Why Estonia?
"The only reliable rare earth producer that does not depend on the People's Republic of China or on raw material supplied from there."
That is how the Silmet plant at Sillamäe, in Estonia, described itself in 2007. It raised its prices on that basis.
Fast forward to 2019 it lost its radiation license. Because the limit value for NORM[1] residues was reached.
Without the license, it could not process columbite and tantalite, the ores it makes niobium and tantalum from. Rare metal sales volume fell 24 per cent in a year. Despite access to non-radioactive feedstock.
More than 600 tonnes of thorium-bearing residue was sitting in storage at the plant. Estonia had no place to put it. In France the thorium goes nowhere. But in Estonia it went somewhere.
Where did the thorium start?
The pond
Sillamäe is a plant on the Baltic shore. It was built between 1946 and 1948 for the Soviet nuclear programme. It processed uranium first. The tailings went into a pond. From about 1970 it processed loparite, an ore from the Kola Peninsula that had niobium, tantalum, rare earths and thorium. The Kola ore contained up to 5-6 kg/t of thorium. Thorium cake was sent to the same tailings pond.
They developed a process to remove the thorium by extraction with tributyl phosphate, but it was not used in the plant.
The pond is on the shore and drains to the Baltic. It has about 1,200 tonnes of uranium and 800 tonnes of thorium. The pond was built to leak into the sea. It was designed and constructed as a filtering facility, to retain solids while allowing liquids to drain into the sea.
The leak caused contamination and they could not close the drain either. Reduction of the outflow of water would increase the horizontal forces on the dam and destabilize it.
Turn your phone sideways to read the charts. They are best on a desktop.
the highest, 18 times the limit
the highest, 28 times the limit
All figures are transcribed from the documents cited, some from scanned laboratory sheets. Where a number here differs from the original, the original is right. Check the original sources before publishing or quoting.
Table view +−
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Dam at the start, 1959 / tailings at the end of 1962 / dam 1964 / 1984 / by 1996 | 12 / 12.35 / 16 / 22 / 24.5 to 25.5 m |
| Layer 6, pebbles with ashes and sandy clay | 648,000 t |
| Layer 5, wastes from uranium ore treatment | 4,052,000 t |
| Layer 3, wastes from loparite ore treatment | 4,000,000 t |
| Uranium processing residues / oil shale residue and loparite waste | 6.3 / 6.1 million t |
| The plant's account: uranium tails / oil shale ash / loparite tails | 4 / 1.5 / 0.14 million t |
| Thorium: wall / old deposition / present deposition / crust | 1.2 to 78.1 / 11.3 / 3,750 / 3.5 to 9.1 ppm |
| Uranium: wall / old deposition / present deposition / crust | 35 to 299 / 290 / 42 / 0.91 to 2.4 ppm |
| Thorium and uranium in the pond | 800 t and 1,200 t, or 850 t and 1,830 t |
| Radium 226 in the pond | up to 12 kg, or 7.8 kg |
| Water from the pond to the sea, 1990s | 1,600 m³ a day |
| Nitrogen / mineral matter carried to the sea, 1990s | 1,500 t / 6,000 to 12,000 t a year |
| Uranium 238, shore wells, Aug 2002 to Oct 2006 (limit 0.1) | 1.49, 1.75, 1.05, 1.05, 0.99, 0.69, 0.69, 0.38, 0.52, 0.43, 0.58, 0.46, 0.45, 0.29, 0.975, 0.46, 0.49, 0.715 mg/l |
| Radium 226, bottom plants, Sep 2003 to Aug 2008 (food limit 10) | 227, 38.7, 80, 85, 131, 281 Bq/kg |
| Thorium above 0.02 mg/l in seepage, on the sheets, 2009 to 2014 | 21 readings in 10 of 17 rounds |
| Pipe dismantled / cover finished | 29 Aug 2003 / Oct 2008 |
Then the Soviet Union ended. Estonia now an independent state that never developed any nuclear activities, was faced with handling this plant and its wastes.
So who paid to clean it up?
Nobody
Silmet is the name the plant took when it was privatized in 90s, after Estonia inherited the site. It has had four owners since: Silmet Grupp, then the Swiss company Zimal from 2005, then the American company Molycorp from 2011, then Neo Performance Materials from 2016. Today it is NPM Silmet. None of the owners appears in the financing of the pond's clean-up. The later ones because the pond was not theirs.
