Uranium mining in Colorado
However, price drops and financing problems in late 2008 have forced some companies to cancel or scale back uranium-mining projects.
[2] Hydrothermal uranium deposits are present through a widely spaced area in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Larimer, Boulder, Gilpin, Clear Creek, and Jefferson counties.
About 122,000 pounds (55 metric tons) of uranium oxide (U3O8) were shipped at irregular intervals from six gold mines in the Central City district from 1872 to about 1916.
[6] The deposit consists of Tertiary hydrothermal veins filling fracture zones oriented predominantly NNW-SSE in gneiss, schist, and quartzite of the Precambrian Idaho Springs Formation.
dug 10 tonnes (22,000 lb; 10,000 kg) of yellow ore that tested high in uranium and vanadium out of a deposit at Roc Creek in Montrose County, Colorado, and shipped it to France, where M. M. C. Friedel and E. Cumenge identified the new mineral that they named carnotite.
[17] The Uravan mineral belt of Colorado and Utah supplied about half the world's radium from 1910 to 1922, and vanadium and uranium were byproducts.
Mining revived in 1935 when the price of vanadium rose, and boomed after World War II when the government stockpiled uranium for nuclear weapons programs.
[19] Energy Fuels Inc. has applied for a permit to rehabilitate and begin pilot production at the Torbyn mine, a former uranium producer in Mesa County just east of Gateway.
[20] Prospectors examined copper-stained sandstone a mile south of Garo in Park County in 1903, but the copper content was too low to mine.
Although the initial discoveries were uneconomic, they attracted further prospecting, which located commercial orebodies along the Chester thrust fault of Laramide age.
Uranium was present as meta-autunite, uranophane, uraninite, and coffinite in tufaceous fluvial sandstones of the Miocene Browns Park Formation.
Uranium is present as uraninite, coffinite, and meta-autunite in Eocene and Oligocene arkosic sandstone, conglomerate, and in sediments interbedded with Miocene volcanic flows.
[30] The Mike Doyle mine in El Paso County produced 280 pounds (130 kg) of uranium oxide from Dakota sandstone in 1955.
Rancher Solomon Schlagel discovered uranium in Weld County, Colorado in 1969 when he noticed that cuttings from seismic shotholes were anomalously radioactive.
Wyoming Minerals Corporation operated a pilot in-situ leaching plant from June 1977 to May 1978, successfully extracting uranium from a deposit in the Laramie Formation near the town of Grover.
[33] Power Resources Corporation began in-situ mining the uranium deposit in the Fox Hills Formation at Keota, Colorado in 1980.
[34] In 2006, Vancouver-based Powertech (USA) Inc.[35] bought mineral rights and leases over the Centennial Project in Weld County near Nunn, Colorado, which had been explored in the 1970s by Rocky Mountain Energy.
The uranium occurs in a series of roll fronts in sandstones of the Fox Hills Formation aligned roughly north-south over 11 miles.
Powertech's mining plans are opposed by Coloradoans Against Resource Destruction (CARD), who point out that the Fox Hills Formation is an important water-supply aquifer.
[44][45] In 2007, Energy Fuels Inc. announced plans to build a uranium-vanadium processing mill in the Uravan district, west of Naturita.
[47] Canadian-based Powertech (USA) Inc. is currently evaluating roll-front uranium deposits in its Centennial Project in Weld County on Colorado's eastern plains.
