Part I: Vietnam’s spiking monazite exports
Traditionally Vietnam has been exporting beach sand monazite from the heavy mineral sand operations near Vinh Linh, ca. 500 t to 700 t per year to China.
But then in 2022 Vietnam’s monazite exports to China jumped from 700 t the year before to 6,351 t.
USGS concluded that Vietnam’s mine output should have increased ten-fold in 2022.
However, in 2023 Vietnam’s monazite exports to China fell back to 507 t.
Having had a closer look we found out that the increase in quantity of 2022 was not of Vietnamese origin.
Krasnoufimsk monazite
We reported on 6 February 2022 that a 5.8 t trial shipment of Krasnoufimsk monazite had been sent by rail in H1 2021 to China to Yongzhou Lingling Yuanda New Materials Co., Ltd, in China’s Hunan province.
This video shows probably the loading of the China Railway container (container markings have been obfuscated in the video):
(The man with the Peaky Blinders cap, avoiding eye contact, is Mikhail Zhukovsky, Director of the Institute of Industrial Ecology at the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The person he has a conversation with is Mikhail Konev, Head of Krasnoufimsk)
The shipper and owner is Redzem Technology LLC, a daughter company of ThreeArc Mining (Tomtor rare earth project), itself being part of ICT, Cyprus, the holding company of Russian billionaire Alexander Nesis, a major shareholder of now defunct Polymetal.
Redzem are also the owners of Krasnokamensk Metallurgical Plant, which had planned to process the Krasnoufimsk monazite as well as the potential output of the Tomtor rare earth project.
But the former would have required cooperation from China, while the latter has become a victim of global warming.
According to the original acquisition agreement of 2013, Redzem have until 2026 to make the Krasnoufimsk monazite disappear.
More shipments - through Vietnam
What we had missed was, that around the same time Krasnoufimsk monazite was also moved in larger quantities out of the Krasnoufimsk storage to Russia’s Far East.
The first lot of ca. 2,000 t of Krasnoufimsk monazite landed in Vietnam in late December 2021, but was promptly returned to Russia as the receiver, the trading company Trung Viet Import Export & Investment Co., Ltd., had the wrong license.
On the second attempt Trung Viet had obtained the correct license for temporary import and re-export of the monazite - to China.
Two further shipments followed in 2022 and that was the reason, why Vietnam’s exports of monazite to China jumped to 6,351 t in 2022. But this transshipment business was not sustained, so in 2023 Vietnam’s monazite export to China fell back to the 500 t level.
Ongoing operations
Redzem are repackaging the monazite at a capacity of 1,200 t/month, from the kraft paper bags in wooden cases to 2,000 kgs big bags.
Part II: What is the Krasnoufimsk Monazite?
Sverdlovsk Oblast local government organisation UralMonazite say on their website:
At the end of the 50s of the twentieth century, it was decided to concentrate the main Soviet strategic reserve of monazite concentrate in a single storage facility . The choice fell on the storage facility for strategic food reserves, post office box 118 of the Middle Ural Territorial Directorate of the Main Directorate of Material Reserves (GUMR) of the USSR Council of Ministers, located 12 km from the city of Krasnoufimsk, Sverdlovsk Region, near the Zyurzya railway station. This storage facility had 19 wooden warehouses measuring 85 × 14 m built in 1941-1942, railway access to the warehouses, production infrastructure, household and living quarters for the facility personnel.
Between 1960 and 1964 two million boxes with craft paper inner bags of monazite of unknown origin were secretly delivered to the Zyurzya railway station and stored in these wooden shacks near-by. Among the likely origins of this monazite are Brazil, Sri Lanka, India and Korea. The large quantity of 82,200 t may have been accumulated between 1945 and 1960.
What was meant to be intermediate monazite storage became permanent, as high thorium content fell out of favour as a nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons material - simultaneously with the West.
Over the decades the shacks fell in disrepair and the wooden boxes with their craft paper bags were rotting.
Part III: Public health issue
The local population has been complaining for decades about health issues assumed to be from exposure to radiation.
After the USSR had fallen apart, the first public protests took place in the 1990s.
People complained about poor health, especially on days when the wind was blowing.
Uralinform news service reported in 2017, that 40,000 people in the regional center and surrounding villages of Chuvashkovo, Kolmakovo, Krylovo, Podgornaya and Shilovka should have been in harm’s way. On windy days the emergency services would have been inundated with cases of serious respiratory problems, according to Krasnoufimsk General Hospital.
In order to affect Krylovo and Kolmakovo with monazite dust and/or radon, the wind would need to blow from a northern direction.
