COAL, URANIUM & OIL SANDS — Int’l Uranium looks to new feed sources

If it can be processed at a profit, it must be ore. Denver-based International Uranium (IUC-T), which operates the White Mesa uranium mill near Blanding, Utah, is finding that reprocessing of contaminated soils from disused processing sites across the U.S. may be as good a source of mill feed as its own mine.

This year marked the first time IUC has reprocessed soils removed from the sites of old uranium processing facilities. The U.S. Department of Defense, which has vacated some sites used to process uranium for Cold War-era weapons programs, has begun cleanup efforts on the properties, and accepted IUC’s proposal to take the excavated soils as mill feed. The first site to be cleaned up in this way was the Ashland site, near Buffalo, N.Y., which has provided almost 24,000 tonnes of soil so far and has shipped another 14,000 tonnes to White Mesa.

There are advantages in sending uranium-contaminated soils to a mill; rather than being dumped in a secure landfill site at considerable cost, the soils are stripped of their uranium in the mill, and the metal is recovered for the nuclear fuel cycle. The rest of the soil becomes mill tailings, which can be disposed of in White Mesa’s large tailings cells.

IUC makes money on both ends — it takes a disposal fee, and also sells its uranium. The net saving for the U.S. government, which does not have to pay high landfill fees, is around US$16 million.

At its Sunday Mine, in Colorado near the border with Utah, IUC mined about 53,000 tonnes of ore grading an average 0.22% U3O8 and 1.3% V2O5. Mining was discontinued at the company’s adjoining Rim property, across the border.

In the first three months of 1999, International Uranium earned US$739,411 on revenue of US$7.5 million. In the first quarter of 1998, the company made US$1.2 million on revenue of US$18.2 million.