Rush for strategic minerals might flip the Brazilian Amazon right into a radioactive sacrifice zone.
The worlds largest rainforest area might face a bleak and radioactive futuredriven by new mining tasks to extract strategic minerals important for the worldwide vitality transition, the high-tech trade, synthetic intelligence, and new weapons techniques. Some of those mineralssuch as niobium, tin, and uncommon earth elementsare present in deposits alongside radioactive uranium, thorium, and their radioactive decay merchandise, all of which finally find yourself as mining waste known as tailings.
By Norbert Suchanek
The Amazon area is threatened by an unprecedented mining growth, within the title of sustainability and local weather safety. It is on the middle of a world race for strategic minerals thought-about important for the worldwide vitality transition and decarbonization. These embody, above all, niobium, copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, tin and the 17 uncommon earth components. They are additionally crucial for high-tech merchandise like smartphones, conflict drones, missiles and AI Data facilities. Brazils mining authority has already acquired hundreds of purposes for prospection and exploration within the Amazon, a lot of that are positioned close to or inside forest reserves and indigenous territories.
According to InfoAmazonia, a news group that mixes knowledge, maps and geolocated reporting to inform tales concerning the planets largest steady tropical forest, there are 5,046 mining purposes to take advantage of important substances for the vitality transition within the Brazilian Amazon Biome.1,205 of those purposes are associated to areas that affect Indigenous Lands and 1,207 overlap Conservation Units.
In 2025, an unique survey by Brazilian investigative news outlet “Reprter Brasil” recognized 1,827 mining requests for copper, lithium, uncommon earth components, and 13 different minerals lower than 40 kilometer from remoted indigenous teams.
In its official Guide for Foreign Investors 2026 the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) expects a powerful improve of Brazil’s mineral reserves from the enlargement of geological data and the success of ongoing exploration tasks.
According to geological research potential uncommon earth deposits may be discovered within the Amazonian states of Amazonas, Rondonia, Roraima, Par, and Tocantins. One of the biggest reserves recognized in Brazil is the Morro dos Seis Lagos deposite at So Gabriel da Cachoeira within the Amazonas state.
However, the mining and processing of uncommon earths and different essential minerals are a grimy enterprise that may have severe penalties for the setting, employees and native populations. Mining, particularly open-pit mining requires clearing giant areas of land to entry mineral deposits. Rainforest has additionally to be cleared for the required employees’ settlements and entry roads. These new highways, specifically, appeal to landless settlers, land speculators, and unlawful loggers who deforest additional areas alongside the routes as noticed all through the Amazon area for many years. But that is simply the tip of the “dirty” iceberg of uncommon earths and significant mineral manufacturing.
High threat of radioactive contamination
There is a risk of widespread contamination of soil, air, and water with poisonous substances, heavy metals, and even radioactive components. This is as a result of a number of the essential or strategic minerals corresponding to niobium, tin and uncommon earth components happen within the soil in affiliation with radioactive uranium, thorium and their radioactive decay merchandise.
The contamination begins with the primary blast. Radioactive and poisonous mud brought on by the explosions spreads over the mining space. The extra rock that must be blasted and eliminated, the extra mud is generated. The quantity of mud may be diminished by irrigation techniques. However, that creates sewage containing radioactive substances and heavy metals that may enter soil and water assets. The extremely hazardous tailings, that are mixtures of crushed rocks and processing fluids from mills and concentrators should be saved in synthetic lakes or ponds for a very long time. Studies present, each tonne of uncommon earths mined generates up to2,000 tonnesof poisonous and radioactive waste.
In addition the beneficiation course of and refining of uncommon earths want an enormous quantity of vitality and chemical compounds. Flotation tailings, as much as 40 tons per ton of produced uncommon earth oxide, that embody radioactive components, are additionally discharged into the open tailings ponds which poses toxicity dangers to water, soil, and air via leakage, mud formation, and rain erosion. In addition refining processes generate additionally enormous quantities of harmful fuel. Each ton of uncommon earth components produced in China releases 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters of poisonous fuel containing flue mud focus, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, in line with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology factsheet “Mission 2016 – The Future of Strategic Natural Resources.
A team of German scientists from the Forschungszentrum Jlich studied the Environmental impacts of rare earth production in several countries including China, Myanmar and Australia. They concluded in their 2022 published study: The life cycle assessments have highlighted the main problems, such as large quantities of chemicals needed to process Rare Earth Elements and the large quantities of tailings generated during beneficiation, extraction and separation that contain the naturally occurring radionuclides Thorium and Uranium and their decay products. These radioactive elements can enter the environment through air, wastewater and rain leaching.
It should also be noted that rare earth elements are toxic to humans and animals. Recent toxicological studies show that rare earths can enter the human body through various pathways such as inhalation, ingestion and dermal contact. They accumulate in different tissues or organs and ultimately posing a serious threat to human health. A 2024 published study considers exposure to Rare Earth Elements as a public health issue of global importance. Possible consequences include lung diseases, neurological damage, cardiovascular dysfunction, reproductive harm, and increased risks of cancer and genetic damage.
Dams can and do break
After all, one of the major risks to the Amazon basin is the enormous amount of tailings from the mining operations, which are stored in huge ponds secured by artificial dams. To avoid radioactive leakage they must be monitored, and permanently managed for a very long time. However, dams can break, as has happened in the past in various countries around the world. Regions with naturally occurring heavy rainfall, such as the Amazon and the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil, are particularly vulnerable to dam breaches.
