Uranium mining in Utah
Uranium mining in Utah, a state of the United States, has a history going back more than 100 years. Uranium started as a byproduct of vanadium mining about 1900, became a byproduct of radium mining about 1910, then back to a byproduct of vanadium when the radium price fell in the 1920s. Utah saw a uranium boom in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but uranium mining declined in the 1980s. Since 2001 there has been a revival of interest in uranium mining, as a result of higher uranium prices.
Mining of uranium-vanadium ore in southeast Utah goes back to the late 19th century, at the northern end of the Uravan mineral belt (see Uranium mining in Colorado), where it crosses into Grand County, Utah. Uranium occurs in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation of Jurassic age. Because much of the value depended on the vanadium content, the only economic ore minerals were carnotite and tyuyamunite. Following World War II buying for nuclear weapons programs made uranium valuable for its own sake, and attracted hundreds of prospectors to southeast Utah.
Uranium was discovered in sandstone of the Chinle Formation in Lisbon Valley, San Juan County in 1913, and some carnotite was mined on a small scale for vanadium in 1917, 1940, and 1941. In the uranium mining boom of 1948, mining began in sandstone of the Permian Cutler Formation. Then in 1952, Charles Steen drilled into a rich 70-foot-thick (21 m) uraninite orebody in the Triassic Chinle Formation; that type of deposit became the largest producer in the district. Ore is distributed along 15 miles of outcrop on the southwest side of the Lisbon valley anticline. The district produced 49 million pounds of U3O8 (uranium oxide) through 1965.
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