In fact, Esso Man and his drivers were
hauling toxic and radioactive waste, as they'd discover a year
later, when Asian Rare Earth tried to build a dump in a neighboring town.
Residents there began to protest, and a few activists took a Geiger counter to
the plant, where they found levels of radiation that were off the charts—up to
88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines. In 1985,
after residents sued, the government ordered the plant to be closed until Asian
Rare Earth cleaned up its mess.
Two years later, the site still wasn't completely clean, but Asian Rare Earth
got permission to reopen the plant. The protests began anew, and Hew, one of the
leaders of the opposition, was jailed for two months. When he got out he snuck
back to the protests, which grew in size and popularity. In 1992, the residents
who'd sued Asian Rare Earth won a permanent injunction against the plant. It was
overturned by the Supreme Court, but Asian Rare Earth had had enough, and it
pulled out of Bukit Merah and shut down operations entirely.
But by then, Hew says, the villagers were anxious. Pregnant women living near
the plant had
miscarried; some gave birth to children who were sickly, or
mentally disabled, or blind. Other children in the village developed
leukemia.
Officials told residents that the waste was properly disposed of. But in
2010, a local paper visited Asian Rare Earth's dump site and found 80,000 drums
containing 4.2 million gallons of radioactive thorium hydroxide. That year,
Mitsubishi broke ground on a secure, underground storage area to properly house
the waste of its former subsidiary. The
New York Times recently called the $100 million Asian Rare Earth recovery
"the largest radiation cleanup yet in the rare earth industry."
(The images in the slideshow below, from the awesome
PeriodicTable.com, are
used by permission.)
As we finish our dessert, I ask Esso Man about the white patches on his skin,
which started appearing several years after he'd worked with Asian Rare Earth's
waste. His doctors speculate they might have to do with his exposure to
radioactivity, he says, but they can't be sure. Such medical guesswork is common
in Bukit Merah, since no one has ever formally studied the impact of radiation
exposure among the village's 11,000 residents. (Mitsubishi denies any health
effects.) And anyway, sometimes Esso Man thinks it might just be stress that's
causing his skin condition. "I feel regret about working for that company," he
says glumly. "I feel bad that I gave people all that toxic waste. Even my own
uncle." All of Esso Man's drivers have died young—not one lived past his 50s. "I
don't know why they died and I am still alive."
After we drop Esso Man back at his gas station, Hew takes me to the nearby
home of Lai Kwan, a local woman who worked as a bricklayer at the Bukit Merah
plant while she was pregnant in 1982. Hunched over and walking slowly, she looks
older than her 69 years. In her modest living room, photos of her eight
children, now grown, line the walls. In the corner is a small cluster of flowers
and vials of powder that I take for a Buddhist shrine, but Lai Kwan explains
that they are gifts from her friends and neighbors, and that the vials contain
chicken essence, known in Chinese medicine for its healing properties.
Lai Kwan recalls that soon after she started working in the plant, she heard
rumors from the Japanese workers that the materials they were refining were
dangerous. Several of her coworkers miscarried, and when she found out she was
pregnant, she worried about her baby's health. So a few months later, she quit.
Her son, Cheah Kok Liang, was born in 1983, profoundly retarded and nearly
blind. Lai Kwan's husband left when the boy was a toddler. Now 29, Cheah still
lives at home and requires full-time care. He's suffered from frequent chest
infections his whole life, but it's hard to tell when he's getting ill, since he
can't communicate. I ask to meet him, but Lai Kwan explains that he is sleeping.
"If he were awake right now, I couldn't be talking to you."
What will happen to Cheah when she can't care for him anymore? "It's getting
harder now," she says. "He's heavy, and I have arthritis." Money is tight—since
Lai Kwan can't read or write very well, she'd only be able to find work at a
factory, and she can't leave Cheah alone for a whole shift. A few months ago, a
local politician visited and promised to help, but "every time I call she says
she is too busy," says Lai Kwan, showing us a picture of the politician and her
son in the local newspaper.
A doctor from Kuala Lumpur tells me that he visited Bukit Merah to treat the
eight children there who developed leukemia, seven of whom have died. Though
there has never been a formal epidemiological study of the area, radiation
exposure is a
known cause of childhood leukemia, and no local I talked to
could remember a single case of the disease before the plant opened.
About six weeks after I get back to the United States, I receive word that
Cheah passed away suddenly. The cause of his death is still unknown.
The new plant's waste toxic wastewater will be
treated and released into the productive fishing grounds of the South China
Sea.
