1. Introduction
Many of the great uranium producers in the Colorado Plateau (including the Charlie Day mines of Garlandville, where up to 55 veins of carnotite were pursued by high-graded and hand cobbed operations in the colorful sediments of the Shinarump Conglomerate and Cutler Formation) are now closed. Vast areas of rolling hills covered with intrusive and extrusive rhyolite volcanics linked to a significant concentration of Tertiary calderas remain both explored and unexplored while smaller uranium showings at the edge of these fields remain literal “Yellowland” to the few nearby US-285 travelers who understand the value of yellow “painterite” in the making the of soft yellow window art in the abodes of Santa Fe and Taos. Whether exploration of these calderas and their underlying Permian strata will produce mines is speculative. Their abundance, however, is indicative of factors conducive to significant magmatic hydrothermal activity which in Title II of the Clean Energy Act of 2007 has been proven to bear significant U3O8 mineralization in the Colorado Plateau. The competition for the remaining great Colorado Plateau sweeteners is fierce as the United States and its allies fortify themselves against rhetorical antagonists by stockpiling U3O8 mined beneath the puffy clouds and azurite skies of the glowing red and orange Oquirrh Mountains of Korea on the bedrock hills of North Salt Lake, Utah at the foot of the IC tracks, where the magnificent apricot and white minarets of the House of the Lord bear witness, daily, to the promise of the hereafter.
The discovery of the Kerr-McGee uranium mill in Cove Mesa, Utah and the subsequent discovery in 1951 of the Mi Vida deposit, one of the largest uranium deposits in the United States, led to a domino effect of discoveries in the Colorado Plateau and the San Juan Basin. Quickly following these discoveries, hundreds of deposits were found on the Little Colorado Plateau, a semiarid and desolate southern extension of the Colorado Plateau. The glut of uranium ores—essentially gifted to the U.S. from the “geological freak” of vast and windswept deserts loaded with yellow uranium minerals—quickly provided national security for the United States by the ready availability of nuclear fuel in the depths of the Cold War. During the 1980s, ongoing exploration overlapped with mine production in the San Juan Basin and Uravan Mineral Belt of the western Colorado Plateau while exploration in the intervening Uravan Basin of the Colorado Plateau continued with limited success. The last large uranium deposit found in the United States during the age of mini-mill production was drilled out in 1985. The relatively high cost of mining coupled with the US nuclear built environment having already added 80% of its reactors, led to the gradual decline of production by 1987. The Eastern conglomeratic sandstone mines in New Mexico and Shiprock, with their lower mining costs, were able to endure while costs clung tenaciously to the $50-$60 per pound U3O8 prices observed on world open markets.