by Mark Steen
The 1950s Uranium Boom was touched off by Charlie Steen’s discovery of the Mi Vida Mine in the Big Indian Mining District in San Juan County, Utah on July 6, 1952. The First Uranium Boom lasted until the AEC stopped purchasing uranium ore for the use in the Atomic Weapons Program. This was very quickly followed by the Utilities Boom, which lasted until the Three Mile Island incident and Jane Fonda’s ridiculous movie inspired the curtailment of the expansion of nuclear reactors for power generation. This was actually when Moab became a cemetery with lights until the area’s extravagant desert scenery became a tourists’ magnet and overwhelmed the place for second time.
It amazes me how few people involved with companies searching for uranium deposits in Southeastern Utah and Southwestern Colorado know what happened in this territory during the 1950s Uranium Boom, which really opened up this area. There are probably several hundred millions of pounds of undiscovered uranium and vanadium in these two states. And there may be 60 to 80 million pounds of uranium awaiting a discovery drill hole on the down thrown side of the Lisbon Valley Anticline.
Between 1948 and 2019, the United States produced 980 million pounds of uranium oxide. The Atomic Energy Commission (the AEC) purchased 347,331,409 of these pounds of uranium concentrate during the years between 1948 and 1971. By the late 1950s, most of the uranium districts in the United States had been discovered as a result of incentives from the AEC, and 94% of the resources proved to be in sandstone deposits. Principal resource regions are the Colorado Plateau, producing about 65% of the U.S. total; Wyoming basins accounted for 24%; and the South Texas coastal plain yielded about 5% of the sandstone hosted uranium. The two major types of deposits found in these two regions are the ‘roll-front’ type and the ‘peneconcordant’ type of uranium ore deposits, with the former precipitated at geochemical fronts where uranium-bearing groundwater penetrated reduced sandstones. The later occurred where uranium in solution has been precipitated locally by agents such as carbonaceous materials, humates, or pyrite.
Most of the other uranium produced during the 1950s through the 1970s came from mines in Alaska, South Dakota, Washington, and Oregon. The Schwartzwalder mine accounted for 99% of the uranium produced from the Colorado Front Range, with 15 million pounds of uranium oxide between 1953 and 1995. Millions of pounds of uranium oxide are reported to remain in place at depth in America’s largest hydrothermal vein deposit. The Schwartzwalder mine was the largest non-sandstone hosted uranium mine in America.
Colorado Plateau production was mainly from peneconcordant deposits, with the majority of the uranium coming from the Grants Mineral Belt in New Mexico, the Uravan Mineral Belt in Colorado, and the Big Indian Ore Belt in Lisbon Valley, Utah. These were commonly underground mines, although the largest uranium open pit mine in the United States is found in the Grants region. Roll-front type deposits in Wyoming, where the Powder River Basin was the most active area of exploration in the 1970s, were generally mined from open pits, though many of these deposits have been successfully tested for in-situ leaching. Both open pit and in-situ leaching were common in Texas. Almost all of the United States’ production of uranium since the 1980s came from five in-situ leaching plants in Wyoming and Nebraska.
Over 80% of the exploration for uranium since the 1970s was for ore deposits in sandstone deposits, and that trend is expected to continue for some years. Several new uranium deposits hosted in sandstone in Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas were discovered during the late 1970s and early 1980s that will be exploited using in-situ recovery methods.
All of the easily discovered American uranium deposits had been found by 1960, and there were very few uranium occurrences that hadn’t been located and promoted during the 1950s Uranium Boom. This includes almost all of the uranium occurrences located in the Basin and Range Province in California, Nevada, and Arizona. Although there was some uranium produced from many of these properties, none of them accounted for very many pounds of uranium oxide. Altogether, the total production didn’t amount to what a good-sized Morrison Formation hosted uranium mine yielded during this same time period. The huge production from the Big Indian Ore Belt and the Grants Mineral Belt caused the AEC to stop investigating most of these Basin and Range uranium occurrences, and few had long term contracts with the AEC after the mid-1950s. I don’t know of any worthwhile, near surface uranium deposits that were taken out of production due to the removal of incentives by the AEC in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. This has become a common theme for some people promoting uranium properties that stopped production during this time period, when the truth is that most of these deposits were not able to obtain a contract to supply ore to the AEC’s Buying Stations due to the low-grade nature and relatively small size of their uranium properties.
Only a few of the discoveries after the 1950s were not made by big company exploration geologists, because of the depths and costs of exploration drilling. However, three of these were actually made in the Big Indian Mining District in Lisbon Valley, Utah. Jim Hudson and the Humeca Partnership drilled five deep holes across the Lisbon Valley Fault and discovered what became Rio Algom’s Lisbon Mine, and Larry Lahusen and his partner discovered what became the Velvet and Section 2 ore deposits on the southern end of the Big Indian Ore Belt. I don’t believe that it was just a coincidence that all three of these discoveries were made by people operating their own drilling rigs who were pursuing deeper, overlooked uranium deposits on a known Uranium Ore Belt. In New Mexico, Richard Bokum, a Princeton educated geologist, was responsible for discovering several significant, deeper ore bodies during the Second Uranium Boom, including a good portion of the Mountain Taylor deposit, which remains the largest unexploited uranium deposits in the United States. Unlike Humeca and Larry Lahusen, Richard Bokum was very well financed by several utilities that had purchase contracts for all of the uranium he could discover.
There were probably more uranium exploration geologists working in the late 1960s and 1970s than there were in the 1950s, and this was long after the AEC had stopped buying uranium from any mines that didn’t have a purchase contract. This was during the Second Uranium Boom, which was driven by utilities building nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The AEC was out of the picture by then, and most of those prospects in California, Nevada, and Arizona were never looked at again until the late 1970s, when most of the prospective ground on the Colorado Plateau and Wyoming had been staked by the big exploration companies, and geologists were looking for leftovers. To my knowledge, none of these Basin and Range properties went into production during the Second Uranium Boom, although most of them got relocated again.
During the aborted Third Uranium Boom of 2004-2008, almost every 1950s and 1970s leftover uranium prospect got relocated and briefly promoted as the future of American uranium production. Almost every unexploited uranium ore deposit that I know of was discovered and blocked out during the Second Uranium Boom, when utilities were buying all of the uranium oxide processed from uranium mills located in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. It is telling that there were no uranium processing facilities constructed in California, Nevada, or Arizona during the Second Uranium Boom, since not enough uranium ore was ever discovered in the Basin and Range Province to warrant the construction of a single uranium mill.
The future for large scale uranium production in the Paradox Basin is awaiting exploration drilling at depth in areas that were just starting to be explored at the end of the Second Uranium Boom. At the present time, public companies have reported about 110 million pounds of uranium in several dozen properties in the Paradox Basin. Just one or two Big Indian Ore Belts could add 80 to 160 million pounds of uranium to the known ore reserves in this territory, and the production would come from a single area.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me in the event you want to discuss any of this uranium mining history with me.
Mark A. Steen
