Bharat Rakshak

Vipul wrote:Uranium Corp gets state's nod for uranium processing.

The state-owned Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) has received clearance from the Karnataka government for setting up a uranium processing unit at Gogi village in Yadgir district. The UCIL, which started exploration for uranium in this village in 2007, has found rich deposits of high-grade uranium (U235) that is used to generate nuclear power.

The state high-level clearance committee (SHLCC) headed by Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa recently cleared the company’s application for mining uranium and processing, at an investment of Rs 550 crore.

The deputy commissioner of Yadgir district recently issued the no objection certificate to UCIL. However, the company is yet to be issued mining lease by the government.

“This is just a preliminary approval for their operations. Before starting work to mine the material, they have to complete the environment impact assessment report and seek approval from the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), Government of India. Only after that will their application for mining lease be processed by the state government,” H R Srinivasa, director, mines and geology, told Business Standard.

The deposits in Gogi are expected to last at least 15 years and the company wants to take up mining at a depth of 65 metres and excavate horizontally over an area of 109 acres, he said.

According to the initial estimates, the company plans to extract 500 tonnes of iron ore per day and recover 1 kg of uranium per tonne, which is double the yield from Kadapa mines in Andhra Pradesh. The UCIL has found a concentration of 400-450 gms in Jharkhand mines.

The company, apart from Gogi village, has also found rich deposits of uranium in Dharwad and Belgaum districts.

In Dharwad, the company has found uranium deposits in the shape of a bar, and are richer than the Gogi village, and the UCIL is likely to take up open cast mining, Srinivasa said.

He also allayed fears of the farmers in Gogi village that radiation levels in and around the uranium deposits are within the prescribed limits of the International Radiation Commission (IRC).

The uranium ore mining by UCIL is likely to yield royalty in excess of Rs 400 crore per annum for the department of mines and geology, he said.

However, the residents of Gogi village have raised serious doubts over the safety of conducting uranium mining in their village. During the public hearing conducted by Karnataka State Pollution Control Board on November 16, 2010, residents of Gogi and four nearby villages had raised objections for carrying out mining.

The UCIL has in its Environment Impact Assessment and Environmental Management Plan submitted to the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board recently, said an Environment Engineering Cell, comprising officials of both the UCIL and BARC, will be constituted at the project site to implement various mitigation measures.

gakakkad wrote:^^^ There goes any hopes of GE or westinghouse to get a reactor deal. If it turns out to be 135k tonnes we will be the 9 th largest in the world. B4 this discovery our reserves were estimated to be 80k tonnes . Ironically after this discovery we will have marginally more reserves than UNKIL.

gakakkad wrote:^^^ There goes any hopes of GE or westinghouse to get a reactor deal. If it turns out to be 135k tonnes we will be the 9 th largest in the world. B4 this discovery our reserves were estimated to be 80k tonnes . Ironically after this discovery we will have marginally more reserves than UNKIL.

It will still not be sufficient to meet India's needs: Banerjee

Tummalapalle in Andhra Pradesh could have one of the largest uranium reserves in the world. Recent studies have indicated that it could have a reserve of 1.5 lakh tonnes of the scarce material.

Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Srikumar Banerjee said: “Studies have already shown that the area had a confirmed reserve of 49,000 tonnes and recent surveys indicated that this figure could go up even three folds.”

How many decades it is good for. Or at least 100 years

"It`s confirmed that the mine has 49,000 tonnes of ore, and there are indications that the total quantity could be three times of that amount. If that be the case, it will become the largest uranium mine in the world. The plant is ready, and will begin production by the end of this year," Banerjee said.

Amber G. wrote:About 1 ton of U235 for 1GW year. ...Since U235 is about .7% of natural U.. about 140 tons per 1GW year.

The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has discovered that the upcoming uranium mine in Andhra Pradesh's Tumalapalli has close to 49,000 tonnes of uranium — three times the original estimate of the area`s deposits. In fact, there are indications that the total quantity could go up to 1.5 lakh tonnes, which would make it among the largest uranium mines in the world.

PratikDas wrote:This will provide the seed energy for more Thorium energy research, and we happen to have a good deal of that

Theo_Fidel wrote:

PratikDas wrote:This will provide the seed energy for more Thorium energy research, and we happen to have a good deal of that

To do that you would need to separate out the U-235 away from U-238 which would trigger off a whole separate slew of issues. Much easier to straight breed Pu-239 from U-238. Though no one has been able to commercially do this yet. Every attempt has ended in disappointment.

Also much easier to separate Pu-239. BARC is trying to use Pu-239 to breed Thorium in PFBR Kalpakkam to U-233. Only need a couple of tonnes of Pu-239 for this. Needs to be seen how efficient the process ends up being.

PratikDas wrote:I was simply pointing out the fact that in the research phase most experiments consume more energy than they produce.

Sanku wrote:

PratikDas wrote:I was simply pointing out the fact that in the research phase most experiments consume more energy than they produce.

In ALL phases all human activities consume more energy than they produce. This is law of conservation of energy coupled with engineering efficiency of form of energy transformation.

You probably want to say something else.