I HAVE COME TO MALAYSIA because of my iPhone. I already
knew that behind its sleek casing lurked a problematic history. I'd read the
stories about Apple's
Chinese factories—about teenage girls working
15-hour shifts cleaning screens with toxic solvents, about
suicides among exhausted workers whose lives are no longer their own. But I had
a much dimmer idea of my phone's history before the Foxconn plant—where did
those components they put together come from? What were its guts made of? My
phone's shady past, it turned out, began long before it was assembled in a
Chinese factory. The elements used to power all our high-tech gadgets come from
a very dirty industry in which rich nations extract the good stuff from the
earth—and leave poor countries to clean up the mess.
"Never again" is a common refrain among Bukit Merah residents who have lived
through 20 years of Asian Rare Earth aftermath. But the Malaysian government
doesn't agree. In
2008, it approved an Australian company's plan to build a
brand new rare-earth refinery on the country's east coast. The company, Lynas
Corporation, will do its mining in Australia, but it will refine the rare
earths—a process that generates vast quantities of toxic and radioactive
waste—in Kuantan, Malaysia, a sleepy coastal city in a state where the average
resident makes
$7,314 a year. When completed, the plant will be the largest
of its kind, meeting
a full fifth of the world's rare-earth demand. Its waste will
not be permanently stored in an underground facility. Instead, toxic wastewater
will be treated and released into the productive fishing grounds of the South
China Sea, home to more than
3,300 species of fish. As for the plans for the radioactive
solids? Well, they remind people all too much of what happened in the days of
Esso Man.
To the Malaysian government, the Lynas plant represents an opportunity to
become a major player in one of the most lucrative, fastest-growing industries
in the world. In the 20 years since the Bukit Merah plant closed, demand for
rare earths has
increased tenfold, from roughly $1 billion to $10 billion
today. A
recent report predicted it to grow another 36 percent by
2015.
THE 17 RARE-EARTH ELEMENTS aren't as rare as was
thought when they were discovered in the 1800s. But they often perform specific,
crucial functions. For example, "
virtually all
polished glass products" depend on cerium, according to the US Geological
Survey; the element is also vital to
catalytic converters. Other rare earths help form the world's
strongest magnets. If you hold a chunk of magnetized neodymium, a chunk a few
feet away will
fly through the air to meet it. Because rare-earth magnets are
so strong, a little goes a long way. They're the reason your smartphone has
computing power that would have filled two rooms just 30 years ago yet today
fits in the palm of your hand.
Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you'll be hard-pressed to
find a phone, laptop, or TV that
doesn't contain at least one of the
rare earths. The elements are also key to all kinds of green technology:
Neodymium is found in
wind turbines; hybrid and electric cars often contain as many
as
nine different rare earths. Yttrium can form phosphors that
make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
Rare earths are also crucial for
defense technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines,
smart bombs.
Elements of Style
The rare earths lurking inside your hybrid car and
smartphone.
But here's the catch. Rare earths
always occur alongside the radioactive elements thorium and
uranium, and safely separating them is a complex process. Miners use heavy
machinery to reach the raw ore, which contains anywhere between 3 and 9 percent
rare earths, depending on the deposit. Then the ore is taken to a refinery and
"cracked," a process wherein workers use sulfuric acid to make a liquid stew of
sorts. The process is also hugely water- and energy-intensive, requiring a
continuous 49 megawatts (enough to power
50,000
homes) and two Olympic swimming pools' worth of water every day.
Workers then boil off the liquid and separate out the rare earths from rock
and radioactive elements. This is where things get dangerous: Companies must
take precautions so that workers aren't exposed to radiation. If the tailings
ponds where the radioactive elements are permanently stored are improperly
lined, they can leach into the groundwater. If they are not covered properly,
the slurry could dry and escape as dust. And this radioactive waste must be
stored for an incomprehensibly long time—the half-life of thorium is about
14
billion years, and uranium's is up to
4.5 billion years. Reminder: Earth itself is
4.5 billion
years old.
Not coincidentally, the refining tends to happen in areas where weak
environmental rules mean that companies can process the elements on the cheap.
Take the
Baotou region of Inner Mongolia, where most of China's
rare-earth mines are clustered, and where waste has leached into
waterways and irrigation canals, according to several
independent investigations. Communities around one former mine in Mongolia blame
at least
66 cancer
deaths on leaked radioactive waste, and local people complain that their
hair and teeth have fallen out.
