Uranium and Nuclear Power Industry – Page 37

Uranium: the unloved metal whose price is poised to go radioactive – by Jon Yeomans (The Telegraph – November 20, 2016)

November 29, 2016

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Last month, shovels hit the ground in a dry corner of western Spain, near the ancient city of Salamanca. Berkeley Energia, a mining company listed in Australia and on London’s junior AIM market, started work on a $100m (£80m) uranium mine.

The project hopes to create nearly 500 jobs in a depressed former mining region and tap into future demand for the heavy metal, which powers nuclear reactors.

To fund its plans, Berkeley recently raised $30m from a placing of new shares, winning support from funds run by the likes of Blackrock and JP Morgan. When it opens in 2018, the mine will be one of the lowest-cost uranium producers in the world – and the only such mine in Europe, turning out 4.5m pounds a year.

Fact Checker: The facts behind Trump’s repeated claim about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Russian uranium deal – by Michelle Ye Hee Lee (Washington Post – October 26, 2016)

October 26, 2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

“Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium — gave Russia for a big payment.”
— Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 25, 2016

“Remember that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium and, you know, she was paid a fortune. You know, they got a tremendous amount of money.”
— Donald Trump, campaign rally, Oct. 24, 2016

“She even handed over American uranium rights to the Russians.”
— voice-over in Trump campaign ad, “Corruption”

Hillary Clinton’s involvement with a Russian uranium deal has come under scrutiny since author and Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer dedicated a chapter to the topic in his 2015 book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”

Cameco and the CRA head to court over potential $2.2-billion tax dispute – by Ian Bickis (Financial Post – October 4, 2016)

October 4, 2016

http://business.financialpost.com/

The world’s largest publicly traded uranium company will clash in court this week with the Canadian Revenue Agency over a potential $2.2-billion tax bill.

At question is whether Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp. set up a subsidiary in low-tax Switzerland and sold it uranium at a low price simply to avoid tax, as the CRA contends. Cameco maintains it was a legal and sound business practice.

For the uranium producer the case presents a serious risk of impact to its bottom line, as the CRA looks to shift an estimated $7.4 billion in foreign earnings between 2003 and 2015 back to Canada.

Cameco to court over tax bill (Mining.com – October 3, 2016)

October 3, 2016

http://www.mining.com/

Canada’s biggest uranium producer, Cameco, is set to appear in court on Wednesday to dispute accusations of setting up a subsidiary in Zug, Switzerland for the purpose of avoiding taxes.

Canada Revenue Agency contends whether the Saskatoon-based corporation wanted to dodge its fiscal duties by signing a 17-year agreement in 1999 with its Swiss arm to sell uranium at the fixed price of about US$10 per pound.

The practice is seen as ‘unfair’ given that the price of uranium rose to over US$130 a pound by 2007 and, despite the fact it has been in a steep downward trend ever since, still trades at over US$20 a pound today.

Desperate uranium miners switch to survival mode despite nuclear rebound – by Geert De Clercq (Reuters U.S. – October 3, 2016)

October 3, 2016

http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON – The nuclear industry is gradually recovering from its post-Fukushima slump, but excess capacity keeps uranium prices at record lows, forcing mining companies to mothball mines, slice costs and cut debt as they struggle to survive.

In the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, Japan closed its nuclear reactors, which accounted for some ten percent of the more than 400 reactors operating globally. Several other countries including Germany announced plans to exit nuclear, and in the past three years several nuclear reactors in the United States were closed as they could no longer compete with cheap shale gas.

Five years later, only three of Japan’s 42 reactors are back in operation but new reactors brought online in China and other countries have partly made up for the Japanese closures.

Activists: Old uranium mines polluting Angostura – by Staff (Rapid City Journal – September 22, 2016)

March 19, 2017September 22, 2016

http://rapidcityjournal.com/

Members of three activist groups say recent research shows that abandoned uranium mines are contributing to elevated uranium levels in Angostura Reservoir in the southern Black Hills.

The research was recently published in the journal Environmental Earth Sciences by authors that included two South Dakota School of Mines & Technology scientists, Rohit Sharma and James Stone. The article is titled “Stream sediment geochemistry of the upper Cheyenne River watershed within the abandoned uranium mining region of the southern Black Hills.”

According to the Clean Water Alliance, Dakota Rural Action and It’s All About the Water, the research shows that elevated uranium levels at Angostura are partly caused by human activity, including abandoned uranium mines and a former mill at Edgemont. Elevated uranium levels at Angostura Reservoir are comparable to the elevated uranium levels upstream in the Cheyenne River watershed at abandoned mines, the groups said.

