Word: cameco
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...federal officials, including Republican Pete Domenici, who is chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. URENCO , an Anglo-Dutch-German consortium, hopes to build in New Mexico as part of Louisiana Energy Services, or LES, an alliance that includes the big American firms Exelon, Duke and Entergy, as well as Cameco, a uranium mining company and Westinghouse, a nuclear fuel manufacturer. If it is built, the plant would produce fuel for nuclear power generation in the U.S. and abroad...
There, far underground, rock-breaking machines crumble and grind the ore and mix it with water to form a soupy slurry, which is piped to surface containers to await transport to the Cameco refining mill at Key Lake, about 50 miles away. This underground processing plant is McArthur River's third major innovation. "What we've done," says Doug Beattie, the mine's chief engineer, "is essentially bring the front end of the mill down to the mine...
...reactors for a year. That much uranium can satisfy fully 2% of the world's electricity demand--as much as would be provided by 140 million tons of coal (twice Canada's annual production) or 450 million bbl. of oil (more than twice Qatar's annual production). Cameco expects to take 585 million lbs. of uranium out of McArthur River during the next 25 years or so--not counting a second ore zone, not yet fully delineated, a few hundred feet west of the current mine. And that still won't be enough to meet the world's growing hunger...
...glossy black that gleams like marble. It's easy to imagine the radioactive energy stored in this rock. Whatever your environmental stance, at McArthur River you can sense the elemental power of uranium, a clean-burning source of seemingly limitless electricity. And you can understand former Cameco CEO Bernard Michel's assessment: "The world is seeing a fresh start for nuclear power...
Michel, 65, a Frenchman who stepped down as CEO in January and was succeeded by American Gerald Grandey, 56, spent his career turning Cameco from a Canada-focused mining company into a worldwide energy conglomerate. Cameco's goal is to become the ExxonMobil of uranium: a vertically integrated multinational involved in every stage of the fuel cycle, from extracting raw ore to fuel enrichment to delivering fuel rods. The company is a middleman in the U.S.-Russian program to import and reprocess uranium from decommissioned Soviet-era warheads, for use in reactors. With its 15% stake in the Bruce Power...