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State says material 'doesn't really present that much of a hazard'; plans to truck sulfuric acid into Montrose County site MONTROSE - Opponents of a proposed uranium mill in southwestern Colorado near the Utah state line may be relieved to hear that state officials in charge of overseeing the transport of incoming ore and outgoing yellowcake don't actually consider such things "nuclear materials." Uranium yellowcake and sulfuric acid would be carted along I-70 in Colorado By state statute, uranium ore and processed yellowcake, used to make fuel rods for nuclear reactors, are considered mere hazardous materials and therefore not limited to transportation along the state's designated nuclear materials routes. "When you're dealing with yellowcake shipments, they get carried in pretty much a dump truck," said Capt. Allan Turner of the Colorado State Patrol's Hazardous Materials Transport Safety and Response (HMTSR) team.

The Australian Conservation Foundation says another contamination incident at the Ranger uranium mine should stop the Fed and NT Governments from allowing the operation to expand. Mining company, ERA has admitted several workers were contaminated clearing up a big yellow cake spill three weeks ago. Earlier this week, it announced a new possible 30,000 tonne deposit.

It was brought to my attention this morning that some people have recently been using last month's Iraqi government sale of Yellowcake uranium to a Canadian company as vindication for starting everyone's favorite Middle East quagmire that's totally going less awful now that most of the integrated neighborhoods in Iraq have been violently purged of one group or another.

Australia is reconsidering a pact to sell uranium to Russia following its military push into Georgia, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith warned on Monday. He spoke as the head of a parliamentary committee examining the deal that would allow sales of uranium for use in Russia's civil nuclear power industry, expanding on the terms of a 1990 agreement, raised fears the yellowcake could be diverted for nuclear weapons use.

A Canadian company that acquired a reported 550 tonnes of yellowcake uranium from Iraq says that the U.S. military wanted the deal to be kept quiet. "We were following the request of the U.S. government,'' Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp. spokesperson Lyle Krahn told The Canadian Press of the clandestine route the material took to get out of Baghdad and to Canada.

QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh is facing an untimely revolt within the Labor Party -- including from powerbrokers, regional branches and her backbench -- over her refusal to allow uranium mining in the state. As Queensland was hit yesterday by Anglo Coal's shedding of 650 staff and contractors, Ms Bligh was accused of sacrificing job opportunities and billions of dollars in royalties with an "outdated policy" to block the mining of yellowcake. The Australian has obtained a motion for July's ALP national conference, passed by the Mount Isa regional conference last November, warning Ms Bligh she risks voter revenge in regional Queensland at this election.

An environment group says a BHP Billiton proposal to transport uranium yellowcake through the Northern Territory should be reconsidered in light of a train derailment near Katherine. Four carriages left the tracks west of Katherine yesterday and investigators are trying to determine the cause. Justin Tutty from the No Waste Alliance says BHP's proposal would see a trainload of radioactive material a day on the same rail line.

At Cameco Inc.'s Smith Ranch-Highland in-situ leach uranium mine, a typical barrel holds about 883 pounds of "yellowcake," which is 83 percent U308, the foundation of nuclear fuel that has sparked a mining rush in Wyoming. Price-wise, it's worth about $64 per pound on the spot market, and about $45 on contract -- the equivalent of about 450 barrels of oil.

The Liberals have reignited the nuclear debate, with a frontbencher saying Australia must have nuclear power if it is to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But the government has vehemently rejected the push and says people do not want nuclear power plants in their suburbs. Liberal frontbencher Ian Macfarlane opened the latest round of the radioactive debate when he talked up "yellowcake" in a speech.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

Canada is the new home to a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium from Iraq, the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. The 550 tonnes of "yellowcake," the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, was sold to Canadian uranium producer Cameco Corp. in a transaction the official described as worth "tens of millions of dollars."

DEVELOPMENT: A Utah uranium mill is cranking out yellowcake. WHAT IT MEANS: Thanks to rising prices, uranium claims are booming on the Colorado Plateau. But actual mining has been hampered by a lack of mills to process the ore. Until now, that is. The White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah has opened its doors to uran

GREEN RIVER, Utah (AP) - A Canadian company plans to build a uranium-processing mill just west of the town of Green River. Mancos Resources Inc. of British Columbia says producers can't make enough yellowcake for the world's growing number of nuclear-fueled plants.

