yoga12656

Blossom is what underground uranium miners called the crystals forming on the tunnel walls. Because the ore was in contact with air inside an underground mine, and as ground water moved slowly against the mines walls, a visible crust of uranium crystals would precipitate, or blossom along those walls. Making the uranium soluble doesnt require a lot of oxygen and water because oxidization is a natural process. Adding more oxygen to the groundwater found in, and around, a uranium-mineralized orebody is the principle upon which present-day In Situ Leach (ISL) uranium mining is based.

Eons ago, the uranium was soluble and moved, on or below the surface, with the ground water. In roll front uranium deposits the uranium was transported into the area through the natural groundwater system and precipitated from solution due to some reducing environment, explained Harry Anthony, Chief Operating Officer of Uranium Energy Corp. Often, the reducing agent was something organic, such as coal, deep-seated oil and gas deposits, or hydrogen sulfide gases. In its reduced form, the uranium crystals are insoluble. It will precipitate as a coating on the existing sand grains of the sandstone, added Anthony. As more water containing uranium sweeps through this area, and encounters this reducing environment, more uranium is precipitated until there is a sufficient concentration to make it a commercial deposit.

After the geological team has delineated a companys uranium roll front deposit and determined it is of economic value, the company must turn to its ISL design engineers to complete the mining process. While it takes stellar geologists such as David Miller of Strathmore Minerals, Bill Sheriff of Energy Metals, or William Boberg of UR-Energy to accumulate large, proven uranium-mineralized holdings, as they have done in Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas or elsewhere, each must turn to their engineers to extract the uranium from those sand grains and process them to produce an economic quantity of uranium oxide, or U3O8. The overwhelming majority of ISL facilities, designed in the United States, were engineered by Harry Anthony, Doug Norris and Dennis Stover.

Trained as a mechanical engineer, Harry Anthony has been involved with more than ten ISL uranium operations from Union Carbides Palangana in 1976 to Uranium Resources Bruni, Benavides, North Platte, Kingsville Dome and Rosita ISL projects. Anthonys consulting work has taken him to ISL projects in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the Czech Republic. Dennis Stover is best remembered for designing Smith Ranch in Wyoming, now owned by Cameco Corp. With a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan, Dr. Stover helped develop the first commercial alkaline ISL project in south Texas for Atlantic Richfield and helped develop an additional five small ISL operations in south Texas. Also a chemical engineer by training, Doug Norriss paths have crossed with both Stover and Anthony. He helped build the Highland and Smith Ranch ISL operations in Wyoming, and designed Mestenas Alta Mesa ISL operation in south Texas.

HOW DOES ISL MINING REVERSE MOTHER NATURE?

In its natural, reduced environment, uranium exists as a solid in the +4 valence, Anthony explained. In the mining stage, we are reversing Mother Natures process by adding oxygen, oxidizing the uranium from a valence of +4 to a valence of +6. The uranium was oxidized at one time, but then reduced by Mother Nature. By drilling wells into the ore zone, circulating the water and adding oxygen to it, the uranium is made soluble again.

Is it really this simple? Yes and no. Energy Metals Chief Operating Officer Dennis Stover outlined the process, Youre simply adding, into the injection well, gaseous oxygen, just pure oxygen, but youre doing it under the water level in the well. The natural pressure, created by that column of water above the injection point, allows the oxygen to dissolve into the water so that theres no free gas being put into the well.

Stover compared the oxygen dissolved in the liquid to the carbon dioxide dissolved in a bottle of soda. The soda remains clear, dissolved in the liquid, when stationery. But when you shake it up, the gas will break out, added Stover. The pressure thats available that lets you dissolve the oxygen is determined by the amount of naturally occurring water pressure thats on the uranium deposit. Stover explained that if the deposit is 100 feet below the water table, you can dissolve a certain amount of oxygen. If the uranium deposit is 200 feet below the water table, or twice as deep, you can dissolve twice as much oxygen.

Historically, ISL mining evolved from acid leaching to leaching with sodium bicarbonate or sodium carbonate. Most people add only carbon dioxide in dissolved oxygen at this point, Stover explained. Theres a chemical relationship between carbon dioxide gas, bicarbonate, and the carbonate ion. The host rock typically contains calcium carbonate or sodium carbonate minerals. By adding the carbon dioxide, Stover said, It will lower the PH of the solution just slightly. That enhances the solubility of the naturally occurring calcium carbonate. According to Stover and the other experts, the addition of carbon dioxide is an effective replacement for the previously added bicarbonate ion.

