Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
The article talks about the radioactive waste products. That's normally thorium. But the Lynas site (Mount Weld) has high concentrations of rare earths, is a huge site, and has low levels of thorium contamination. People are rightly concerned about radioactive waste being left in Malaysia. Lynas wanted to ship the radioactive waste back to Australia for processing, but they are forbidden from doing so by Australian law.
Some people are suggesting that Lynas is using Malaysia to avoid environmental laws thus cutting costs. But Malaysia gave them a 12 month tax break, and was already cheaper than Australia, so environmental laws don't appear to be the main motivator. (Although cheaper costs because of less strict environmental protections is probably an important factor.)
It is frustrating that all reporting about this is emotive or otherwise sub-optimal.
[1] I think that conditions at Foxconn are appalling and need to be improved.
I don't believe that the government offering tax breaks to entice a company to relocate their plant implies that. In addition, environmental laws in developing countries are lax, if not non-existent.
Furthermore, if Australia is blocking the shipment of these waste products into the country, surely that implies that this is a serious environmental problem. Australia is willing to lose business over the matter, because they feel there are hidden costs (environmental, health, safety) that are not easily quantified directly.
From the article:
Shipping ore thousands of miles is extremely expensive. But the company says the cheaper labor, electricity, and chemicals in Malaysia make it worthwhile. Malaysians who oppose the plant see a much more troubling dynamic. "Australia is a first-world country that wants the developing world to do its dirty work," says Fuziah Salleh, Kuantan's parliamentary representative and an outspoken critic of the Lynas project. "Our environmental laws are very lax, and Lynas knows exactly where to take advantage of it. If you look at Australia, there are very strict laws about controlling the waste, dust, and air quality. But here in Malaysia—even if we have those laws—it is very hard to enforce."
>It is frustrating that all reporting about this is emotive or otherwise sub-optimal.
We're talking about materials that have half-lives on the order of billions of years and have caused miscarriages and childhood leukemia in residents, decades after a previous plant was closed.
I find it very hard to believe that materials that "have half-lives on the order of billions of years" produce enough radiation to be noticeable from the background radiation. That is exactly the kind of scaremongering that makes the reporting "emotive or otherwise sub-optimal".
Don't complain about fact poor reporting by countering with your own.
Those people do not have the luxury of conducting scientific experiments, but we still have the responsibility to accurately report what is going on. This is important because inaccurate reporting can cause an unjustified marginalization in the future, if it is later discovered that the radioactive effects of the pollutants were not to blame. For example, if you frame an argument against depleted uranium munitions as "this stuff is radioactive!", you are going to lose valuable support and sympathy when it becomes clear that the radioactivity in depleted uranium does not account for the wide range of symptoms that you originally attributed to it.
"The food they are eating is radioactive" by itself, means next to nothing. It is true of all people. At least give us the radioactivity in estimated banana equivalent dosage.
With Fukushima, the Japanese government kept raising the 'safe' or "'allowable' limit of radiation, every time the detected levels breached limits, thus making a mockery of their own guidelines.
Meanwhile, discussion about safety limits were framed around 'natural' and 'background' radiation, without informing people that caesium-137 and strontium-90 are man-made by-products of nuclear fission (which some would argue the acceptable limit is zero).
By all means, let's do the science, but in the absence of rigorous experiments, I don't think it's scaremongering to err on the side of caution when anecdotal evidence points to serious health issues.
>Meanwhile, discussion about safety limits were framed around 'natural' and 'background' radiation, without informing people that caesium-137 and strontium-90 are man-made by-products of nuclear fission (which some would argue the acceptable limit is zero).
This just makes me suspect that you really are not qualified to have this conversation. What, pray tell, is the difference in danger between an alpha particle that comes from a man-made isotope, and one that comes from a natural isotope? That you use scare quotes ('natural' and 'background' radiation) gives me additional pause. You do realize that radiation is radiation, no matter how the source of it was made, right? Naturally occurring radiation is no less real than radiation that emanates from substances which we create.
Comparing radiation exposures to the baseline background levels is the only rational thing to do. It is impossible to have a rational discussion about radiation if you don't do that.
> I don't think it's scaremongering to err on the side of caution
Certainly. Tell people what is known, the limits of what is known, the consequences of possible realities, and what they should do to protect themselves. That is reasonable reporting.
