Kingsville Dome Project "in-situ leach ("ISL") technology"
Uranium Resources, Inc. was organized in 1977 with the primary objective to acquire, develop, and place into production, uranium deposits in the southwestern United States using in-situ leach ("ISL") technology. Uranium Resources, Inc. has constructed and operated ISL projects in Texas and Wyoming and participated in numerous joint venture projects over the past 25 years. New production commenced at the Vasquez ISL project in 2004 and the Kingsville Dome ISL project, which has a history of low cost production, will commence production in April 2006. Their combined nominal annual production capability is expected to range between 1.0 to 1.2 million lbs. U3O8. The Company has successfully produced and completely restored commercial ISL projects in Texas and a pilot plant project in North Platte Wyoming. Our strategic plan is to acquire the best-known uranium resource properties in Texas and New Mexico, the associated intellectual data available, obtain the necessary permits and licenses, and maintain technological staff to produce these properties commercially. Uranium Resources, Inc. properties can compete with international uranium production based on operating costs. Hydro Resources, Inc., the wholly owned subsidiary whose role is the operating company for acquisition, permitting (licensing) and developing of the New Mexico properties, has invested over $25 million in New Mexico since 1986 because the San Juan Basin is the most prolific uranium province in the United States with historical production of over 347 million lbs. U3O8.
South Texas Projects
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Vasquez URI, Inc., "URI" the company's wholly owned subsidiary in Texas is currently licensed and permitted and operating. The Vasquez production facility was commissioned in October, 2004 and is producing uranium loaded resin for delivery and processing at the Kingsville Dome central plant. The Vasquez production is the first uranium produced in Texas since 1999.
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Kingsville Dome This project has been through two different production cycles (due to market conditions) since 1988. Initial production commenced in May 1988. From then until July 1999, we produced a total of 3.5 million pounds. The Kingsville Dome deposit is scheduled to resume mining in April 2006 as a result of the approval of our Production Area Authorization #3 which was received in February 2006.
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Rosita Based on the significant increase in the market price of uranium, we have reevaluated the potential for uranium production at the Rosita project and concluded that the properties contain sufficient uranium to resume production. In order to produce this property, we will need to spend about $3 million to fund the development and plant refurbishment necessary to bring this project back on-line.
posted by Jaime Kenedeño @ 9:04 PM
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October 23, 2000
Bipartisan Consumer Bloodletting
Drove Bush-Berlanga Drug Policy
Hugo Berlanga Legislated for Drug Maker Before Becoming its Hired Gun
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In a rare candid moment in last week’s debate, George W. Bush tackled allegations that he is too cozy with drug companies by invoking the name “Hugo Berlanga.”
Bush said Berlanga, who was the Democratic chair of the Texas House Public Health Committee until 1998, accompanied him to St. Louis “to tout our record on health in Texas.” Using Berlanga as a poster boy for his own bipartisan pragmatism, Bush said, “I didn’t care whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. What I cared about is could we work together. That’s what Washington, D.C. needs.”
Berlanga exemplifies how government works in Austin—as in Washington. He resigned as a powerful committee chair in March 1998 to become a revolving-door hired gun. By 1999, Berlanga billed 22 lobby clients between $635,000 and $1.3 million. One-third of these clients were health interests affected by his old committee.
As House Public Health Committee chair, Berlanga authored a sweetheart 1997 bill for future lobby client DuPont Pharmaceuticals; Texas’ pragmatic governor signed it into law. The next year, DuPont Pharmaceuticals pragmatically put Berlanga on a lobby retainer of between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.
Some 2 million people, most of whom are elderly people with heart disease, take DuPont’s Coumadin to thin their blood. In 1996 the FDA approved a generic substitute called “warfarin.” DuPont then lobbied state governments to restrict sales of this generic, which sells for about half the price of Coumadin. Just three states passed these sweetheart bills.
Berlanga’s bill (HB 2571) barred pharmacists from selling warfarin and seven other generic “narrow therapeutic index drugs” unless a doctor explicitly authorizes a generic substitution (this class of therapeutic drugs only works properly when dosages are precisely controlled). Estimates predicted that the Texas law would protect $20 million in annual name-brand drug sales—led by DuPont’s Coumadin.
