New Uranium Boom

Yellow Gold in Radioactive Comeback

By Richard Martin, 6-20-05

The new 21st century energy boom took another step forward over the weekend as nuclear industry nabobs gathered in Grand Junction for Uranium Expo 2005, the first significant business conference centered on uranium in the region in the last 10 years. Fueling the attendees’ upbeat outlook was the price of a pound of uranium, which has risen from single-digit lows just a few years ago to almost $30 a pound today. Chad Wasilenkoff the CEO of Canadian mining outfit Titan Uranium Exploration, predicted that the price will hit $50 a pound in the next 12 months.

Forming an arc across western Colorado, the Uravan Uranium Belt contains as much as 75 million pounds of uranium, plus 500 million pounds of vanadium, a non-radioactive element used to harden steel.

The uranium boom might seem preposterous, considering that no new nuke-plant licenses have been granted in the United States in the last 15 years. But existing facilities are running at capacity for the first time in a decade, and several big energy companies are in the pre-licensing stage for new plants. The real push is coming from the developing world: China and India, in particular, have ambitious plans for dozens of new nuclear plants in the next decade, while countries like France and Sweden already generate the bulk of their electricity from nuclear reactors.

For those who recall Three-Mile Island, Hanford and Chernobyl -- plus the fact that the Department of Energy is currently paying out billions of dollars in compensation to disease-stricken former uranium miners, many of them Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico – the prospect of a new uranium-mining industry in the West sounds like a recurring nightmare. Mining-company executives and DOE officials, though, maintain that the industry is far safer and more environmentally responsible now than it was 30 years ago – and that environmentalists are chaining themselves to the wrong tree by battling new nukes while global warming continues unabated.

I’m with the industry on this one. The world’s increasing energy demands are not going to go away, and you can either meet them with coal- or natural-gas fired power plants or with clean, renewable nuclear power. The risk of a Chernobyl-sized nuclear accident is manageable; and the alternative is to do nothing to preserve the Earth’s atmosphere from burning carbon-based fuels. I’ll take a new uranium boom in the badlands of the Southwest any day.

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