Uranium exploration in Africa: global hunger for cleaner, cheaper energy

Resurgent global interest in nuclear power has made Zambia, a southern African nation better known for its vast copper reserves, into a hotbed of uranium exploration.

The search for uranium in Zambia is part of a larger wave of uranium exploration and mining across mineral-rich southern Africa that is raising hopes of new jobs and tax revenue, but also sparking debates over safety and security. Many countries are looking for cleaner and cheaper alternatives to oil and coal power, and uranium prices are high after a decades-long slump.
Elsewhere in Africa, exploration is ramping up across the border in Botswana. Namibia’s uranium exporting industry has seen a revival, with a US$112 million expansion of the long-running Rossing open mine and the opening of a new mine in 2006 by Australian-owned Paladin Energy Limited.

It’s the “biggest push on uranium exploration since the late ’70s,” says Alasdair Cooke, executive chairman of African Energy Resources, which has poured US$8 million into its exploration project with Albidon Mining Ltd., in southern Zambia over the past three years. “With the global energy market coming under so much pressure (from) new economies, uranium has become part of the mix.”

Faced with domestic energy shortages, the government of South Africa released a draft nuclear energy policy in August pledging a rebirth in the country’s uranium mining, processing and enrichment industries, and the construction of new nuclear reactors over the next decade. The region’s economic powerhouse, South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons program following the end of apartheid in the 1990s but still has two nuclear reactors that produce 6 percent of the country’s power.

International Herald Tribune