All this so that my friends and I can settle an argument about the order of
Metallica's first three albums from the comfort of our bar stools.
KUANTAN, THE TOWN WHERE LYNAS has built its new
rare-earth refinery, is a popular
vacation spot—laid-back and unpretentious, with uncrowded
beaches and delicious seafood. By early fall, Lynas' rare-earth ore will begin
to arrive.
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."
Lynas emphasizes that this refinery will be "completely
different to the Bukit Merah rare-earths plant" and that "there are now much
higher standards in place which mean Bukit Merah could never be repeated." Last
year, the Malaysian government asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to
recommend a list of
11 safety requirements and standards that should be in place
in order to operate. But Lynas was
allowed to open its refinery without meeting the most
important one—a
long-term storage solution for the waste. Instead, Lynas says
it will treat the highly acidic liquid waste before releasing it into waters
that support a thriving mangrove ecosystem and fish that local residents depend
on.
"Lynas doesn't care what happens to us," one fisherman
tells me. "They just want their money."
That hasn't done much to reassure the people of Kuantan. "Lynas doesn't care
what happens to us," one fisherman tells me. "They just want their money." They
are also less than thrilled that their government has promised Lynas a 12-year
tax holiday.
But even more dubious is what Lynas proposes to do with the radioactive
solids: Isolate them—the company is not forthcoming with any details as to
how—before diluting them with soil or concrete and selling the mixture as
fertilizer or construction materials.
"They have yet to establish it is either economically or practically
feasible," says Dr. Peter Karamoskos, a radiation safety adviser for the
Australian government. Noting that Lynas' waste is six times as radioactive as
levels recognized as safe, he does a quick calculation: "By the end of 10 years
of 1 million tons of waste, where are you going to find 6 million tons to dilute
it with? Where are you going to find the clients to take up that stuff? Where
are their contracts? Any builder who touched this waste would be out of business
immediately. You can argue that if you diluted it adequately you could use it.
However, remember the problem is that buildings get demolished. Once you start
doing that, you release that back into the environment."
No wonder the plant has become a rallying cause for the opposition parties in
upcoming elections. Even in Kuala Lumpur, 150 miles from the plant, I saw bumper
stickers bearing the words "
Save Malaysia!
Stop Lynas!" and here in Kuantan, the slogan is everywhere—on flyers in
store windows, on T-shirts, and even on umbrellas.
Among the local protesters is an environmental consultant and Kuantan native
named Lee Tan, who now lives mostly in Australia but hasn't forgotten a single
crevice of her hometown. A stout, cheerful woman in her early 50s, Tan takes me
to a roadside fish stand in the nearby village of Sungai Karang, where a handful
of families sit around plastic tables as kids dart around underfoot and a few
hungry cats lick their chops near the trash area out back. This is a Muslim
village, and Tan and I are the only women not wearing a
tudung, the
Malaysian headscarf. The shop's owner, 31-year-old Jamil Jusuf, is making his
specialty: fried fingers of selayang and padang fish dusted with spicy meal,
wrapped tightly in leaves and grilled over an open flame. Jusuf says he first
heard about the refinery from tourists. "They told me that the waste will go
right where I get my fish from," he says.
Over at a fishing dock on the Balok River, just a few hundred yards from
Lynas' waste release site, a fisherman says that he has heard that the
opposition party, which is largely made up of ethnic Chinese, is using the Lynas
issue to get more votes; the Malay-dominated government has been very supportive
of Lynas. He produces a beat-up booklet bearing the Lynas logo. "Lynas has come
here many times to hand out pamphlets," he says. Later, Tan translates the
pamphlet for me. "The Lynas plant will not be dangerous to the public, the
surrounding area, or its workers," declares one bolded heading.
The next day I snag a meeting with a senior government spokesman, who agrees
to speak if I don't publish his name. I ask him what locals will gain from
having the plant nearby. "A lot, a lot," he says, before admitting that Lynas
will only employ about 300 people. "But because Lynas is here, some other
industries will also come."
"The Malays are not worried," one government official
told me. "Because we have been telling them that this project is safe, so why
would they fear?"
"Which ones?"
"Siemens," he says. I ask whether the German electronics conglomerate has
made a formal commitment. He concedes that it hasn't.
"So have any other companies officially said they would come?"
"Thus far, no other commitments yet."
And what of the plant's potential chilling effect on tourism? He brushes that
aside. "Fears created by the opposition have influenced a very tiny segment of
the people, especially among the Chinese," he says. "The Malays are not worried,
because we have been telling them that this project is safe, so why would they
fear?"
