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Show Sprawling USY Mill at Uravan Gefs Ore from All Mesa Area A truck slowly winds Its way over the mountains and hills toward a narrow fertile valley, just a little beyond a deep gorge where two historic Colorado rivers merge the San Miguel and the Dolores. This is the same valley, almost 100 miles southwest of Grand Junction, from where Marie and Pierre Curie obtained the radioactive material they needed for their radium experiments a half century ago. Today, in thU thriving community which is known as Uravan, you will see a huge uranium ore-processing mill crawling up the rimrock to find space for its expanding ore refining facilities. It is the mill operated by the U. S. Vanadium Corp. Truckers carting uranium ores from the mines back in the mesas may carry their loads either to this mill at Uravan or to other mills that are treating ores In the Plateau to obtain uranium tor atomic energy use. But the road followed by many trucks leads to Uravan. Each day a steady stream of ore trucks can be seen slowly winding Its way toward the top of the mesa overlooking the Uravan mill. At the sampling plant, atop the mesa, the load of ore is first weigh, ed In truck and all. The trucker then drives up to a long shed, housing a half dozen ore bins, and dumps his load. In a control room below, a button is pushed to start the load in the bin on Us way through the crushing and sampling equipment. Ore Is withdrawn from the conveyor belt in four steps to make sure that a uniform sample is obtained. From a 10-ton load, for example, a small representative sample of the ore will end up in a bag to be sent off to the laboratory. The chemists will check quantity of uraniuu and other elements present. The uranium-bearing ore, after it has been sampled, then starts through various processing operations. In preparation for treatment, it is crushed and screened to small-size particles. The Uravan mill extracts two products from the ore: uranium and vanadium. This Is not an easy job, since most of the ore Is Just waste rock. There may be as little as one-tenth of one per cent of uranium In It or about an average of two or three parts per thousand. The first step Is to add chemical reagents, such as salt. Then the ore is fed Into huge roast-ers, several stories high. After the roasting operation, it is treated In large wooden leaching tanks which look like round swimming pools. During leaching the uranium and vanadium are dissolved by different solutions, and then each mineral Is precipitated by still further processing operations. Finally, the uranium concentrate is filtered and dried ending up a bright canary yellow in color. That's why the mill people call the uranium "yellow cake." The vanadium concentrate, on the other hand, turns out to be red, so it Is known as "red cake." Before shipment, however, It Is fused In a furnace and during the final processing the vanadium concentrate becomes black. Uravan lies In the beautiful San Miguel Valley, right In the middle of the rich carnotite ore bodies of the Colorado Plateau. About 600 or 700 of the townspeople are U. S. Vanadium Corp., employees and their families, and the corporation owns all the community buildings except the school. USV owns mines In several coun. ties In Colorado and Utah, and has about 50 active agreements with contractors for working of the properties. The company also buys ore from approximately 90 other Independent miners working other claims, representing the smal Individual enterprises that have become an important part of the Plateau's Industrial activity. In addition, USV owns and operates the two large ore-refining plants at Rifle and Uravan, and has sampling plant at Thompsons, Utah. USV also is carrying on an extensive exploration program throughout the Plateau and during last year approximately $8 million was spent by USV on the Plateau for payrolls and the purchase of services, supplies and materials, exclusive of ore. |