Comment by jjk166
14 days ago
Uranium is mined by in-situ leaching. You don't have to move any rock (well a little, but astronomically less than for traditional mining). It's not at all similar to rare-earth mining.
14 days ago
Uranium is mined by in-situ leaching. You don't have to move any rock (well a little, but astronomically less than for traditional mining). It's not at all similar to rare-earth mining.
That's one of many methods to mine uranium, used when the grades are low and the returns so poor that vast amounts of rock would have to be physically moved to return a kilogram of target ore. It works in particular geologic formations.
Large numbers of in-situ uranium wells were established in the US during the cold war at great expense to ensure some domestic supply, none the less the overwhelming majority of WWII and cold war uranium for weapons was sourced from outside the US and today the bulk of uranium for power is sourced outside the US.
The largest uranium mines in the world do not use in situ leaching, Olympic dam (the largest known single deposit) uses underground mining, specifically sublevel open stoping, to extract uranium, gold, copper, and silver.
Cameco's McArthur River mine is, IIRC, the largest producer (most currently extracted yearly, although not largest deposit) and also, not suprisingly, not an in-situ leach mine, it's underground tunnels with level to level rock grinding bores that drop rock to automated trucks, ground and slurried and then pumped to the surface for further processing some 80 km away at another plant. ( See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_cYEBotDBo )
The big issue with uranium hard rock mining is radium, radon, and similar daughter products. If you don’t care about, or are able to mitigate, the radioactive poisoning issues for workers, then it’s pretty straightforward mining wise.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Canada]
The US southwest has tons of hard rock uranium mines, and they were very economic. And it’s still done that way in Canada in some places.
The US used to be a huge uranium producer [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United...], and new mines are opening [https://www.mining-technology.com/news/three-new-uranium-min...] as prices improve again.
You can’t go much of anywhere in Arizona, Utah, etc. without running across old Uranium mines. There is even a big one on the Rim of the Grand Canyon within sight of the visitors center if you know where to look. This guy on YouTube is a reasonably responsible and informed explorer [https://youtube.com/@radioactivedrew]. They often look like hard tar like (dark and amorphous) deposits in the native sandstone.
Liquid extraction mines are ‘easier’ because humans don’t need to go into tunnels somewhere and hence be exposed to radon and similar contamination, but they’re a lot harder to actually extract uranium from. You can literally walk into a hard rock mine and just chip off a flake of pretty high grade ore. Lots of videos on YouTube of folks doing it. I’ve done it when out exploring. And yes, you need a Geiger counter and a good understanding of what is going on. I made a lead shielding box before finding my 5k CPM chip of ore, and validated that it worked.
I’ve heard of people finding 10k or even 15k CPM ore samples randomly lying around or exposed on walls of abandoned mines. Very few of these mines get the benefit of any signage (even a keep out sign) and I’ve never seen any with a sign warning of radiation. I just read some webpage when refreshing my memory which claimed uranium ores can have as high as 60k cpm of activity, which is nuts.
All of those are ‘Geiger counter continuously screaming at you and/or overlimit’ territory. Don’t carry them in your pants pocket or put them under your pillow and expect to have a good time. [https://youtu.be/CCrDcxz9gNk?si=rHOQKTYE4bf7raZE]
They’re mixed radionuclides, so make sure to have proper PPE, store safely, and follow decent decontamination/storage procedures. Don’t have a picnic inside or near any of these mines.
A lot of the older mines were before the actual risks were known or quantified. Naive radiation models didn’t take into account the risk from daughter products attached to dust properly - lung cancer rates were waaaay higher than expected based on raw radon or radiation measurements. like ‘5 packs a day of cigarettes smoking’ high even after just 5-10 years in the mines. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navaj....].
Massive numbers of locals/natives ended up dying of lung cancer because of it, as they were the ones working those early mines. Whole towns and reservations were decimated.