Miners having a blast in Utah uranium rush

MOAB, Utah – Utah mining prospector Kyle Kimmerle has more than a hunch that uranium will make him rich. It is a conviction so strong he has bet his house on it.

‘We literally spent every dollar we had in savings, hawked and sold our houses and put everything we owned into this. We went all in,’ said Kimmerle, who runs a funeral home in this Canyonlands city. ‘My wife is scared, but I’m not.’

He is among a rush of prospectors in the Colorado Plateau mineral belt who are thumping stakes into public land and registering claims, hoping to get rich on the back of record uranium prices.

The boom is reviving the fortunes of a storied mining area in the U.S. Southwest where large uranium ore deposits were first tapped for the voracious Cold War nuclear weapons program in the early 1950s, before suffering a slump.

Reuters