Uranium mining is reborn

TICABOO, Garfield County — The last U.S. uranium mill ever built, in this parched landscape near Lake Powell, shut down almost as quickly as it started operating as nuclear power fell into disfavor about two decades ago.

Keith Larsen, chief executive for U.S. Energy Corp., picked up the mill 10 years later for practically nothing, banking it for better days. His patience paid off, making Larsen's company one of the few already taking profits out of a new uranium boom.

Larsen's mothballed mill, once a liability, became a $90 million asset with mining claims — the deal he made to sell the package to Toronto-based SXR Uranium One Inc. by the end of the year.

Suddenly, nuclear power is back in demand as a relatively cheap, reliable and emissions-free solution to the world's insatiable demand for energy. Even some leading environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as an antidote to global warming. More than 50 nuclear plants are planned or under construction in a dozen countries, according to U.S. and international nuclear agencies.

The nuclear comeback has reinvigorated a Western mining industry that, during the 1950s and again in the 1970s, was the stuff of legends. Uranium claims — which grant an exclusive right to mine a piece of federal land — were bought and sold like stock.

The successive booms made millionaires and losers and overnight towns. It also left some environmental damage, including a huge pile of radioactive uranium tailings the government has promised to move from a bank of the Colorado River near Moab.

Today's boom doesn't have people running around with Geiger counters. For the most part, the West's uranium deposits are known, mapped and claimed.

"It's nothing like it used to be," said Moab Mayor David Sakrison, whose town has been transformed into a recreational playground. "It's a different community. We're more tourist-oriented. A lot of the people who lived here in the 1970s have moved away. It's a new cast of characters."

The first Western uranium boom answered a call in 1948 for domestic uranium stockpiles for atomic bombs. By the 1970s, demand from nuclear power plants was picking up, until the partial meltdown of a Three Mile Island reactor in 1979 signaled a shift in public acceptance.

The Ticaboo mill here opened in 1982 just in time to watch the bottom fall out of the uranium market. Utilities were canceling orders for new nuclear plants. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Russia further tarnished nuclear power.