However, simply mentioning that "radioactive things are being eaten", is scare mongering. It sounds scary, but the statement is true of from natural organic fruit from two-thousand years ago before industrialized society to a slightly charred poundcake from Hiroshima after August 6th 1945. Without specifying the parameters, it means nothing but induces fear nevertheless. It is textbook scare mongering, and besides being absolute shit journalism, it is actively harmful for the reasons I have previously laid out.
Writers use words like 'natural' and 'background' to not only correctly identify those sources of radiation, but also because the language is reassuring to readers; naturally occurring background radiation sounds normal and doesn't cause panic. If writers were to describe man-made sources of radiation as being the result of fallout from weapons testing or dispersal of waste material from a nuclear accident, readers would panic regardless of the details.
I would prefer reporting to distinguish between sources. Firstly, as people may mistakenly believe that all background radiation is natural without realizing that man-made sources are contributing to overall levels. Secondly, as radioactive isotopes affect the human body differently when ingested or inhaled, people should be aware of the different health risks from man-made sources. For example, Sr-90 is linked to bone cancer and leukemia, Cesium-137 concentrates in muscle tissue, while I-131 collects in the thyroid.
I wish there was more accurate reporting, with limits and parameters as you mention, but it seems problematic as the science is complicated, physicists are not physicians, journalists are neither, and vested interests are at play.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/05/29/should-we...
I read this article today which does a decent job of estimating cancer deaths based on a certain amount of exposure: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044477240457758...
Some locations recorded doses as high as 22 rem (total exposure before evacuation). Afterward, the levels of radiation dropped quickly; the largest component came from iodine, and its level dropped by 50% every eight days.
How many cancers will such a dose trigger? To calculate an answer, assume that the entire population of that 2-rem-plus region, about 22,000 people, received the highest dose: 22 rem. (This obviously overestimates the danger.) The number of excess cancers expected is the dose (22 rem) multiplied by the population (22,000), divided by 2,500. This equals 194 excess cancers.
If you lived there and had seen the onset of serious health issues ever since the factory came to town, wouldn't the anecdotal evidence be enough to convince you of the cause? If I observe a zombie eating a person, and that person comes back from the dead to attack othres, I don't need to know if it's the bite that's responsible, I just need to stay away from zombies.
You have roughly 40 grams of potassium in your body at any given moment. Roughly 40 milligrams of that are a radioactive isotope (and a gamma emitter at that). Note that this isn't due to human industry: the radioactive potassium in your body was formed in stars billions of years ago. It's everywhere, and in nearly every natural aggregate material on earth, be it organic or not.
You are roughly 1 part per million radioactive potassium. Will this give you cancer? Possibly. Some couple 100 people per year globally will die of cancers induced by this potassium. This is just part of the radioactive background risk that we accept as natural.
You can't have an accurate conversation about material risks without quantifying concentration vs the background.
For example, living near Denver for a year will expose you to more radiation than living next to Fukushima during the accident would. This is because there's high radon in the Denver area geography.
But I'd bet if you asked all of the couple million people if they're safer from cancer in Denver or Fukushima all but a handful of nutbars and nuclear industry folks would answer Denver.
I don't mean to just be an apologist here: we should care a lot about toxic releases of all forms. But right now the discussion is entirely dominated by alarmism and there's little accurate information. This is disastrous because it means we direct too many resources toward lessor risks, and the media and population as a whole ignores larger risks.
Radiation is easy to detect and easier to vilify. But notice that no actual numbers we given in the article. The best they could get was "up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines." A statement so emotional and devoid of actual content.
That said, I wish companies would try to properly dispose of their toxic (and/or radioactive) waste products and not give it to people to paint their houses with.
I see this often cited when talking about suicides at Foxconn but comparing suicides at a company to the general population is not that useful. The population of Foxconn workers are young(typical age reported to be 18) and 100% employed. That's not a group of people you want to compare to a span-all-socioeconomic-classes general population.
Of course, its difficult comparing suicide rates in different countries, and other factors may be at play, but this just goes to show that suicides are not a good metric to make this otherwise perfectly valid point (when more teenagers kill themselves here than in foxconn plants, the argument becomes more difficult that everyone is killing themselves because things are so terrible). Suicide itself is an incredibly complex topic that should probably not be trivialized. This is of course not to say conditions there are in any way good, they're not. I just think its better to rely on the other much more ample and obvious evidence.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_suicide_in_the_United_S...
Not necessarily. The #10 cause for the general population may be deadlier than the #1 cause for 15-24 year olds. That Here are some made up numbers:
15-24 year olds: 0.1% deaths/year, of which 10% due to suicide
general population: 1% deaths per year, of which 5% due to suicide
As I said, I made up the numbers. However, I do not think they are completely out of range. 1% deaths in a stable population gives a life expectancy of 100 years, but the US population is growing and hence relatively young. Also, looking at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf, Figure 3, I think 1% is a reasonable guess at that figure.
