Grants looks to reclaim title of "Uranium Capital of the World"

[phantom power]

Rick Van Horn says this on a drive through the old Ambrosia Lake mining site north of Grants. It's his company, Uranium Resources Inc. of Lewisville, Texas, that has renewed hope among many that Grants could soon reclaim its old title.

URI last month agreed to buy Rio Algom Mining LLC and a mill license from BHP Billiton Ltd. for about $126.5 million in cash.

That includes paying $16.5 million for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to build and operate a conventional uranium mill at the Ambrosia Lake site.

Operating a mill - one that will ultimately be capable of processing 8,000 tons of uranium ore a day - is a necessary key that will allow mining companies to commence work in the area, opening a new door for New Mexico's long-dormant uranium mining industry. It comes at a time when the demand for clean-producing energy, such as nuclear power, is re-emerging.

Van Horn, the company's executive vice president and chief operating officer, said the mill and the mines it will service could create up to 4,000 jobs within the Grants Mineral Belt, leaving officials within Grants to harbor dreams of a mining renaissance.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/nov/12/grants-looks-reclaim-title-uranium-capital-world/

[AlecBGreen]

1. define "clean"

"clean-producing energy, such as nuclear power, is re-emerging"

doesnt produce GHG's
DOES produce radioactive waste

I think we should kick-start our nuclear industry but that should go hand-in-hand with the development of renewable energy sources. Nuclear is NOT the solution to all our problems.

[phantom power]

2. The phrase "clean energy" requires lots of unpacking.

The best way to define "clean" is something like "fully externalized cost per unit of energy delivered." In other words, we'd like to figure out the total economic and environmental cost of delivering a unit of energy, for all of our options, and pick the ones with the lowest total cost. This is one of those problems that is simple to state, but hard to do.

Sources like solar and wind are "clean" in the sense that they don't produce waste while they operate. You do have to make them first, and that requires manufacturing, and mining, and so the environmental impact shows up there. And you have to make a lot of them. Just as a rough example, to displace a one gigawatt nuclear plant with wind power, you would have to manufacture around 1,000 3-megawatt wind turbines (accounting for a typical 30% loading for wind power). And additionally, the costs of deploying some amount of energy storage to smooth out the supply.

So, which has the least environmental impact per unit of energy delivered? There has been only one systematic attempt at answering this, that I'm aware of:

http://externe.jrc.es/infosys.html

[DCKit]

3. I hear they're going to re-open all the old asbestos mines too. nt

[jpak]

4. So these mines could produce 16-24% of current US uranium demand for 30-40 years

if everything goes as planned...

then what?

[Nederland]

5. What about all the other mines?

I know a lot of mines got closed down in Colorado when prices hit rock bottom. I imagine there are lots of mines all over the country that closed not because they were tapped out, but merely because demand stalled.

[TheWraith]

6. True.

Even with the recent price spike, uranium is pretty much dirt cheap in terms of operating cost. That, combined with the NIMBY difficulties, is part of the reason we've shut down our uranium mining industry.

Of course surface mining is fairly inefficient compared to some of the emergent technologies, like what the Japanese are pioneering with direct capture of uranium (and other useful heavy metals) from seawater using special sponge-like filters.