The goal is to get the uranium out of the sandstone and soluble. Were accelerating Mother Nature and making the uranium soluble again, said Doug Norris, engineering manager for Uranium Energy. When its soluble, we can just pump it out of the ground. But it is dissolved in the water like salt in sea water. You cant see it, but its there.

MINING THE URANIUM

ISL mining and processing the uranium is a very simple process. Its a water treatment plant with hundreds of water wells. There are two types of wells: injection and production. The water plus reagent (oxygen, carbon dioxide) is injected into the ground via water wells. Outside the United States, where environmental regulations may be less restrictive, an ISLs aquifer may be bombarded with harsh acid leaching. On Harry Anthonys engineering services website, he describes the process he observed in the Czech Republic, Over 4,100,000 tons of H2SO4 (sulfuric acid), 270,000 tons of HNO3 (nitric acid), 100,000 tons of NH3 (ammonia), and 25,000 tons of HF (hydrofloric acid) were consumed by the mine.

It would be nearly impossible to get an ISL project permitted in the United States using these chemicals to leach the uranium. The water quality division, within a states Department of Environmental quality (DQE), demands restoration to background, which is about where the groundwater was before ISL mining began. The less things you add, the less you have to reclaim at the end of the process, Doug Norris pointed out. The more stuff you add trying to get it out of the ground, the more you have to clean up.

Dennis Stover explained how the fluids presently used came about, Historically, most ISL operations had a great deal of difficulty with plugging or fouling of their injection wells due to the precipitation of excessive amounts of salts. He pointed out that the chemistry miners were using in conventional milling operations didnt work in ISL mining. Because they had very high concentrated salt solutions, they were trying to accelerate everything, Stover told us. When you take those concentrated solutions and put them underground, Mother Nature is not always happy. Other salts that were present in the rock would dissolve, solutions would become supersaturated and they would precipitate out. The wells would plug up.

Norris explained that sometimes you have to add a carbonate source, such as carbon dioxide to stabilize the dissolved uranium as uranyl dicarbonate. Norris said, The uranium is in a solid state in the ore, as Mother Nature left it. We oxidize it and turn it into uranyl dicarbonate. What goes to the processing plant is called lixiviate, the dissolved uranium in its ionic form. According to Anthony, Today, most ISL mining operates at neutral pH, and the uranium is complexed as a dicarbonate.

Water is circulated through the injection wells with the expressed purpose of separating the uranium coating the sandstone. Each time you circulate the water through the orebody, you are capturing some of the uranium. Each pass through is called a pore volume. Its like filling up a bucket of sand with water, explained Anthony. Once you have the bucket full of sand, you can still pour in water. The amount of water you can pour in until you just bring it up to the top of the sand is termed a pore volume. Pore volume is the interspatial volume.

In Anthonys models for operating an economic ISL plant, he calculates 20 pore volumes (PV). Porosity, or the spaces in between the sand particles, where the water can travel (permeability), helps determine how much uranium can be recovered. It takes about 20 PV to 30PV to recover the highest percentage, said David Miller, who was Cogemas chief ISL geologist in the United States, before becoming President of Strathmore Minerals. But, as the price of uranium keeps going higher, it may be economic to recover a higher percentage of the orebody. Maybe 40PV to 50PV will be possible with the direction the prices are moving. Of course, your average processed grade will go down. A few years ago, you would want to shut wells off at 15 parts per million (ppm), but now you might want to run them at 10ppm. At $50/pound uranium, you may be able to run at 7 or 8ppm.

Typically, an ISL operation should recover about 70 percent of the uranium in the ore, under the 20PV to 30PV scenario. However, in the case of the Czech Republics Diamo project, once Europes largest uranium mining operation, only 55 percent was recovered. Clearly, the more uranium recovered with the least number of pore volumes, the lower the operating costs. Trying to recover more uranium is only possible if you have the plant capacity. Because of the rising price of uranium, we would expect more companies to attempt to recover a higher percentage of uranium. Miller warns, however, You will not make your production quota if your plant is sized at a certain gallons per minutes at a certain grade to meet your annual production. If you lower the average grade and fail to increase your flow rate, your annual production will decrease.