FROM KUANTAN, I HEAD BACK to noisy, frenetic Kuala
Lumpur. In my hotel room, I can hear tourists at the karaoke bar next door
belting out Whitney Houston hits. Tourism accounts for around 6.7 percent of the
country's GDP. Over the last decade, the number of foreign tourists has
more than doubled, making it the
ninth most visited
country in the world, just shy of Germany. That it's a Muslim country makes it
an especially
popular destination for visitors from the Arab world. I wonder
if radiation fears will hurt tourism.
Most of the 12 rare-earth experts I've spoken to say it's technically
possible for Lynas to scrub its waste of all the toxic elements—acids,
radioactive substances, and corrosive tailings. But not one has seen sufficient
explanation—from either Lynas or Malaysian officials—of exactly how it will do
this.
When I ask Lynas if it has plans for a permanent waste storage facility, I
receive no response. When I ask how the plant will treat its liquids for release
into the river, or the radioactive solids it aims to recycle into construction
materials, spokesman Alan Jury declines to provide answers and instead refers me
to the International Atomic Energy Agency's review of the plant.
I track down an engineer who worked on the Kuantan plant; he agrees to speak
with me if given anonymity. Early on in the construction process, the engineer
says, his team noticed serious flaws, including moisture seeps and cracks, in
the 22 waste tanks the company was building. The problems led AkzoNobel, a Dutch
company that Lynas had contracted to create the linings for the tanks, to pull
out of the project,
a story that the
New York Times broke early this
year. When I asked about the incident, an AkzoNobel spokeswoman wrote, "Due to
changes in the Project specification, AkzoNobel would only recommend the use of
its linings on the Project subject to the successful results of longer-term
testing. That testing could not be completed within the project timescale."
"My personal opinion is that the plant can operate safely," the engineer
tells me, "providing that i's effectively engineered." So far, though, he isn't
convinced it is.
"I don't see the waste as impossible to manage, but you can't do it in
secret, and you can't do it without good numbers," agrees Gavin Mudd, a senior
lecturer of civil engineering at Australia's Monash University. "If Lynas is so
confident in its methods, then it should have no problem being transparent."
Lynas spokesman Jury says that the change of contractors was a "commercial
decision" and assures me that the new one, Trepax Innovation, is lining the
tanks "to meet the international industry standard."
I attend a press conference with Raja Dato' Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the
head of Malaysia's Atomic Energy Licensing Board, the body that subsequently
granted Lynas a license to operate. I ask Aziz, who never seems to break a sweat
or lose his grin as reporters pelt him with pointed questions, whether the board
has looked into the plant flaws. Aziz responds that the plant has been inspected
by a registered engineer. When I ask for the engineer's name, Aziz declines to
give it. Why wasn't the report available to the public? I ask.
"Because it's Lynas' document," says Aziz.
So it was Lynas that looked into the allegations made by the Dutch
contractor? He demurs, so I ask again who inspected the plant.
"I looked into the allegations," he says.
"You personally looked into them?"
"We looked into them."
"So then why can't you tell me the name of the engineer who inspected the
building for the safety flaws?"
"That's for you to find out."
Right. When I later ask Jury about the alleged inspection report, he says he
doesn't have it.
On the day that I leave Malaysia, a group of Kuantan residents
files suit against Lynas and the licensing board, alleging in
part that the board had a conflict of interest when it made a deal to receive
0.05 percent of the plant's revenue for "radiation research." When the news site
Malaysian Insider asks Aziz about the suit, he responds, "I don't know
anything about it."
DOES MY PHONE HAVE TO HAVE such a toxic footprint? Not if
manufacturers—and consumers—are prepared to spend more. In the shadow of the
Clark mountain range in California's Mojave Desert, about an hour outside of Las
Vegas, is the Mountain Pass Mine, America's only major rare-earth mine and
refinery. Owned by a company called
Molycorp, it opened in 1952 and for decades produced europium,
crucial for making color TVs. But in the late '90s, its
wastewater pipes burst, and California shut the plant down;
cleanup is still ongoing.
Then, in 2007, Molycorp executives decided to try to get the plant up and
running again. The incentive was becoming too great. At the time, China was
producing about 97 percent of the global supply of rare earths. But in 2010 it
cut exports by
35 percent in order to keep the valuable metals for its own
manufacturers. Prices rose and, fearing a shortage, members of Congress
introduced a bill that would kick-start a domestic rare-earth
renaissance by handing out federal subsidies. In March 2012, the United States,
European Union, and Japan filed a
formal complaint with the World Trade Organization over
China's manipulation of the rare-earth market.
