Mining revival: a uranium boom for a wary West

Seven mines are open so far in five Western states, including one in Utah.

By Ben Arnoldy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 19, 2007 edition

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Moab, Utah - Perched on a towering cliff above the town of Moab, the former mansion of a uranium prospector looks down on 130 acres of hazardous uranium waste piled on the banks of the Colorado River. Long after the industry went bust in the early 1990s, uranium still casts similar silhouettes of fortune and fallout across the mountains and mesas of the West.

Now, after two decades of dormancy, the uranium industry is roaring back to life thanks to a 14-fold spike in prices since 2002.

Canadian firms are snatching up old US mines with names like Pandora, Cyclone, and Whirlwind. Seven mines are open so far in five Western states, including one in Utah. Locals are scouring tattered topographical maps and driving across the wilderness; they staked 32,000 claims last year alone. And former geologists and miners are now sought-after consultants.

This boom, however, returns to a more wary West, one more reliant on tourism and less innocent about the potential pitfalls of uranium. Regulations are more stringent now, but activists say history argues against complacency.

"There are concerns because in the past the regulators let the industry get away with murder," says Sarah Fields, chair of the nuclear waste committee of the Sierra Club's Glen Canyon group in southeastern Utah. "The efforts should be put in cleaning up the old sites."

Origins of uranium boom

The nuclear arms race spurred the first uranium boom in the 1950s. Nuclear energy kept it going through the '70s. But by the early '90s, new nuclear plant construction fizzled in the US and uranium recycled from decommissioned Soviet warheads flooded the market. Prices fell so low that the industry only hung on in places like Canada, where the ore was high grade.

As late as 2002, the spot price for uranium was just below $10 per pound; now it's $138.

Supply is down due to problems at a Canadian mine and the drying up of the Russian legacy material. Meanwhile, demand is rising – 31 nuclear plants are under construction, mostly in Russia, India, and China. Interest in nuclear energy has rekindled in developed nations, too, as fossil fuels fall further from grace.

The uranium prices are helping to open up mines. The Pandora mine in Utah, less than 40 miles south of Moab, reopened in 2006. Two mines in Colorado and Nebraska also reopened in 2006 after being closed for years. Texas saw two new mines open in 2004.

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Refining uranium: Ore extracted from the Pandora mine is loaded onto a truck and hauled off to be processed and refined in the White Mesa Mills in nearby Blanding. Joanne Ciccarello - staff Hot commodity: the West's uranium boom