COPYRIGHT 2007 by StockInterview, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

James Finch contributes to StockInterview.com and other publications. StockInterviews Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market has become the most popular book ever published for uranium mining stock investors. Visit http://www.stockinterview.com

With two out of three Americans overweight today, its getting harder to believe that all this extra fat is a simple problem of self-indulgence or poor personal discipline.

In fact, researchers and clinicians from various sciences say unequivocally that its not. Certainly adults are responsible for what they put in their mouths. But when so many are affected, from all across the American demographic, we have to also look whats going on in our culture at large.

And one thing thats going on is that theres a lot more going out. In 1978, just 18 percent of the calories Americans consumed were eaten away from home. But by 2003, that was up to half.

Why should that even matter? A calorie is a calorie is a calorie, right?

At the bottom line, yes. The trouble is that when we eat out, we simply have much less control over what ends up on our plates, and from there, on our bottom line. That shows up in a variety of ways.

Nutritional research indicates that for almost any given dish that you might choose to prepare at home, when its compared to a restaurant dish of the same name, its often not the same thing at all. So even trying to consciously select what looks like the healthiest choice on the menu might not do you much good.

Restaurants tend to use more oils and fats, more sugar, and more salt in their food preparations. The reason is simple: if the food is yummy, youll come back! But that tends to add up to a lot of extra calories you werent counting on.

And speaking of extras, how about all those extra nibbles: the plates of appetizers, the baskets of warm bread with pots of cool butter, the bonus beverage specials? most families simply dont have all those edible accouterments with regular home meals.

But at a restaurant, your drinks are brought before you even order. You often get bread or rolls to eat during your wait, and appetizers and desserts are helpfully suggested by your server.

Yet those extras can have even more calories than your meals! An order of buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing? Thats a tidy 1,010 calories before dinner. For a fried onion blossom with dip, figure around 2,000. Even a basket of garlic bread is about 800 calories. How many people are sharing those calories at your table?

Then you get to the main attraction, and the major problem with dining outportion size! Restaurant meals are often three to four times larger than a normal serving size.

Even plates, glassware and utensils have grown. Very often, the dinner plate you get in a restaurant would qualify as a platter in any home kitchen, but then, they have to be bigger to accommodate those super servings!

It wouldnt be such an issue if we were better at walking away. An old adage about fitness says that the most important exercise to do is pushbacks, as in, when youve had enough, push back and get up from the table.

But research shows that Americans in general tend to be completers, and many of us were raised to feel a sense of guilt if we left food on our plates. Add that programming to a giant dish of pasta, and suddenly, youre stuffed!

The truth is, no matter how we're raised, or whether we're slim or fat, if more is put in front of us we'll eat more, period. And usually, we're not even particularly aware of it. This has been proven out by study after study, in both the United States and abroad.

And that's not all. The research also shows that as we become accustomed to those mega-sized meals were presented in restaurants, we tend to prepare bigger portions at home, as well. We may not use all the extra oil, salt and sugar that restaurants do, but were certainly having more of our main ingredients, and were eating big and hearty.

The other thing that restaurants have over the home meal is variety. Even the most accommodating home cook typically wont make a different special meal for each member of the family. Again, the nutritional research shows that the more different things you can have, the more youll eat overall.

United States Department of Agriculture studies showed that when offered three varieties of a given food itemsay, sandwiches or cookiespeople would eat more than if they were offered three items of the same variety. Thats part of why those all-you-can-eat buffets are such a caloric catastrophe. Who ever has just a little?

Given the demands of todays busy lifestyles, dining out nowadays is not only a pleasure, but a time-saving survival tool. Restaurants may eventually be required to provide nutritional facts for their meals, but even without hard numbers, awareness of the pitfalls can go a long way toward helping us control those calorie counts.

We just need to think about what were up against when someone else is serving, so that when were eating out, were not taking so much in.

Caroline J. Cederquist, M.D. is a board certified Family Physician and a board certified bariatric physicians (the medical specialty of weight management). Dr. Cederquist is the founder of Bistro MD a home diet delivery program that specializes in low calorie gourmet food that is delivered to your home or office and a practicing bariatric physician.

