Uranium’s Lingering Glow

“Nuclear power is cheap and you end up with lots of energy,” says Dasler. “It has a huge wealth associated with it.”

Unlike the rich concentrations in Lake Athabasca, southern surveys found sandstone-hosted uranium deposits with uranium grades below 1%. Such deposits could be mined using in-situ processes that pump acidic water into a rock core and pump out solutions rich in minerals. In-situ leaching is about 10 times cheaper than sending robots digging into radioactive mineshafts, so even those supplies could produce a commercially viable operation. Consider that a kilogram of Uranium-235 can produce as much electricity as 1,500 tonnes of coal.

“With uranium, there’s a whole lot of energy in a tiny package,” says Shahe Sabag, president of Toronto-based Dumont Nickel. “In an odd way, it’s one of the more eco-friendly energy sources. It’s a high-powered fuel, the best fuel we have on the planet. And one reactor can replace five or six coal-fired plants with no greenhouse gases.”

Uranium is one of the many minerals Dumont Nickel Inc. is looking to mine from more than 2,500 square kilometres of Alberta black shale to which it holds mining rights 120 kilometres north of Fort McMurray. Driving the search is a desire to paint a green stripe on the mining industry using a process being pioneered in Finland called bioleaching. The method uses organic compounds instead of acid solutions to unlock uranium and other metals from shale beds, says Sabag.

“Imagine running a city, or even a city block, on a small micro nuclear plant,” says Sabag, who discussed bioleaching with delegates to the 2009 Gussow Geoscience Conference in Banff in October. “There are many technologies coming down the pipeline. And we have to start assessing the risk versus the benefits. Nuclear power is infinitely safer, unlike other forms of energy which will poison us for sure.”

There are already 436 nuclear reactors producing electricity around the world, consuming 65,000 tonnes of uranium each year. Uranium production is about 45,000 tonnes annually and diluted weapons-grade uranium from decommissioned Russian and American nuclear warheads is supplying as much as 40% of those needs. But when those agreements end in 2013, it’s going to leave a huge gap for uranium producers to fill, says Vancouver-based mining analyst Lawrence Roulston. With 50 new reactors under construction and another 295 on the drawing board, the hunger for nuclear fuel is growing.

Roulston says uncovering new sources of uranium over the next decade and beyond is going to be vital for nuclear power generation. Alberta has the resource. Still, finding uranium is costly and mining it doesn’t come cheap either. Developing a conventional uranium mine can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Greg Hayes, president of Northern Tiger Resources in Edmonton, is living with the economic realities of market volatility. An offshoot of Firestone Ventures Inc., Northern Tiger has unloaded about a third of its 69,000-hectare holdings staked south of Fort Macleod and redirected its capital to finding gold.

Hayes, too, touts the fundamentals behind an eventual uranium rebound. “I think nuclear power will be increasingly important as part of future power generation unless some miraculous new technology comes along,” he says. “It’s the only way to meet our competing and complex energy needs.” Unfortunately, that rebound can’t come soon enough for a junior exploration company such as Northern Tiger. Market volatility has Hayes prospecting for a second driver to take over behind the wheel. “The long-term fundamentals for uranium are very strong, but we’re looking for a joint venture to help bring the mineral to market,” he says.

“We’re still interested in uranium and it might be possible to have something in place by end-of-year. If things look good we have the ground program planned. Now we just have to watch the market,” says Hayes. “There’s uranium in southern Alberta and it has good potential. We’re still in it and we need companies that are interested in advancing that to the next level.”

Current Issue