To counter this rip-off, the FDA wrote physicians and state regulators in 1998, restating its finding that the generic product was as effective as Coumadin.
A state judge barred the Texas Pharmacy Board’s gubernatorial appointees from implementing Berlanga’s law in December 1998, ruling that they failed to justify a policy that would cost Texans millions of dollars. The Board completely abandoned this anti-competitive policy in February 2000. •
Hugo Berlanga’s 1999
Revolving-Door Lobby Clients Lobby Contract Value
Client Max. Min.
Coalition For Nurses In Advanced Practice $150,000 $100,000
AT&T $100,000 $50,000
City Of Austin $100,000 $50,000
City of Corpus Christi $100,000 $50,000
Driscoll Children's Hospital $100,000 $50,000
DuPont Pharmaceuticals Co. $100,000 $50,000
Patton Boggs, LLP $100,000 $50,000
Port of Corpus Christi $100,000 $50,000
Webb County $100,000 $50,000
Accident & Injury Pain Centers, Inc. $50,000 $25,000
Incarnate Word Health Systems $50,000 $25,000
Martex Energy $50,000 $25,000
Sagem Morpho $50,000 $25,000
Waste Control Specialists $50,000 $25,000
Workers Compensation Health Clinic, Inc. $25,000 $10,000
Chicago Title Insurance Co. $10,000 $0
Commonwealth Land Title Insurance Co. $10,000 $0
Lawyers Title Insurance Corporation $10,000 $0
Partners Title Co. $10,000 $0
Security Union Title Insurance Co. $10,000 $0
Ticor Title Insurance Company $10,000 $0
Transnation Title Insurance Co. $10,000 $0
Totals $1,295,000 $635,000
For more on this issue, see:
“Bush’s Pal, the Drug Lobbyist,” Newsweek, October 30 [www.msnbc.com/news/479674.asp]; and
“Bush Signed Texas Drug Law,” Associated Press October 17, 2000 [www.latimes.com/news/politics/elect2000/pres/wire2/20001017/tCB00V0944.html]
# # #
Texans for Public Justice is a non-partisan, non-profit policy & research organization
which tracks the influence of money in politics.
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Lobby Watch | home
Uranium processing to resume at area mines
Fred Owens 28.JUN.06
KARNES COUNTY — The uranium mine in Hobson, owned by Energy Metals and Everest Minerals, and the Panna Maria mine, owned by Rio Grande Energy, both of which were closed down for many years, will be reopened soon as uranium processing plants, according to spokesmen from both companies.
The plants will process the slurry from extraction wells located elsewhere in South Texas, reducing the uranium into a dried form known as yellow cake, which can be safely stored or transported.
The Hobson plant is expected to open in 18 months to process ore from a site in Duval County.
The Panna Maria plant will open sometime after that and will also process uranium slurry trucked in from extraction wells.
See the story in Agriculture Today, which explains why the dramatic rise in the price of uranium plus safer and more efficient extraction techniques have caused uranium mining to resume in South Texas.
fowens@wcn-online.com
http://www.wilsoncountynews.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=12166&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1000&hn=wilsoncountynews&he=.com
Uranium mining resumes in South Texas
Yellow cake uranium, dried and drummed, is ready to be shipped out from a mining operation in Duval County. Because of the increase in the price of uranium, mining companies are resuming activities in Karnes County and throughout South Texas.
Fred Owens 28.JUN.06
PANNA MARIA — Uranium processing will resume in Karnes County because of a dramatic rise in its price.
Uranium has gone from $7 per pound in 2000 to $45 per pound now, according to Kevin Raabe of Rio Grande Energy, which owns the Panna Maria mine. Energy Metals and Everest Minerals own the Hobson mine.
A belt of uranium sands runs from Gonzales south to the Rio Grande River and into Mexico.
The uranium deposits lie 100 feet to 700 feet below the surface in bands approximately one-quarter-mile wide.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, open pit mines in Hobson and elsewhere in South Texas extracted millions of pounds of uranium, which is used primarily as fuel for nuclear reactors, but also for nuclear weapons, for special armor-piercing artillery shells, and for various scientific purposes.