In Brazil, there have already been dozens tailings dam failures in mining areas that led to severe environmental disasters. The two worst dam collapses in Brazil to date occurred in Mariana in 2015 and in Brumadinho in 2019, both located in the Atlantic Rainforest region of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
Case studies on radioactive contamination from rare earth production
Radioactive contamination resulting from the extraction of rare earths and strategic minerals is neither an unfounded hypothesis nor science fiction. It has already occurredfor instance, in Malaysia during the 1980s: Radioactive waste from the rare earth processing plant of Asian Rare Earth and the Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation poisoned the local population of Bukit Merah. When the Mitsubishi joint venture plant opened over 1982, the villagers soon began complaining of the factorys stinging smoke and bad smell which made them choke and cry. Worse was to come. Their health began failing, indicated not only by frequent bouts of coughs and colds, but a sharp rise in the incidence of leukemia, infant deaths, congenital disease and lead poisoning, remembers the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP). The affected population protested and went to court. Finally, in 1994, the Bukit Merah plant closed. The rare earth company left behind its radioactive waste, stored in 80,000 drums of 200 liters each in a dump site just three kilometers outside from Bukit Merah.
Another dirty rare earth mining hotspot is Myanmar, also in Southeast Asia. This country is one of the largest rare earth exploiters in the world serving the Chinese industry for years with dear consequences. The mines along the Myanmar-China border generate radioactive waste and chemical contaminants that seep into waterways, degrading local ecosystems and disproportionately impacting indigenous populations.
A research by Thailands Naresuan University found that water samples taken from areas of extraction in Kachin State were severely contaminated with radioactive elements, toxic heavy metals and other harmful substances. In 2025, the policy brief Kachin, a Sacrifice Zone for the Green Transition of the EarthRights organization in Washington DC brought to light the environmental destruction and human rights violations resulting from the mining of heavy rare earth elements in Myanmar: Mining in Kachin is leaving creeks and rivers dangerously contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive elements. Worse: These rivers are tributaries of the great Mekong, one of the most fish-biodiverse rivers in the world and a food source for millions of people.
Toxic runoff from these (Rare Earth) mines is polluting transboundary rivers that run from Myanmar into Thailand and then into the Mekong mainstream. People living in the affected areas cannot use the rivers for fishing, their agricultural products are shunned at markets in Thailand, and they fear their bodies are being exposed to toxins, wrote the Stimson Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., in its 2025 published field note Toxic Rare Earth Mining is Ruining Mekong Tributaries in the Golden Triangle.
Even in the Amazon basin, mining activities have already led to radioactive contamination on at least one occasion.
In 1993, a tailings dam at the Pitinga open pit mine in the state of Amazonas at Presidente Figueiredo municipality, roughly 130 kilometers north of Manaus collapsed, contaminating the Tiaraju River of the Waimiri Atroari indigenous territory with heavy metals and radioactive elements. Pitinga was established in 1981 during the military dictatorship by the mining company “Minerao Taboca” and has produced primarily tin ore and niobium since 1982. However, the polymetallic deposit additionally incorporates different strategic minerals corresponding to tantalum, uncommon earth components and the radionuclides thorium and uranium, that are ultimately discovered within the tailings and processing residues.
The dam collapse on the Pitinga mine is severe and may concern all the group, as there may be proof that the corporate launched radioactive minerals that would trigger irreversible environmental injury, warned the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI) on the time. The Waimiri Atroari reported circumstances of tooth loss, hair loss, and leukemia: typical signs and penalties of radiation publicity or radioactive contamination.
Egydio Schwade, a co-founder of the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) and resident of Presidente Figueiredo, witnessed already in 1985 the discharging of Pitingas mining waste into the Tiaraju Stream, a tributary of the Alala River, which serves because the lifeblood of the Waimiri-Atroari Reserve and flows into the Rio Negro. Conditions worsened considerably within the years that adopted 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992 as a result of successive failure of containment dams, he remembers in his 2016 revealed report Criminal Mining: A Testimony.
Another accusation comes from the indigenist Porfrio Carvalho of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs company (FUNAI). In 1987, he denounced the collapse of 9 dams of the Pitinga mine, which polluted the Riaraju, Alala, and Jauaperi rivers and threatened the fauna and flora of the Amazon. Although he didn’t point out radioactive contamination as a result of an absence of technical evaluation, he described it as a large-scale ecological catastrophe within the area. Carvalho has been accompanying the Waimiri Atroari because the late Sixties. He died in 2017 from most cancers, aged 70.
The mining firm Minerao Taboca, which operates the Pitinga Mine in Amazonas, was offered in November 2024 to the Chinese state-owned firm CNMC (China Nonferrous Metal Mining Company) for US$340 million. The Chinese firm goals to quadruple manufacturing at Pitinga. In addition it plans to take advantage of the mines uncommon earth minerals. Pitinga is taken into account a possible hotspot for large-scale uncommon earth mining within the Amazon. These components are current not solely within the major ore physique of Pitinga but additionally within the greater than 6,000 hectares of tailings ponds that include greater than 100 million tonnes of waste rock.
According to the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) the Pitinga mining advanced is emblematic for Brazils historic injustice towards indigenous peoples and the systematic downplaying of environmental air pollution and the dangers related to tailings dams.
Norbert Suchanek is an skilled journalist based mostly in Rio de Janeiro Born in Germany in 1963, Norbert Suchanek has been researching and writing about environmental and human rights points since 1988. In 2025, he acquired the Nuclear-Free Future Award within the Education class in New York City. He can be co-founder of the International Uranium Film Festival.
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