Comment by lazide

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.