Excerpt from Sun Dogs and Yellowcake: Gunnar Mines – A Canadian Story – by Patricia Sandberg

September 20, 2016

To order a copy of Sun Dogs and Yellowcake: Gunnar Mines – A Canadian Story, click here: http://patriciasandberg.com/purchase-book/

Patricia Sandberg was formerly a partner at DuMoulin Black, a Vancouver law firm acting for mining companies listed on Canadian and international stock exchanges. Her clients had mining operations in Canada, the United States, China, and Latin America. Three generations of her family, including Patricia as a child, lived at Gunnar and her grandfather spent thirty years working at mines run by Gilbert LaBine, Canada’s “Father of Uranium.”

Shooting the Elephant

Re-enter Gilbert LaBine, some twenty years after his radium score and now sixty-two years old. LaBine, in his nominal positions as president and director of Eldorado, was well informed about Eldorado’s moves in the Beaverlodge area. He was also not averse to conducting a little business of his own.

His first foray was with a highly competent, experienced pilot named John “Johnny” Nesbitt, who had spent his life flying in Canada’s north country, including for Eldorado and its Great Bear Lake operations. When Eldorado switched its focus to Lake Athabasca, Nesbitt added the Beaverlodge operation to his flight path.

Potential $1 billion work to clean up Arizona’s dangerous Navajo uranium mines – by Mike Sunnucks (Phoenix Business Journal – September 19, 2016)

September 20, 2016

http://www.bizjournals.com/

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is starting what could be a $1 billion, years-along process to clean up abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation land in northern Arizona. There are more than 500 abandoned uranium minds on the sprawling Indian reservation that cuts across northeastern Arizona as well as parts of Utah and New Mexico.

From 1944 to 1986, mining companies extracted more than 30 million tons of uranium from mines on Navajo land. The mining was fueled by the U.S. Cold War with the former Soviet Union and the super powers’s nuclear arms race.

Uranium is key to nuclear weapons and northern Arizona, in particular the Navajo Nation, had deep deposits. Private companies often hired Navajos to work at the mines.

Uranium Investments Grow Radioactive – by Spencer Jakab (Wall Street Journal – September 18, 2016)

September 19, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/

No commodity faces the unique pressure that uranium and nuclear fuel do and there is little prospect of a near-term recovery

There is too much of nearly every commodity in the world today. Then there is uranium. The outlook for the element that powers nuclear reactors may be worse than for any other, and there is almost no prospect for improvement soon. Unlike other commodities, low prices won’t stimulate demand.

There are several reasons for the weakness, some obvious, others surprising. The result has been the price of triuranium octoxide, which surged 1,400% in the five years through June 2007 to $136 a pound, is now about $25. And the price of fuel processing has dropped by nearly two-thirds since 2010.

The obvious reasons are the shutdown of nuclear power plants after the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan. Plants also shut down in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere, while Belgium and Taiwan may be next.

[Gilbert Labine, Eldorado Mine] Treasure Under the Arctic’s Rim – by Leslie Roberts (MACLEAN’S Magazine – July 15, 1936)

September 15, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

Men said Great Bear Lake mineral wealth was too far north to be developed — Now men fly that wealth to market

THEY CALLED it a madman’s pipedream. possibility They said that anyone who believed in the possibility of producing minerals 1,500 miles north of the most northerly transcontinental steel, ought to consult an alienist.

That was when the boys started prospecting the rim of the Arctic. Even when Gilbert Labine, hard-headed visionary, and E. C. St. Paul, his partner, discovered pitchblende on the shores of Great Bear Lake, May 16, 1930, the Jeremiahs continued to wail.

What was the use? You couldn’t get your machinery in and you couldn’t get your ore out. Fly it out? Faugh, the man is mad. That was in 1930.

Visualize now the shores of Great Bear Lake in 1936. Where Labine discovered radium-bearing rock in 1930, a modern mining plant is in constant operation. Shafts have been thrust down to depth. A concentrating plant capable of handling 100 tons of rock a day has been installed and is running full blast. A hundred men are permanently employed.

‘They are absolutely huge:’ Wolves attack [uranium miners] in Northern Saskatchewan as animals lose fear of humans – by Tristin Hopper (National Post – September 15, 2016)

September 15, 2016

http://news.nationalpost.com/

From the dining hall, it sounded like a fight — a midnight scuffle between feuding workers at the Cigar Lake uranium mine.