Ökosil is the cleanup company, formed by government order in 1998 to deal with the plant's tailings pond. It's a joint venture between the Estonian government and Silmet Grupp. The pond belonged to the plant's parent, Silmet Grupp. The cleanup company rented it.
The cleanup cost came from the European Commission's Phare programme, the Nordic governments and Estonia.
This seemed like an unfair advantage to the owners of the plant, since they got rid of the waste without paying for the clean-up. But on 29 August 2003 the pipe to the pond was dismantled. Because that was the plan from years before. Estonia wanted to close the pond.
Then the pond was closed but Silmet was still operational.
So where did the thorium go once, they cut the pipe?
Barrels
It stayed at the plant, inside a storage.
And more kept arriving, though no longer with the rare earths. The plant had found rare earth feed which contained NORM below the exemption levels.
The other half of the plant had no such feed. The production of Nb and Ta still uses radioactive raw material and the NORM waste generation continues.
The state knew what it lacked. Its first national radiation safety plan, in 2008, says so: a state system for management and storage of radioactive waste containing natural radionuclides is lacking in Estonia. Permanent storage or recovery was required, it wrote, but a suitable method is yet to be found.
But Estonian law already said what to do with radioactive waste. What did it say?
Hand it over
The Radiation Act says the licence holder must hand radioactive waste to a radioactive waste storage site within five years of its production.
Estonia has one such site. It is the interim store at Paldiski, run by A.L.A.R.A.[2]
But that store was built for other waste, and it did not take the waste produced at Silmet.
When Estonia set up its radioactive waste organisations in the 1990s, it split the Soviet sites between two companies. A.L.A.R.A. got the submarine training centre at Paldiski and the old depository at Tammiku. The Sillamäe pond assigned to Ökosil.
In 2012 a paper co-written by an official of the regulator described the problem:
"Under the Radiation Act, the producer of radioactive waste should transfer the arising waste to the radioactive waste management operator in at least 5 years. Unfortunately, there is no radioactive waste management operator for NORM waste in Estonia."
That was 2012. Today the state operator does hold a little NORM waste at Paldiski: 24.8 cubic metres in 2018 and 32 in 2024. What Estonia still does not have is a disposal site for it. There are no plans to establish a NORM waste storage site in Estonia.
The state's answer was that the duty did not count. This requirement does not apply to NORM waste, since the Environmental Board (the regulator) decides the way of management of NORM residues and waste separately each time while processing the radiation practice licence application.
The five-year clause carries no such exception. But another section of the same Act says the storage of NORM waste is set by the license.
And there was a cleaner way out. What if it is not waste?
The word
In January 2014 the plant's license described the material as residue. The state's programme explained why a year later: it can be used as secondary raw material. So, the programme wrote, radioactive waste would not be generated at the plant at least until 2018.
Nothing physical had changed. Only the name.
The Radiation Act defines a residue as material which it is intended still to use in the future. It sets no time limit and no test of the intention.
France did this in 2004. It declared the thorium a useful material, so it was no more waste. Estonia used the same trick ten years later.
But a residue needs a use. What was the use?
Fuel
Molycorp had bought the plant in 2011. The plan was to ship the residue to Molycorp's Mountain Pass operation in California.
There it would be reprocessed, "together with mine tailings to obtain alternative nuclear fuels."
The state wrote the date of removal into its national programme.
Molycorp Silmet "wants to deliver the NORM residues to the parent company Molycorp Minerals LLC (United States of America) by 30 July 2018, at the latest."
But in 2016 Molycorp Minerals went bankrupt.
The plant passed to Neo Performance Materials, and the residue stayed where it was. The plant listed three routes:
Disperse it in oil shale ash.
Send it to the Karabalta uranium plant in Kyrgyzstan.
Send it to Energy Fuels, a nuclear energy company in the United States.
What was the plan once the buyer was gone?
The harbour
The idea goes back to 2009 and was published in 2012. The harbour was already being filled with oil shale ash. The plan was to add 48 tonnes of the residue to 110,000 tonnes of that ash, and use the mix in the construction of the harbour. The paper that proposed it, co-written by the regulator's official, called this the optimal solution.
There is a problem with that. From 6 July 2018, the Radiation Act bans the deliberate dilution of radioactive material to get it out from under the Act. It allows one exception: the Environmental Board may license dilution for recovery or recycling. I haven’t found any evidence of dilution so far.
