Malaysia – A Rare Earth Mule

RM50mil fine per mishap for Lynas = donation to the government to allow them to build?

By P N

 

In Malaysia, no housing developer has ever gone to jail for stealing residents’ sinking fund/maintenance charges provided they wind up and now DG Abdul Aziz is talking about a RM50mil fine per mishap for Lynas.

We all know that many housing developers consistently breach Act 663 Building and Common Property (Maintenance and Management) Act 2007 and with no serious enforcement, do you expect us to believe that the authorities are going to enforce the law on one of the world’s largest rare earth mining companies? All fines imposed on Lynas could be an act of showcasing only, RM50mil could be donated to the Government and there is no actual fine. What is RM50mil if you compare that to the cancer risk.  

In one article, the DG mentioned that the radioactive waste from Lynas Corp’s plant can be “scattered everywhere”, and I wonder whether he was joking or Shannon Teoh (MI) did a mistake in his reporting (22nd April 2011). If he was serious, I think we better scatter rare earth and thorium knowledge in his brain first before he says something. I call upon the DG to resign if he has a conscience, and don’t become a scapegoat or tool of the powers that be.  

Let me provide a theory and a simple explanation about rare earth and the 2 nuclear power plants that we are going to build.    

Firstly, thorium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium) is precious and can be used as fuel in nuclear reactors, thus Malaysia has been chosen to produce it as a by-product of the extraction of rare earths from monazite sands. Since we intend to build two nuclear power plants, no countries or companies are willing to help us unless we become a mule, carrying the toxic/radioactive burden on our back while awaiting these big brothers to decide what to do with the thorium waste next. Possibly become the world supplier of thorium fuel rods. 

Decision on what to do with the thorium is difficult to make and filled with uncertainty, thus no conclusive statements on the waste being made so far. The only way out is to say it is safe to store it here. Countries like Russia, India, and recently China, have plans to use thorium for their nuclear power, partly because of its safety benefits.

Our proposed two nuclear reactors will be powered by thorium since we are already processing it and are readily available rather than to use uranium which is rarer, costly and more dangerous. So our proposed reactors are experimental and one of the earliest to use thorium with India’s Kakrapar-1 reactor being the first. 

Under the US Geological Survey (USGS) estimate, USA, Australia and India have particularly large reserves of thorium and furthermore IAEA report mentions that India possesses two thirds (67%) of global reserves of monazite, the primary thorium ore up from approximately 300,000 tonnes to 650,000 tonnes (1996-2010). Therefore it is not surprising if the ore from Mount Weld is switched or added halfway on the ocean en route to Gebeng.  

The scramble to bring rare earths into production outside China is moving into higher gear and everyone is looking for mules. Shares of Molycorp (largest rare earths company) shot from USD13 (Jan 2010) to USD80 (May 2011) 370% in 17 months, and is gearing up to reopen a rare earth mine in Mountain Pass in California which recently bought a 90% stake in a rare earths producer in Estonia. Compare that to Barrick Gold (largest gold mining company) shares up from USD20 (1994) to USD55 (2011) only 175% in 17 years!  

Money from these investments can keep BN in power for a very long time. When you have a huge government presence in the economy, you also have a huge bureaucracy, and bureaucracy brings corruption. This is one of the reasons why Malaysia is rated so poorly on Transparency International’s annual corruption rating. Corruption breeds misallocation of capital, and the capital flows not to the best use in nuclear facilities will be disastrous. 

The next question is how are we going to store our nuclear power plant waste which is an even bigger problem than thorium waste? In the US, a permanent storage site has been selected at Yucca Mountain, an extremely dry area of Nevada. The massive TBM (Tunnel Building Machine) is used to dig the tunnels 1500 feet under the Yucca Mountain.

Often there is no permanent storage site, they often stay there in the reactor’s pool for years and the towers are constructed to be safe even with a plane flying into them. Transporting the waste to Yucca Mountain is another headache. With our brain-drain situations, how are we going to manage the plants when even the janitors need to have a college degree to be qualified to work there. 

However, if this theory is wrong and the thorium is meant to be stored here permanently, then we are fucked. Probability of people getting cancers will be high and out of nowhere. Assume thorium as red marbles, scattered far away from each other in a natural state. Now after refining, you have truckloads of red marbles condensed together which are highly radioactive, can you dispose of them by putting them one by one far away again like in the natural state? Impossible but we are trying to be smarter than the forces of nature. Therefore having the Yucca Mountain-like facility is a must and you know the cost.

How can you prosecute Lynas when you can’t see these red marbles and its radiation with your naked eyes and place the blame on their refining? 

If the 2 nuclear plants that we are going to build are using uranium fuel instead of thorium, while storing the thorium waste here, we are double fucked. Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming, so fission stops by default but not for uranium. According to scientific prophecy, massive solar flare projected to affect earth (coming in 2012-2013) with magnitude equivalent to year 1859 could short out transformers and disrupt the power grid.

If this outbreak is approaching the magnitude as predicted, the network of power supply is expected to be vulnerable as there is a shortage of large transformers to replace the ones that are expected to be fried and when design is not prepared to meet the cooling needs of a nuclear power plant outage of long duration, guess what? The party is over for life on earth as each and every nuclear power plant in the world might be in Fukushima’s meltdown situation.