The x% due to suicide numbers likely are exaggerations (a Zipf curve will have trouble getting to 5% in rank 10)
So suicide rate can't be used as a proxy for measuring employee conditions.
I was going to suggest that the lower rate could be due to having more female workers, since far more men then women commit suicide BUT it turns out that in China this is not the case (in US studies they measure that women try a lot but don't succeed at the same rate - cause of that is contentious argument - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_suicide).
To answer main thread, the article does include a bunch of bollocks (my favorite bit is where they try to shock us with the half-life of Uranium), but the core of the article seems to be probably valid.
Aside: why is it so common that eco-articles (or eco-movies) ruin their core theme by adding outrageous bollocks?
Except everyone mentions the Foxconn Suicides as a major problem. Giving actual numbers is a way to remedy that specific bit of untruth.
> my favorite bit is where they try to shock us with the half-life of Uranium
For the people who don't know: Long half-life means lower radiation over any given period. The really hot stuff, the stuff that throws off a lot of radiation per second, doesn't last long precisely because it's throwing away so much energy to get to a more stable state. Isotopes that stick around longer do so because they're more stable, and so have less energy to throw away every second.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/
I think US college students is a socioeconomically appropriate group to compare with.
Mother Jones is an overtly political operation, so you're unlikely to read reporting that's not trying to Make A Point. Compare to Reason.com or Mises.org or similar outlets whose positions are extremely predictable.
That's not to say things are necessarily wrong, but I tend to take what they have to say with a large grain of salt, and am not all that enthusiastic about seeing them on this site, as they tend to be sort of the opposite of 'intellectually curious' and more along the lines of "See! Big companies are EEEEEVIIIIL!" or on the other side "Look! Free markets are always the best possible thing, in every situation!"
One hypothesis for why good content might show up in such venues that isn't redundant with articles from a more neutral source (which I would prefer, all else being equal) is they basically get a bit of "partisan bonus" income (built-in readership and appeal to a base) which lets them fund some actual, not-purely-propaganda investigative journalism which would be harder to fund if they didn't position themselves in that manner. Put differently, it can sometimes be a way of monetizing journalism that wouldn't otherwise be linkbaity enough to be profitable, by slathering the core of what might've been a good article in a layer of partisan appeal to get eyeballs. Of course, that explanation does rely on there being such a core...
As opposed to, say, some comments in HN?
A long half life is inversely related to activity. Heavy radioactive metals like uranium and thorium are toxic heavy metals, but negligible radioactivity, precisely because their half lives are so long. Until recently we didn't even think natural thorium isotopes were radioactive, since the half life is close to the age of the universe.
The really dangerous radioactive isotopes either have fairly short half lives or decay into isotopes with short half lives. A few hundred thousand years is the upper bound for caring, and most of the bad stuff is under a decade. Basically by simple logic none of this will be naturally occurring or it would be gone already.
Plenty of non radioactive material is dangerous, though.
Huh? Thorium was the 2nd element Marie Curie discovered to be radioactive, in 1898 according to wikipedia [0]. In fact the whole thorium decay chain [1] was classified even before anyone could identify what elements they were, resulting in the historic names "mesothorium", "radiothorium", etc [1].
Were you thinking of bismuth? [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#New_elements
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Thorium_series
And if you complain that the problem is that we aren't paying third world worker enough, that's because they don't have enough capital to be as productive as workers in developed nations. You would need a really massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to the third world for their adopting western labor standards to not result in mass starvation. Safety conditions in third world factories might be bad, but third world farms are actually much more dangerous.
All of this isn't to say that the specific behavior in the article is acceptable, it's obviously going beyond the pale and ought to be stopped. It's just that your proposed solution is entirely unworkable.
We're not talking $1 a day subsistance farmer when we talk free trade agreements. We're talking about the standards billion dollar multinational companies must comply with to do business between countries. Indeed, $1000 in safety equipment means almost nothing to these companies, but they'll only do it if we force them to. Our efficient free market system favors those that can reduce their costs of operations to the minimum level possible. If we don't make the rules of the playing field encompass these standards, everyone will be beholden to the guy that meets only the bare minimums, because he can sell his stuff the cheapest.
Yes, you are.
He is part of the same local economy and by placing a cost on those higher up the chain, you will affect him just as much.