In order to affect Chuvashkovo, Podgornaya and Shilovka, however, the wind would need to blow from southern directions.
One expert calculated that the wind must blow at minimum 20 m/s (44 miles per hour) in order to carry radon (radon 220 from thorium, half life 56 seconds, radon 222 from uranium, half life 3.8 days) floating on the ground of the wooden shacks (more dense than air) from the warehouses to the affected areas.
Measures taken
From 1999 State Public Institution SO "UralMonazite" (subordinate to the Sverdlovsk Ministry of Natural Resources) built large sealed metal hangars around the Krasnoufimsk Monazite shacks in order to contain the mess inside. High walls were erected, hoped to be trapping any bottom-dwelling radon. Also decontamination stations for the staff working at the site were set up.
No impact?
Referring to statistics from 1999 to 2015, Krasnoufimsk Central District Hospital reported that the number of endocrine, oncological, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, and congenital anomalies had still been growing in the city and region after 1999.
The last metal hangar over the wooden shacks actually was erected only in 2013.
How to get affected
Russian journalists, activists, scientists and medical experts have been publishing conflicting, ambivalent and incoherent articles based on incomplete research over the years about what may have happened to people around Krasnoufimsk.
Basically, they all speculate in order to find an answer to the question, how people could possibly get poisoned from the monazite storage without ever being in more or less frequent physical, direct contact with the material itself:
One article suggests, citizens may have taken the monazite as a kind of pebble for their gardens and this way got poisoned.
Another publication suggested, piles of coal used for heating may have been contaminated.
Others argue that it is not the single dose, but the slow build-up of radioactive elements in the human body over time, which would not necessitate frequent direct contact with the material. (Why then should respiratory emergency cases peak on windy days?).
One article questioned if monazite dust should be capable of causing instantaneous symptoms limited to windy days like plutonium or polonium poisoning would do.
However, we found also one very comprehensive article in the Russian publication Chemistry & Life Popular Science No. 8 of 2019 that argues in minute detail, that the poisoning from a monazite dust and radon in adjacent villages should be somewhat unlikely:
Official position
When it regards the Krasnoufimsk monazite, the Russian government is atypically forthcoming, open for criticism from all sides, and engaging with environmentalists.
Except Chemistry & Life, no-one questions the official position that the unsuitable monazite storage on behalf of a long forgone government of a no-longer-existing USSR should be at fault for the public health issue.
Additional information
Soviet Sverdlovsk CIty, now called Yekaterinburg, has been a major production center of the Soviet military-industrial complex since World War II. By the 1970s, 87 per cent of the city's industrial production was military.
By the way, this is the area where the American U2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960.
The region of Sverdlovsk Oblast, where Krasnoufimsk is located, is also the main nuclear weapons development center of Russia. We found the following nuclear facilities:
Urals Electrochemical Combinat (UEKhK), founded 1949: Novouralsk is home to the world’s largest uranium enrichment factory, 150 km east-north-east of Krasnoufimsk;
Mayak Production Association, Ozersk. Founded 1948. This complex is one of the largest nuclear facilities in Russia. Originally in nuclear weapons production, it was re-purposed in 2003. It does nuclear fuel reprocessing, plutonium production, and radioactive waste management, 200 km east-south-east from Krasnoufimsk;
Russian Federal Nuclear Center – Zababakhin All-Russia Research Institute of Technical Physics” (“RFNC-VNIITF”), Snezhinsk. Founded in 1955. The main nuclear weapons development center of Russia, 185 km east-south-east from Krasnoufimsk.
Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant, Beloyarsk, opertating since 1964, 215 km straight east of Krasnoufimsk.
The relative proximity to four major nuclear facilities may have been the reason why - in the vastness of the Soviet empire - Krasnoufimsk was chosen for the monazite storage, in expectation that the thorium contained may be put to use at any of them.
There were reports of incidents, such as:
In 1957 Mayak Production Association suffered one of the first man-made nuclear accidents in the Soviet Union.
In 2022 Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant allegedly had an accident, which was denied by official sources. (In 1986 he Soviets also denied that something had happened at Chernobyl, holding on to the lie for 36 hours, until conceding that a “minor accident” had taken place).
In 2023 UEKhK suffered a fatal accident with uranium hexafluoride.
We are not satisfied
The lack of comprehensive research on the root cause of the public health phenomenon is alarming, highlighting the need for further investigation into the source and nature of the poisoning incidents in Krasnoufimsk.
One thing for sure, monazite needs to be handled professionally and with adequate protection. Everywhere. All the time.
Thank you for reading and have a rare-earthy weekend!