AmberG wrote:

GuruPrabhu wrote:I hadn't realized that the discussion had moved here. The explanation for U/Th not sinking is as Amber said -- U/Th are lithophile rather than siderophile (metal loving). This is seen in foundries also. If you take a large vat of molten iron, the U and Th impurities migrate from the bulk and concentrate on the periphery (mostly on top!). The core of the earth has two parts, a solid one and a liquid one -- the liquid is mostly molten Fe and Ni, which has expelled the U and Th.

There is some speculation that there is a concentration of U in the solid core also. If true, this may form a natural reactor. There is no direct evidence yet -- the numbers have to add. The measured *total* heat flow from the earth is either 31 TW or 44 TW, depending on the method used. OTOH, several calculations now agree that the radiogenic component (U/Th/K decays in the mantle) contributes 19-20 TW. There are estimates that the "core reactor" may contribute as much as 6 TW. All of this can be sorted out if planned large neutrino detectors get the go ahead.

Don't know if GP is still here to read this (or he became a victim of Bradmins' game) but neutrino detectors in Japan and Italy(Kamioka Liquid-Scintillator Antineutrino Detector and the Borexino) have confirmed, according to a recent article, that indeed there is fission going on.

More than half of 44 TW is from radioactive decay (+ fission in the core, confirmed by geoneutrino's). And yes about 4TW from decaying K40. Remember those bananas!

Expect a few news headlines regarding this in coming days.

WASHINGTON: India could soon join a select group of countries like US, China and France which export nuclear reactors, a Congressional report has said.

....

According to World Nuclear Association, India is offering its indigenous 220 and 540 megawatt heavy water reactor designs for export, although no specific customers have been identified.

The CRS report said only a limited number of countries conduct commercial enrichment and reprocessing of fissile materials and can supply this technology.

At present, supplier states are not planning any transfers of enrichment or reprocessing technology. The Nuclear Suppliers Group recently added criteria to its guidelines for the supply of fuel cycle technologies.

"Commercial reprocessing is now being done in France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and India."

upcoming uranium mine in Andhra Pradesh's Tumalapalli

PratikDas wrote:

Sanku wrote: In ALL phases all human activities consume more energy than they produce. This is law of conservation of energy coupled with engineering efficiency of form of energy transformation.

You probably want to say something else.

No. I was spot on. Burning a kerosene lamp as an experiment with a match would produce more energy than what was consumed in making the match itself or my act of setting it alight, provided there's enough kerosene in the lamp to tilt the odds in my favour. There is no need to go back to the time of the dinosaurs that died to provide biomass that decayed into the crude oil which gave the kerosene.

Amber G. wrote:(remember all those discussion about radioactivity in a banana!)

ramana wrote:I said many times the object of the deal is to codicil the NPT and get out of the sanctions regime. All else is time pass.

Theo_Fidel wrote:Except the NPT has not been amended. And the sanctions regime has not been lifted.

amit wrote:^^^^^

Same old stuff that has been discussed to death and dissed recycled yet again. Sigh!

somnath wrote:There are repeated allusions to non-amendment of NPT...Was that ever a goal? Do people even know what NPT is about? Signing up to NPT, even as a nuclear weapons power, would mean giving up the right to test for ever!

It would obvioulsy be a waste of time to ask for any evidence that anyone promised "NPT amendment" as a byproduct of the nuke deal..

gakakkad wrote:@ Amber would you be having full text of the nature article?
From my hospital I can only access Nature Medicine and Nature genetics.

London, July 18: We all know that the Earth runs on massive amounts of heat - enough to melt iron in the outer core, create magnetic field, spread the sea floors and move the continents. However, where all this heat comes from was a mystery until now....
...
According to a new research, ...half of our planet's internal heat stems from natural radioactivity...

Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat is constantly flowing out of the Earth's interior into space. But, where does it come from?

Geologists relied on temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world.

Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in Japan, first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly.

Using the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) located under a mountain in Japan, they analyzed geoneutrinos -emitted by decaying radioactive materials within the Earth.

<snip>

KamLAND scientists have now published new figures for heat energy from radioactive decay. Based on the improved sensitivity of the KamLAND detector, plus several years' worth of additional data, the new estimate is not merely "consistent" with the predictions of accepted geophysical models but is precise enough to aid in refining those models.

Antineutrinos are produced not only in the decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes but in a variety of others, including fission products in nuclear power reactors. In fact, reactor-produced antineutrinos were the first neutrinos to be directly detected (neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinguished from each other by the interactions in which they appear).

All models of the inner Earth depend on indirect evidence. Leading models of the kind known as bulk silicate Earth (BSE) assume that the mantle and crust contain only lithophiles ("rock-loving" elements) {We talked about this wrt to question why U/Th is more in the crust etc} and the core contains only siderophiles (elements that "like to be with iron"). Thus all the heat from radioactive decay comes from the crust and mantle - about eight terawatts from uranium 238 (238U), another eight terawatts from thorium 232 (232Th), and four terawatts from potassium 40 (40K).{K40 is primary reason why banana - or human body - is radioactive ...though C14 also contributes to human radioactivity}

Additional factors that have to be taken into account include how the radioactive elements are distributed (whether uniformly or concentrated in a "sunken layer" at the core-mantle boundary).....
...

The study is detailed in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Gerard wrote:

upcoming uranium mine in Andhra Pradesh's Tumalapalli

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