Word: mining
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...recent winter day, more than 2,000 ft. below the surface of the McArthur River mine, Dale Powder operated a scoop tram from a niche in the rock wall 100 ft. or so from the vehicle. He wore a hard hat and rubber boots, a radiation detector and a shoulder harness with a pair of joysticks that he manipulated through his heavy work gloves. The scoop tram looked like a dump truck with the cab lopped off. On solid-rubber tires 5 ft. high, it carried freshly mined ore in soccer-ball-size chunks to the "grizzly," the big grated...
Powder is from Uranium City, 186 miles northwest of the mine, and near the end of his day shift, he was one of only two dozen or so miners at work underground at McArthur River. Where Powder works, it's as dry as a bone, but a few hundred feet away, in a neighboring tunnel, a perpetual fine rain falls. The porous sandstone that encases the mine's ore zone is saturated, even in winter, with water melting from the frozen surface. To keep the water from pouring into the mining shafts, Cameco's engineers have pulled off a remarkable...
...freeze plant is only one of the technological innovations at McArthur River. The primary one is the method of production: known as "raisebore" mining, it has been commonly used to dig vertical elevator or ventilation shafts for close to 20 years. But before McArthur River came online in 1999, it had never been used to mine...
...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...
...wealth of energy these innovations produce is startling. One tramload at 60% U3O8 is worth about $134,000. A single hole produces something like $150 million worth of uranium in the 10 days or so it takes to bore it. By mining just 140 tons of ore a day (a thimbleful compared with big copper-or iron-ore mines), McArthur River produces more than 18 million lbs. of uranium a year. That's 20% of the world's annual production, enough to run 40 standard 1,000-MW reactors for a year. That much uranium can satisfy fully...