Making Uranium Recovery from Phosphates Great Again?
The United States is the world’s largest consumer of uranium. In 2017, the great majority (93%) of this uranium was imported. A recent investigation by the current administration found that foreign uranium imports and the supply of related products—essential for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, blue-water navy, and power plants—pose no threat to national security. Declining domestic uranium mining is, however, regarded as a significant concern.
Uranium miners in the United States initiated the investigation, hoping for quotas on foreign uranium imports that would allow them to better compete with enterprises, often state-run and heavily subsidized, abroad. Quotas, if implemented, could, in fact, re-energize uranium mining in the U.S. They could also remotivate uranium recovery from unconventional resources, namely phosphates, which, at its height, contributed nearly 20% of the country’s uranium requirements in the 1980s and is now poised to become monetarily profitable again and may be implemented much faster than new uranium mines that, ultimately, would have to be in someone’s backyard.
Phosphates—and here, specifically, sedimentary phosphate rock—can contain considerable amounts of associated uranium, in regard to both concentrations and overall quantities. Phosphate rock is the fourth-most mined material on earth and used primarily (>90% globally) for mineral-fertilizer production.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b07859#