Good news from the Q gov to rescind the ban on U mining. Hope WM...

Good news from the Q gov to rescind the ban on U mining. Hope WM gets his drilling rigs lined up on that SW anomaly so we can all find out what's there. (As well as being a radiometric anomaly, it is also an Induced Polarisation anomaly (meaning the presence of sulphides of some sort).

My recollections of the CDU data is that the SW radiometric anomaly map is always shown as "total radioactivity".

Airborne radiometrics of this ilk is usually expressed, at the regional level, as total radioactivity - meaning it is recording emissions from the 3 most commonly occuring radioactive components in the landscape, namely uranium, thorium and/or potassium. [And because of the lithology, & the shape of the anomaly, I think it highly unlikely that any significant radioactivity is due to potassium.

Depending on how the data were acquired, CDU could possibly separate out the components of the radioactivity and, for instance, show the intensity of the anomaly due to U and Th as two separate maps. Or, I guess, a few drill cores will give us the answer.

We should all hope its mostly U and not Th. I don't think anyone recovers Th from hard rock mines economically. There's too much Th available in beach sands or other heavy mineral sands. All crushed and ready to go to the separator.

And while Aust has plenty of recoverable heavy mineral sand deposits containing monazite (the commonly occuring RE/Th mineral) India has enormous reserves on some of its beaches. Our best bet for the SW anomaly is for it to be a nice clean (big) uraninite deposit.

There was one curious thing about the Qld announcement. "Mines Minister Andrew Cripps said ........... the government would not consider nuclear energy production or nuclear waste disposal plants in Queensland." I wonder what he thinks will be left over after the U is removed from the ore?

[One of the curious things about U (& Th) is that most of the radioactivity is not in either U or Th - it is in the daughters of these two elements. When one removes and purifies U (or Th) from ore, you leave behind most of the radioactivity. This is discarded in the tails - the leftovers from the extraction process. And, of course, these tails have to be disposed of in a safe way.]

So I hope that Mr Cripps recognizes that if U is mined in Q, then there will certainly (& unavoidably) be nuclear waste disposal in Q - on a fairly large scale.

Cheers, Gung