That rule took effect 24 days before the export date.
So the barrels had not moved out of Estonia. And the licence that let the plant hold them had a limit. What happens when the limit is reached?
The limit
The licence ended on 30 January 2019.
"Today the company has no licence for the said activities."
That is the difference with France. At La Rochelle the right to hold the residue is large and old, and it protects the plant. At Sillamäe the right to hold it was small, and when it was used up the plant could no longer process its two niobium and tantalum ores.
Holding thorium had a price for the first time. The plant had booked a provision for transporting and reprocessing the residue, and by the end of 2017 it stood at 3.9 million euros. Even the auditor drew attention to it. Separately, in 2019, the regulator asked the plant for a bank guarantee of 2.3 million euros, as proof of the financial security needed to make the NORM residue safe.
In 2019 the plant signed a contract with Energy Fuels. The shipment waited on a licence change in Utah.
Did it ever leave?
May 2022
Yes.
The company sent the NORM residues to the USA in May 2022. Unloading and acceptance by the buyer, Energy Fuels, began in June.
By the end of the year the residues were transported out of Estonia and accepted by the buyer in the USA. The provision was used up and the project closed.
But how could it leave at all?
Estonian law says radioactive waste that arises in Estonia is disposed of in Estonia, unless an agreement with another state is in force. Estonia had no such agreement as of 2015.
That rule is written for waste. This was residue. A residue going abroad as secondary raw material needs only a license.
So the word did two jobs. It let the material stay for eight years without being handed over. Then it let the material go.
The barrels are gone. Is the story over?
What stayed
No.
With the site free of residue the plant could apply again for a licence to process tantalite and columbite. Then, in autumn 2023, it took the final decision to stop hydrometallurgy. It gave market reasons. It now buys ready oxides. And by 2024 it was importing products from Neo group companies in China, among other suppliers.
And after the residue left, a new bill appeared. The clean-up provision rose from 500,000 euros to 2,400,000 in 2025. It is for the areas and equipment contaminated by processing materials with a historical NORM content.
A pond, a shipment abroad and a clean-up bill. Who was keeping count?
Nobody's job
The European Commission ranks the Sillamäe pond as one of Estonia's two main legacy issues. Its last check of Estonia, in 2020, did not include Sillamäe.
In 2018, after the export date had passed, Estonia told the Commission that its radioactive waste flow was about 0.85 cubic metres a year. More than 500 tonnes of residue sat at the plant that year. It was not in the figure, because residue is not waste.
So if nobody was counting, what protected the plant all those years?
The pile is not the competitive advantage
In France the pile was the moat. Rhodia holds an old right to keep its residue on site already contaminated, and a new entrant would have to ask for that right today on a clean site.
Estonia shows the other side of it.
The old contamination did help the plant. The public paid for the pond. No provision for it ever appeared on the plant's books. That is part of what let the plant sell itself as the only producer outside China.
Owning the feed helped too, for a while. In 2005 Zimal controlled the mine, the first processor and Silmet under one group, and the plant wrote that belonging to this group guarantees the raw material. The thorium came in with it. By 2009 supply contracts were being postponed over price and quantities.
But the right to hold new residue had a ceiling, and in 2019 the ceiling cost the plant its two ores.
So the thing that protected the plant was never a place to put the thorium. Buy feed that someone else has already removed thorium from. Call what is left a residue. Find a buyer abroad before the licence fills up.
What should an investor ask?
Where does the thorium go
Ask it this way. If I opened a separation plant in Estonia today, how would I get rid of the thorium?
There are five solutions.
Never let it in. Buy feed that arrives below the exemption level. Then ask who cleaned it, and where.
Call it residue. You may hold it under your license if regulator assigns one to you, up to the limit. The regulator may ask for a guarantee, and here it asked for 2.3 million euros. When the limit is reached the license expires.
Export it as raw material. If you find a buyer.
Dilute it into fill. Banned, unless the regulator licenses it as recycling. Planned by the plant for 2024. Not shown to have happened.
Hand it over as waste. To a country that plans no storage site for it.
A project that tells you it has solved its thorium has done one of those five. Ask which.
Notes
[1] NORM means naturally occurring radioactive material. It is the label the Estonian documents put on this residue: radioactive because of the uranium and thorium that came in with the ore.
[2] A.L.A.R.A. is the state's radioactive waste company.
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Published by House of Hōma OÜ, registered in Estonia.
