Boom times for uranium mines?

Trading at $7 a pound in 2001, “yellowcake,” as it is called, hit $120 a pound in May. By the end of June it raked in as much as $138 a pound on the spot market.

The surging price has lured more than two dozen companies with mining expertise to the high-desert uranium fields here in just the past year or so, says John Indall, a Santa Fe lawyer for the Uranium Producers of America. The companies are reviving old claims, searching filing cabinets for forgotten geological maps and hiring old-timers who know the land.
“We have seen a kind of gold rush,” says William von Till, chief of the Uranium Recovery Branch at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Washington.

Von Till says prices are propelled by a belief among energy markets that nuclear power is poised for a revival. The NRC expects orders for as many as 28 new reactors over the next two years, and scores more are planned worldwide over the next decade, says Larry Camper, director of the division of waste management and environmental protection at the agency.

Why the comeback? Increasing demand for energy in developed and underdeveloped nations, coupled with worries that coal- and oil-fired power plants may contribute to global warming. Nuclear power produces zero greenhouse gases, and the USA has a massive supply of uranium.

Uranium rose as an industry in the West in the post-World War II atomic age. But production withered to almost nothing by the mid-1980s after nuclear accident scares at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union shook public faith in nuclear power.

Uranium is found widely, but New Mexico is the mother lode. Indall estimates that 600 million pounds of uranium lie under New Mexico’s sandy soil. And the energy produced by a pellet of uranium the size of a fingertip is equal to that produced by nearly a ton of coal, Lister says.

Yet not everyone is hankering for a uranium boom.

USA Today