By then engineers had developed several major improvements to refining
methods. Molycorp's new facility uses hydrochloric acid to remove thorium
earlier in the process, when it is still in a solid state. Thorium and other
waste solids are mixed into a cementlike substance, which workers spread out in
layers over a 100-acre pit lined with high-density polyethylene.
Molycorp isn't perfect. That state-of-the-art tailings field is only
permitted for 30 years; after that, a new pit would need to be built. The
facility uses about half the water that the old plant used, but its energy
demands are seven times greater. What's more, officials are tight-lipped about
how much ore Molycorp ships to a refinery in Estonia, and about the methods used
at its two Chinese refineries.
"Unless the consumers demand that China and others do
things in an environmentally sound manner," one engineer and mining consultant
told me, "they'll continue to do business as usual."
And even once Mountain Pass and other new US rare-earth plants are running at
full capacity, we won't come close to producing all the rare earths that we
consume. The United States contains only 10 percent of the world's known
deposits. A recent Congressional Research Service report recommended that the US
ensure reliable access to sources in countries like China, where rare earths are
more abundant or—more to the point—cheaper to extract and refine. "Unless the
consumers (industry or end buyers or both) demand that China and others do
things in an environmentally sound manner," Jim Kuipers, a Montana-based
engineer and mining consultant, wrote me, "they'll continue to do business as
usual."
Could recycling help? After all, Americans are buying ever more personal
electronics, but only
24 states require manufacturers to pay for e-waste recycling,
which means only
25 percent of electronics of any kind (and 11 percent of
phones and other mobile devices) are ever even collected. What programs do exist
often amount to shipping old phones and TVs to
Chinese villages, where they are broken up and bathed in acid
to remove gold and silver—resulting in terrible lead and dioxin pollution.
Upshot: Though rare earths are recyclable, only
1
percent currently are. A bit of good news: Sick of being buffeted by China's
export policies and eager to go green, Japan's major
car companies recently began recycling the rare earths in their
hybrids' batteries. Get on it, Detroit.
ONE NIGHT TOWARD THE END of my visit to Kuantan, I'm lying
in bed in a hostel in the middle of a dark neighborhood. I've been told that I'm
the only guest tonight, and the hostel's owner lives on the other side of town.
In the middle of the night, I awake to the sound of men's voices yelling outside
my room in Mandarin. The front door slams. I sit up in bed, heart pounding. The
yelling doesn't stop, and I'm becoming increasingly panicked. Something crashes,
and that's it: I grab my phone, call Tan, and text a friend back in the States:
"Don't freak out, I'm fine, but can you look up how to make an emergency call in
Malaysia just in case?" She quickly texts back, and I feel immediately better. A
little while later, the hostel owner, whom Tan called, arrives. "No scared, la!"
he assures me. (Malaysians often use "la" at the end of sentences for oomph.)
They are just last-minute guests, tea merchants who were out partying. Very
drunk but totally harmless. Mortified, I text my friend back. Then I apologize
over and over—in English and tortured Malay—to the tired owner.
As I try to fall back asleep, I realize that in this situation, my phone was
my security blanket. In different circumstances, it could have been my
lifeline.
A few days later Tan and I meet up with a group of anti-Lynas activists,
including a chatty local man named Chow Kok Chew. He explains that he moved to
the area 30 years ago—from Bukit Merah. "Every day when I went to work, I saw
awful smoke," he says. "There were a lot of factories, but none had as much
smoke as Asian Rare Earth." It was hard, he says, to start a new life here on
the east coast, hundreds of miles away from his hometown. But Chow built a
successful career as a construction supervisor and raised three children here.
Now it feels like home.
So if the plant gets built, I ask him, will he move yet again? He shakes his
head. "I am old." Still, he has been spending most of his spare time reading up
about the plant—and encouraging his friends to do the same. Next month, Chow and
his friends plan to shave their heads in protest. "If I don't do something," he
says, "I'm worried that my grandson will say, 'Grandfather, the first time you
kept quiet. The second time you kept quiet, too. Why?'"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Additional reporting by Azeen Ghorayshi. Support for this story was
provided by grants from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Puffin
Foundation Investigative Journalism Project. Read Kiera Butler's dispatches from
Malaysia here. 