While on my constant search for new nintendo Revolution information, I came across some articles speculating the European release date and price tag for Nintendos next generation gaming console. Of course, this is only a rumor, and I have not confirmed the date, or the price in any official capacity.

amazon France has slipped a page with the European release date and price for Nintendos monumental new game console, the nintendo Revolution.

The tentative release date for the Nintendo Revolution is listed as June 15, 2006. The total cost after conversion to US dollars, would be approximately $365. European game console prices tend to be a bit priced a higher than in North America, but this still sounds a bit overpriced given the Xboxs $299-$399 price tag. From what we know so far the nintendo Revolution will be less technologically advanced than the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

Based on the GameCubes 2001 launch cycleit arrived in Europe six months after it debuted in North America. This leak gives credence to rumors that the Revolution could see a surprise 2005 launch in canada and the US.

Of course, when more official information is available for both the release date and price, htt://www.nintendorevolution.ca will let you know.

Promise not to tell? One of the best kept secrets of the bahamas is Harbour island. This romantic little island, known as "Briland" by its inhabitants, is a short hop from the states. A one hour flight from florida to north Eleuthera followed by a brief cab and water taxi ride gets you to this bahamas gem in a hurry.

Harbour island is less than 4 miles long and a 1/2 mile wide. Its long wide beach is famous for its hard-packed pale pink sand. The likes of Fodors and Conde Nast rate it as one of the "best bahamas beaches." The beach, combined with some great restaurants, hotels and vacation home rentals, makes Harbour island a destination of choice amongst bahamas enthusiasts. It's no surprise to find a few "rich and famous" there -- they know they won't be hounded.

Central to Harbour island is Dunmore town. This quaint and friendly community features old Victorian structures adorned with Bahama's colorful pastel paint schemes. No high rise hotels, fast food or traffic jams on this island!

Golf cart rentals are the transportation of choice. Swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving, fishing, and just plain walking the beach are some of the popular activities. To be sure, Harbour island is not known for its shopping and night life nor is there any gambling. If you seek large crowds, wild parties or theme park rides, this is not your destination.

Harbour Island's weather is delightful; especially during late winter and Spring when there is little chance of rain. ocean breezes take any edge off of moderately warm temperatures ranging from the 70s to 80s during the day and late 60s at night. Air conditioning during season is unnecessary -- ceiling fans are adequate. Nothing beats falling asleep to the sounds of the ocean through an open window.

Dining out is casual. The better restaurants include Pink Sands Hotel, Coral Sands, The Landing, Rock House, Romora Bay Club and Harbour Lounge. For local fare, Ma Ruby's should not be missed. And there are more... Part of the pleasure of exploring the island is checking out the restaurants. When compared to other Bahamian islands, Harbour Island has one of the best selections of restaurants -- all within close proximity to any place you stay.

On the ocean side, hotels include Pink Sands Hotel, Coral Sands Hotel and Dunmore beach Club. On the bay side, it's The Landing Inn and the Rock House. On a budget? There are other hotels to choose from. Visiting Harbour island is not cheap, but if it was, then everybody would be there, right?

Harbour Island's vacation home rentals and villas are numerous. Location and size come at a price. If you desire "beachfront", the better locations are usually on the north and south along the east coast. If you want to save a little, there are some nice rentals in Dunmore town and others located in the interior of the island. The beach is always minutes away.

Look for home rentals on the internet offering more than a few photos so you know what to expect. A number of rentals are handled by rental or real estate agents who may not provide much in the way of details, descriptions, map locations or photos. Owners who care about promoting their home rental typically have independent web sites and accept e-mail inquiries directly.

The better house rentals on Harbour island are booked nearly a year in advance of prime season. Those who want the best make early reservations -- many are repeat customers. You can also take a "standby" position on a number of rentals in hopes someone cancels. Ask for referrals and double check policies for deposits and refunds.

If you seek a memorable and relaxed Bahamas vacation coupled with sun, sea, great food and a romantic beachfront that will knock your eyes out, consider Harbour island. See you on the beach!

Copyright 2004 Perry Joseph

Perry Joseph is a freelance writer, website developer and frequent visitor to the Bahamas. For more information on Harbour island, visit his website: Harbour Island Bahamas