> Indeed, $1000 in safety equipment means almost nothing to these companies, but they'll only do it if we force them to.
If that was the case, they wouldn't have out-sourced the manufacturing to begin with. They wouldn't be buying expensive robots to replace that minimal-cost labor as we speak. Every penny counts.
> Our efficient free market system favors those that can reduce their costs of operations to the minimum level possible.
This is true, but to a point.
> If we don't make the rules of the playing field encompass these standards, everyone will be beholden to the guy that meets only the bare minimums, because he can sell his stuff the cheapest.
Frequently, consumers take many other factors into a purchase decision. Not just the price. If I know that a product was manufactured in a responsible manner, I'm willing to pay more for it.
If this wasn't the case, the organic movement wouldn't exist. Neither would the local-food movement.
People are willing to pay for higher quality goods and even identical goods that were manufactured in a more responsible manner.
The whole global economics is currently based on shifting inconveniences around to other countries. Cheaper countries are simply countries that are not charging the social/environmental cost. That, in turn, favors corrupt governments.
That's why BRIC will never have true democracies or truly good HDI. If people in these countries make money and consume in the same level of Europe and US, there won't be cheap workers and corrupt governments to turn the economy wheel.
This happens right now too, as you can see from the totally void answers of anyone from Lynas, and that's the main reason why they want to spend huge ammounts of money for shipping to Malaysia - it's still much cheaper than respecting the western environmental laws.
The idea that you can find "objective reporting" anywhere is a dangerous illusion (or delusion). Just because something comes from a "good" source, doesn't mean it's true.
Personally I prefer it when the agenda is (seems) obvious -- that makes it easier to read responsibly.
This article is weak, not because Mother Jones is left slanted, but because the writing shows a profound lack of basic science understanding and carries a lot of unsourced scaremongering.
http://www.vestas.com/en/about-vestas/sustainability/sustain...
Apple makes some pretty serious claims about its environmental impact (http://www.apple.com/environment/). But it doesn't mention refining REEs. Lots about carbon, reducing chemicals such as PVCs, and recycling... Perhaps the market forces that brought carbon to the fore could help correct REEs and reduce the impact on the environment these mining operations incur.
If I were a resident of that area I would be concerned about the plant. While I am suspicious of the technical reporting it seemed clear to me that Lynas isn't being entirely transparent about its environmental assessments and who exactly is approving their projects. When engineers involved are talking to reporters about suspicious activity and large firms are pulling out of the project it does raise some concern that perhaps Lynas isn't doing as much as it could be to ensure even minimal safety concerns are met.
Either way I don't think it's unreasonable for Malaysia and other countries in these sorts of situations to raise awareness about the environmental impacts these kinds of projects have and to enforce a higher degree of scrutiny in approving them. It may raise prices on consumers receiving these goods but it's clear that enough wealth is being generated that we could afford a price-bump.
With enough investment in better recycling technology and hazardous materials management we might be able to slowly reduce that price-bump over time.
But then again, I don't understand enough about economics to believe that is even possible.
The article may be making a rather strong appeal to emotion but it does raise the question of whether there is enough being done from an investigation and regulation angle to protect people from the hazardous side-effects of mining REEs.
Some have argued that part of the reason for prolonging the US engagement has been that these resources are located in regions of Taliban control, but that seems highly speculative. Developing that resource would certainly alter the economic history of that nation.
[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistan...
Tomorrow: The insane secrets behind bottled water (spoiler: the guys driving the trucks hauling the water check their deliveries on a touchpad device that uses one gram of a rare earth metal that came from China!)
http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463290-ntn-lynas-report
Once you pull it out of the ground - exposure becomes a real problem. They mention that some of the materials must be kept in liquid, so it does not become a dust that can get blown away. At the same time, they need to line the storage pool with a material that will block it from seeping into the groundwater. For centuries.
Not for thorium. The stuff is almost harmless, and is insoluble in water, so tends to just stay put.
Plus, even if you did have to isolate it, centuries would be nothing. It's has a half life of 14 billion years! Just bury it back in the ground and that's all - it's really not very radioactive. (Just deep enough that it won't be dug up by accident and that's all - you don't need to block the radioactivity, since even a piece of paper is enough shielding.)
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing since you are confusing cesium from nuclear reactors and thorium.
The article says that.
From the second page of the article.
Nobody is denying whether or not they're essential. The issue is that they're produced in poor countries so that the refiners can offload most of the cost of refining rare earth metals in the form of environmental damage.