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Show Sfcarf on Mew Deep Mine Shaft Quickens Area Uranium infefesf The long-awaited announcement announce-ment of the start of a shaft operation to the deep Hu-meca Hu-meca uranium deposit in the Lisbon area last Wednesday brought encouragement to the people of Southeastern Utah who have hailed the operation as the real start of the area's second phase of uranium industry activity. Rio Algom Corporation an nounced late Wednesday that the start of development work at its uranium property proper-ty south of the community of La Sal would commence immediately. The first major contract of approximately $1.9 million for the sinking of a ventilation ventila-tion shaft has been awarded to Centennial Development Company of Eureka, Utah. The shaft will be 18 feet in diameter, concrete lined, and 2,662 feet deep. Work is scheduled to start immediately, immed-iately, and completion is scheduled for October 1970. A representative of Centennial Cen-tennial arrived in Moab last week, and began making preliminary arrangements to get the project started. Rio Algom Corporation is a U. S. subsidiary of Rio Algom Mines Limited, a major ma-jor Canadian producer of uranium and specialty steels. The firm has been interested interest-ed in the local area for several sev-eral years, having purchased the Humeca property from local interests. Following an extensive drilling and blocking block-ing program, Rio Algom announced an-nounced last fall that it would develop the properties, proper-ties, and that ores mined and milled from the Humecu mine would be sold to DuKe Power Co., Charlotte, North Carolina, for fuel in nuclear power plants now under construction. con-struction. The mine, situated som; 35 miles southeast of Moab, is slated for completion in early 1972. It will have an initial capacity of 1.2 million pounds of uranium oxide per year. As yet, no announcement announce-ment has been made relative rela-tive to plans for milling the ore mined there. Development work on the current project began on Feb. 12 with the start of drilling of the first of three wells required to provide water to the mine site. The wells are being drilled by L. R. French Water Wells of Monticello. Also underway, according to a telegram from Rio Algom, Al-gom, is the designing of the production shaft headframe and shaft collar. The engineering engin-eering contract was awarded to Stearns-Roger Corporation of Denver, Colo. Tenders for construction will be invited by early May and the completion com-pletion date for this phase of the development project is to be October 1. The Rio Algom agreement with Duke Power Company calls for the delivery to the utility of 3 million pounds cf uranium oxide over a six year period commencing in 1972. Discussions are underway under-way with other potential customers cus-tomers for the sale of additional addi-tional uranium from the property, pro-perty, since the Duke contract con-tract will involve only a portion of the mine's initial output. ' |