifer averaging 0.024 inches per year. The original depth below the surface was about 200 feet but the water level is dropping rapidly due to lack of recharge. It would take rainfall about 8000 years to reach the top of the water level but it is in an arid part of the nation so recharge is slowed even more. There is also a caliche barrier across part of the aquifer.
The matrix in the Ogallala is paleowater having been charged in the last glacial. Given the characteristics of the aquifer, it seems probable to me that the Uranium was deposited with the aquifer rock about 6 million years ago. As a final piece of the puzzle, Uranium is found on the surface across a broad area in the southern end of the Ogallala in West Texas’
Well low level radiation is good for people. Radiation hormesis it’s called.
“Radiation hormesis is the hypothesis that low doses of ionizing radiation (within the region of and just above natural background levels) are beneficial, stimulating the activation of repair mechanisms that protect against disease, that are not activated in absence of ionizing radiation”.
Currently disagreement about whether it works …….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
And to test it properly you need to compare organisms grown in a radiation free environment with those grown with varying degrees of background radiation. So you need to be able to grow critters in a location with no background radiation and feed them radiation free food. You would have to remove the radioactive isotopes of carbon and potassium from food. Not easy
But if you want a dose of background radiation why not go for a walk in the park or along the beach ?
Given the handling of this by the press, I’d say it’s a trial balloon for a new topic for alarmists.
Uranium is not the problem, radium is. http://il.water.usgs.gov/proj/gwstudies/radium/
There are solutions to these things, but folks have to spend money on them. I’m more worried about other stuff, personally.
“The uranium and nitrate levels of the California-based Central Valley aquifer measured up to 180 and 34 times their respective EPA thresholds.”
This isn’t the language of science, it is the language of sensationalist journalism. The don’t give actual values, only the “timeses.”
I participated in a training course on the use of a certain spectroscopy instrument. The instructor showed us that he could find uranium in the dust that was in every office hallway.
It’s not like naturally found water is “pure” everywhere except these locations and “pure” of all toxins except uranium. What about lead, asbestos, sporidia, dioxin, estrogenic compounds et cetera, ad nauseum? This BEFORE we even dare question whether the fluoride, trihalomethane, bromates, and ferric sulfate municipal systems deliberately add into the water supply are risking anything comparable to the public health as the risk they are attempting to mitigate.
For that matter, in Portland Oregon last year, officials apparently panicked when a teenager was videotaped urinating into Mount Tabor Reservoir No. 5, contaminating 38 million gallons of already treated drinking water with about six ounces of (alcohol and marijuana laced) pee. Or so I assume.
There is *stuff* in water. Cope.
Me drink water? Yuk! Fish £uck in it!
I went and read the EPA stuff. Their 30ug/L standard is also the WHO recommended level. Developed using a number of rat, rabbit, and dog lab studies plus human epidemiology in Canada, Norway, and Finland where naturally high uranium well water occurs. There is a good 23 page WHO precis overviewing all the the studies easily googled.
The problem is not radioactivity. AW is right about the potassium in bananas. It is heavy metal kidney damage, dose and lengthnof exposure dependent progressive and irreversible nephritis. So indeed this is a potential animal/health problem. Up to 95% can be removed by simple coagulation with iron sulfate. Works for municipal water supplies. That might not be feasible for isolated farms. Dunno. But reverse osmosis (removes 99%) is a solution for isolated contaminated farms; same type and size system as used for desalination on oceangoing yachts.
Main ‘irrigation/soil’ food uptake is certain root vegetables (potatos, sweet potatos, turnips). Not much grown over the Ogallalla and Central aquifers. Drinking water would be the main concern. For which WHO already highlights two different readily available solutions.
Problem maybe sometimes? This paper says yes, depending on the well. Cause for alarm, definitely not. Simple adaptation where needed. Total research time: 5 min EPA, <5 min Google to find WHO, 15 minutes to read and understand the WHO white paper.