gus - where is our plant design due end feb? , page-20

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Nothing we don't already know but always good to read current attitudes and happenings with ISR mining

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Uranium mining looks to expand in Johnson County

Published:
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 12:09 PM CST
Grant Smith

The mine sites are well out of the way.

The road out is poorly paved for 30 miles before transitioning to washboard gravel. The rural housing developments thin and after another hour drive the only things in view are the Big Horn Mountains in the distant west and the nearing Pumpkin Buttes.

Besides a faded company sign, the only thing that announces arrival is an unusual array of small black boxes dotting the landscape.

“We call them prairie dog condos,” said Dayton Lewis.

In actuality, they’re header-houses constructed to keep the often savage elements away from the well-heads that extend a few feet above ground and up to 500 feet below.

Lewis is a project manager for Uranium One Mining, a worldwide mining company headquar purchased the Irrigary and Christiansen Mine sites in the southeastern corner of Johnson County and with the current economic advantage tipping toward uranium, the company is hoping to expand the operation capacity of both sites.

“We believe that at full capacity there will be a total of 40 employees combined at the Christiansen and Irrigary sites,” Lewis said. “There will be quite a few contractors working on the site. This year will be primarily one of retrofitting both sites and installing a new production well field at the Christiansen site.”

As Dayton describes it, the uranium mining industry has had a series of highs and lows over the past 70 years.

“In the 1940s there was big deposits of uranium found in New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado,” Lewis said. “When they first started mining uranium they were using an open-pit method which would leave a big hole when the mining was done. In the 1960s they started playing around with the in-situ method of mining and by 1974 the industry was wholly dedicated to the process.”

But the public’s confidence, and subsequently the market for uranium, was shaken in 1979 when the Three Mile Island accident occurred.

“I think now you’re seeing a larger and larger push for nuclear power,” Lewis said. “You look at some European countries and they operate pretty much completely off nuclear power. The market is back up in America to produce uranium for nuclear power.”

As Lewis points out, one of the strongest arguments for the power source is the minimal impact that the mining process has on the landscape.

“A lot of people wouldn’t even consider us miners,” Lewis said. “By mining in-situ we are able to minimize the impact on the surface. Once we get the wells drilled, all you really see is the header-houses.”

The way process works is through a closed looped system or pumping water. Ground wells are drilled down to the uranium deposit. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are added to the circulating groundwater that dissolves the uranium. The water is transferred back to a treatment site – via pipeline – where the uranium is extracted from the water by use of a resin.

“The uranium is extracted from the resin to form an elution,” Lewis said. “The uranium is then pressed and dried and packaged for shipment. The resin will be cleaned off and re-used.”

According to Lewis, there’s two theoretical explanations on how the uranium got to the area. One sits 100 miles away in the Laramie Mountain Range, the other is more immediate.

“One place they believe it came from is from the granite that eroded out of the Laramie Mountains,” Lewis said. “The other is the volcanic ash that covered most of Wyoming. The uranium leached down, basically by just rainwater taking it down to the sandstone.”

When Lewis speaks about the mining process from beginning to end he notes how crucial the use of water is to the operation and how closely its quality is regulated.

“We monitor all around the ore-zone so we can see if there is excursion from the leach that gets away,” Lewis said. “We also monitor above and below the well so we can keep the flow confided to the ore body. What people often don’t understand is that the water we are working with is not drinkable before we start mining and it won’t be after, but we return it pretty close back to the quality before we started.”

And that same standard of regulation applies to the process of packaging the uranium.

“Working here you actually have very low annual radiation doses due to the closed process system which limits the venting of radon,” Lewis said. “For our employees, 90 percent have an annual dose of less than 25 percent of the annual limit.”

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