Promising uranium sites found near Baggs

A uranium exploration company has found an area that seems promising for uranium mining near Baggs, in south-central Wyoming.

Crosshair Energy Corporation completed a soil survey and found additional areas with high levels of radon, which indicates uranium in the ground.

Crosshair Vice President Tom Bell says that’s good news for the company.

“Right now we have a resource that’s about five million pounds of uranium in the ground,” Bell said. “And we think that we can add a significant amount of additional pounds of uranium in this new area that we’re moving into.”

Bell says they will likely do conventional mining – rather than using the newer “in situ” technique – because the uranium is fairly shallow.

“We would go into production with a conventional open-pit mine and probably set up a heap leaching operation, where we spread the ore on an impermeable liner and irrigate it with chemicals to extract the uranium,” he said. “And then once the ore is exhausted, we bury it.”

Bell says the company will gather baseline environmental data for the area for about a year before applying for permission to mine the additional tracts of land.