GREEN RIVER, Utah (AP) - A Canadian company plans to build a uranium-processing mill near this town in eastern Utah. Mancos Resources Inc. of British Columbia says producers can't make enough yellowcake for the world's growing number of nuclear-fueled plants.

Most Americans have heard of Niger only because that's where the CIA dispatched former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV to find out whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium. But Niger's precious resource, just a footnote to the Iraq war, is the cause of monumental suffering here.

As Energy Fuels Resources (EFR) awaits Montrose County BOCC approval for a special use permit for the Pinon Ridge Mill and prepares to submit a permit application to Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE), it lacks capitalization to build the mill, faces a very tight uranium market with surplus uranium production capacity, a dropping uranium market price and production costs higher than market value. Today's market bears little resemblance to the first uranium boom and bust in the Colorado-Utah borderlands when the federal government paid a guaranteed base price for uranium ore to miners to feed nuclear weapons production programs. "Yellowcake," uranium oxide produced by uranium mills is a global commodity widely available at a volatile market-based price for commercial purchase for use in nuclear reactor fuel. Advertisement 1. The Uravan belt uranium is not a significant fraction of U.S. nor global uranium resources. Uranium resources at permitted uranium production sites in Wyoming, Nebraska and Texas dwarf the potential of this district.

The State Government expected to reap a windfall of more than $30 million a year from uranium export royalties from as early as 2015, Premier Colin Barnett said yesterday. Mr Barnett also reiterated the Government's commitment not to allow uranium exports through ports in residential areas, but said it was possible yellowcake would be shipped out of Pilbara ports in the longer term.

The mining and export of Australian uranium has been a controversial issue for many years, and will continue to remain an intense political issue for many more years to come. With a depressed world uranium market, the mining industry has been seeking to cut costs in order to make projects more economically viable. One such method of achieving this is a mining process known as In Situ Leaching (ISL) or Solution Mining. It involves pumping chemicals into the ground to dissolve the uranium mineral "in situ" and then pumping these uranium-laden solutions back to the surface for extraction and processing of the uranium into yellowcake for export. It is claimed by the industry to be "a controllable, safe, and environmentally benign method of mining which can operate under strict environmental controls and which often has cost advantages"1. This ignores the reality of many former ISL trials and mine sites across Europe and North America, and the history of ISL trial mines in Australia.

The CEO of Energy Fuels, George Glasier, holds up a tiny pellet, smaller than a ping-pong ball, to illustrate his point. This pellet of nuclear fuel, he says, is the equivalent of five gallons of oil, one railroad car, or 100 tons of coal. Behind this small finished pellet, however, is a long and expensive chain of production, from mining the uranium ore, to milling it into concentrated yellowcake that will travel across the country to be refined again into pellets that are placed into a fuel rod and used in a nuclear reactor. Right now, the price of uranium is too low to support that chain of production, according to Denison Mines President Ron Hochstein. Hochstein said that Denison's White Mesa Mill, the nation's only operating uranium mill, has ceased its regular milling operations for the remainder of 2009. "We will stop processing conventional ore through 2009, but will be processing alternate feedstock on a reduced scale, and we'll be laying off some personnel," said Hochstein. "Our costs are higher than the current spot price." Hochstein was upbeat about the future of the uranium market, and his company already has processing contracts in place for 2011, when he expects that the spot price of uranium will again make it profitable to process the radioactive material.

"For nearly 20 years, Monticello was a Uranium boomtown. It started in I941 when the government opened a Uranium Mill in town to feed the Manhattan Project. The Vanadium Corporation of America mill produced the "yellowcake" that Robert Oppenheimer and his team would use to create the first atomic bombs. The mill paid good wages and the workers felt patriotic. Fritz Pipkin remembers his dad working in the mill. "I feel like my father was a hero," he said. "It was no different than the soldiers in Germany or Japan. They gave their lives to create this product that was used for the Manhattan project and the bombs that ended the war." Pipkin also remembers playing in the piles of radioactive tailings at the mill. "As kids we'd go on down the canyon right here and we'd camp out and drink from the water that came through the tailings ponds. Nobody knew of any danger. It's a wonder kids in Monticello don't glow in the dark from all the hours we spent down here on these tailings piles.""