(1888PressRelease)
April 26, 2006 - For nearly three decades, the world’s mining industry was falsely led to believe that the first commercial In Situ Leach (ISL) mining operation was begun by a Westinghouse-led consortium, which included U.S. Steel and Union Carbide, in Bruni, Texas in 1973. A three-month StockInterview investigation revealed the true birthplace of ISL mining began in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin in the late 1950s. StockInterview senior editor James Finch said of the revelation, “Interviews, newspaper reports, production figures, inter-office memos, photographs and maps confirm that uranium was commercially produced using modern-day ISL methods as early as the late 1950s, long before Texas came aboard.”
Commercial ISL operations in Wyoming began a full decade before the Texas copycat. An exclusive interview with Don Snow, a uranium mining and exploration geologist, employed by Utah Construction and Mining Company, confirmed the ISL techniques used between 1962 and 1969, pioneered the mining technique as it is used today in the United States, Australia and Kazakhstan. Utah International later merged with General Electric, which at the time was the world’s largest corporate merger. In confidential papers provided to StockInterview, it was discovered General Electric was the largest buyer of ISL-mined uranium produced in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
According to the World Nuclear Association, ISL uranium mining produced 21 percent of the world’s supply of this nuclear fuel in 2004. ISL mining has been heralded as the “wave of the future uranium mining” in many parts of the world. All of the key ISL techniques were pioneered by Charles Don Snow, M.I. Ritchie, J.S. Anderson and others who worked at Utah Construction and Mining Company. That was perhaps the second innovation for that company – its first milestone was in helping to build the Hoover Dam along the Arizona/Nevada border.
ABOUT STOCKINTERVIEW.COM The entire interview with Charles Don Snow, and all supporting documentation in the featured article, can be found at the Internet news website, StockInterview.com. Visit this webpage for the complete story:
http://www.stockinterview.com/isl-1.html
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