A security guard hopped into her vehicle to break it up, and for a split second, her headlights illuminated a scene that was anything but a fist fight: a wolf with its jaws around the neck of a 26-year-old kitchen worker. The truck’s arrival spooked the wolf away and the security guard, who has declined media interviews, sprang out to provide first aid.

An adult gray wolf can easily bite through even the thickest moose bones; a fleshy human neck provides little obstacle. A few more seconds and the worker likely would have been dead instead of recuperating in hospital. “A single wolf basically pounced on him,” was what a mine representative told the press.

Wolf attacks aren’t supposed to happen this way, but wolves don’t exactly act as expected in Northern Saskatchewan.

[PORT RADIUM’S ELDORADO] THE MINE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD – by Ronald A. Keith (MACLEAN’S Magazine – November 15, 1945)

September 14, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

A vivid first-hand report on Eldorado, the supersecret mine in the Arctic, which produces the raw material for atomic bombs

IT WAS cold and wet and eternally midnight. Our helmet lamps were bleared with rock dust as they flickered along the cavern walls, tracing bright patterns of ore stain against the black velvet of the perpetual darkness. The icy breath of ventilating air reminded us that this was no ordinary hard-rock mine but a cave under the floor of Great Bear Lake, within 26 miles of the Arctic Circle.

Our oilskins were beaded with moisture; everywhere was the drip of seepage, the silent flow of water underfoot, the trickle of subterranean streams and the clean cool smell of wet rock. Suddenly, our tunnel halted against a rugged face of pre-Cambrian rock. There, jet-black and glistening in the torchlight, was a broad vein of ore. “That” said Joe Belec, “is it!”

We stood there in the Eldorado mine, 1,000 ft. below the surface of the largest subarctic lake in the world, and gazed thoughtfully at what might have been a seam of coal, but what we knew to be the black magic of pitchblende, the source of uranium, the earth-quaking substance of atomic power.

‘A very particular time and place in Canada’s history’: New book recalls Saskatchewan’s forgotten uranium mine – by Alex MacPherson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix – September 12, 2016)

September 13, 2016

http://thestarphoenix.com/

Almost nothing is left of the Gunnar uranium mine. What didn’t decay after the mine on the north shore of Lake Athabasca was abandoned more than five decades ago was later hauled away as part of a massive — and massively over-budget — cleanup operation. Patricia Sandberg, whose father and grandfather worked for Gunnar Mining Ltd., and who spent eight years of her childhood at the northern Saskatchewan mine, worries it will be forgotten altogether.

“It is a part of Canadian history that most people don’t know about, and I think it’s really important,” said Sandberg, whose new book, Sun Dogs and Yellowcake, chronicles the mine’s history and records the stories of the people who lived and worked there.

The Gunnar uranium mine, located about 800 kilometres north of Saskatoon, was discovered by prospectors working for Gilbert LaBine, the Ontario-born explorer who is widely considered the father of Canada’s uranium industry.

Uranium mining contributes small fraction of total nuclear power emissions, study says – by Alex MacPherson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix – September 8, 2016)

September 9, 2016

http://thestarphoenix.com/

Despite critics’ claims that mining and milling uranium is a hidden cost in the comparatively clean nuclear fuel cycle, extracting the radioactive material produces only a small fraction of the process’s total emissions, according to the author of a new study.

“There were some gaps in our understanding about what the actual emissions from the full nuclear fuel cycle were,” University of Saskatchewan engineering graduate student David Parker said of the idea underlying the study.

“One area with a lot of gaps that critics was pointing to was mining and milling. The thought was this gap in our understanding of greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining and milling might be a significant contributor to total emissions.”

ELLIOT LAKE’S GLAMOROUS RISE AND BITTER FALL – by McKenzie Porter (MACLEAN’S Magazine – July 16, 1960)

September 2, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

This is a candid portrait of the hundred-million-dollar boom town that was built on uranium—the mineral with sex appeal— and of the mesmerized thousands who learned the hard way that it was just another mining camp after all

ELLIOT LAKE IS the most elaborate mining camp ever built, and until recently it was the luckiest. Although it is buried in the northern Ontario bush, half way between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie, it looks like a metropolitan suburb.

Moose, bears and wolves peep nervously down from majestic heights of rock and pine upon a hundred million dollars’ worth of fluorescent lights, crescent streets, split-level homes, three – story apartment blocks, cantilevered shopping plazas, breeze-way schools, wide-screen movie theatres, picture-window hotels, functional churches, a lakeshore community centre and the finest hospital north of Lake Huron.

Ed Gibbons, a former editor of the Elliot Lake Standard, once described the town as “a frontier monument to the architectural theories of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright,” and he spoke more in wonder than in jest.