Resource industries such as uranium, oil, copper, and other minerals are known for having dramatic price swings because supply so often lags behind demand. An increased demand for uranium will bring more mines into production, often leading to an oversupply, which causes prices to sink and those same mines to be shut down.
Experienced mining companies and their customers are accustomed to these price swings.
Overproduction in the 1980s brought the price down. An additional factor was the collapse of communism in Soviet Russia — which would not seem to affect mining activity in Karnes County, except the mineral market is global now.
The new regime, under Boris Yeltsin, decided to partly dismantle its arsenal of nuclear weapons. The Russians reprocessed the highly concentrated uranium in those weapons for use as fuel in nuclear reactors.
This extra supply of uranium further depressed the world price, leaving only the lowest-cost mines in Canada and Kazakhstan as active suppliers.
Now, global market conditions have changed again. The price of oil has gone to $70 per barrel. Natural gas prices are even higher.
Widespread demand for less dependence on oil has renewed interest in nuclear energy in the United States. The South Texas Project in Bay City, for example, is planning construction of a third unit.
Asian countries are planning major initiatives in the construction of nuclear power plants.
And, getting back to Russian politics, Vladimir Putin, unlike his predecessor, no longer is dismantling nuclear weapons in order to sell the fuel at any cost. Instead, Putin established a program whereby developing countries can purchase uranium fuel from Russia along with the technology for developing nuclear reactors.
All these factors add up to diminished supply and increased demand. That means a price of $45 a pound for uranium, and that price means that landmen from uranium companies have been spotted knocking on doors in Karnes County hoping to negotiate mineral leases.
No more open
pit mines
Open pits mines, because of their expense and environmental damage, are a thing of the past.
Karnes County residents were concerned, back in the 1960s, about the prospect of large open pit mines in their community.
Thorough reclamation work, however, has been done on those properties since the mines closed. Cows graze in a pasture and fish swim in a pond, where there was once a 200-foot hole in the ground.
Because of environmental concerns and as a result of newer technology, open pit mines will no longer be used. Instead, the uranium will be extracted in a process called in situ recovery (ISR).
In a typical ISR mining operation, four wells are drilled in a square down to the uranium sands. Those insertion wells force water through the substrata and dissolve the uranium ore. A fifth well in the center of the square extracts that ore-laden water, which is then pumped into a truck and taken to a processing plant.
The processed water is returned to the site and re-injected into the ground.
A square array such as this can extract approximately 10,000 pounds of uranium in two or three weeks.
At that point, the wells are flushed and capped, and the process is repeated on another site in the ore field.
The uranium companies feel that ISR is a much cleaner and safer method of extracting uranium than the open pit method.
Several ISR mining operations are already under way in South Texas, including one in Brooks County that employs over 130 people, and similar ones in Duval and Kleburg counties as well.
Mining firms are drilling test holes throughout the region and obtaining mineral leases on promising locations.
The Hobson site owned by Rio Grande Energies will not be mined, but will be used as a processing site for the ore-laden liquid.
Basically, the ore is separated from the water and vacuum dried into “yellow cake.”
Yellow cake needs to go through two more highly technical processes before it can be used as nuclear fuel. The first process is called conversion, and only one plant in the United States, which is located in Illinois, does this. The next step is called enrichment, and again there is only one plant, located in Kentucky, in the United States that enriches uranium.
Similar conversion and enrichment plants are located in Canada and England.
Hence, yellow cake uranium mined in Texas is sold on the world market to companies from Japan to Brazil, but it must first be delivered to conversion and enrichment plants.
The nuclear fuel used by the South Texas Project plants in Bay City might come from anywhere in the world.
In any event, on a summer day in Hobson at the Rio Grande Resources mine site, the grass is growing, the cattle are grazing, and the birds are singing. It is a quiet and lovely place, but it might be getting very busy in the near future
http://www.wilsoncountynews.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=59&twindow=&mad=No&sdetail=12144
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