Environmental R&D, for controlled impact and shared expertise
For Orano Mining, investing in Environmental R&D is a priority not only to have better control over its impact (20% of budget devoted to R&D), but also to share its unique expertise with the scientists, the authorities and local communities. Michael Descostes, Environmental R&D Manager, explains to us how his function is helping to make Orano Mining a key player in the management of the environmental impacts of uranium mines.
We intervene at every stage of the mining cycle, from exploration through to extraction and remediation to manage environmental impacts and optimize the costs of remediation and monitoring. This expertise has been shared with the scientific community
and the safety authorities in more than 250 publications in the last 15 fifteen years alone (scientific articles, conferences and patents).
We are working on a very diverse range of projects with a wealth of experience gathered in the field and access to geological objects that have been very little studied to date. Our core business consists of numerous complementary disciplines (geochemistry, mineralogy, hydrogeology, microbiology, etc.) and may sometimes intersect with history or even archeology when the sites are located close to deposits mined during the Gallo-Roman period.
We are working on a very diverse range of projects with a wealth of experience gathered in the field and access to geological objects that have been very little studied to date. Our core business consists of numerous complementary disciplines (geochemistry, mineralogy, hydrogeology, microbiology, etc.) and may sometimes intersect with history or even archeology when the sites are located close to deposits mined during the Gallo-Roman period.
What is specific about working in Environmental R&D at Orano Mining?
We work over long periods of time. From the discovery of a deposit to the end of remediation of a site, it takes around 50 years on average. We study mineral processing tailings and mining waste rock to guarantee their stability over a timescale of several centuries. We take samples of water, sediments, bacteria, and plants, both at the surface and down to several hundreds of meters in depth. And we do so under a wide variety of conditions: in the jungle in Gabon, the desert in Mongolia and Niger, on the Kazakh steppes, in the vast expanses of Northern Canada and in France of course.
This data is used to decipher the complexity of the natural environment modified by mining activity. Then we construct models to gain an understanding of what has happened in the past, what is happening now and what is going to happen in the near and more distant future, to take better account of climate change in particular.
Is innovation something that conflicts with R&D at Orano Mining?
To take such samples successfully, you have to innovate. We have patented a specific sampler to be able to take samples from lacustrine sediments of up to several meters in depth while leaving their structure intact. In collaboration with universities and industrial partners, we have developed tools to measure elements at very low concentrations in natural waters. We are looking for concentrations of the order of the femtogram per liter, in other words a millionth of a billionth of a gram per liter. That is like trying to detect 1g of radium in the total volume of over a million Olympic swimming pools!
We try to decipher how the natural environment functions in all its complexity to restore it to a similar state after mining activity is complete.
What major discoveries have you made recently?
With the French company Ai4R, we have developed a system for the imaging of radioactive elements at the microscopic scale, which was impossible ten years ago. This technology is now used as a matter of routine. We are developing applications for radium-226, the main radioactive element in the 100 millions of metric tons of tailings that Orano has to manage over the long term.
We have also discovered bacteria living in tailings which capture uranium and selenium. They have been named Acidovorax bellezanensis after the former Bellezane mine where they were discovered. Their use for the removal of pollution from water has been patented. We are also exploring the potential of bacteria to remediate aquifers mined by In Situ Recovery.
Do these research activities also have beneficial impacts for the host populations of your sites?
We share our expertise not only with the scientific community but also with local communities in proximity to our sites and associations. We propose training both internally and externally, as we did recently with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the University of Ulaanbaatar. And, of course, we are open to talented young people who want to come and work with our team: around fifty interns or work-study trainees, around twenty PhD students and a similar number of post-doctoral students have worked with us in recent times.