No Rest for the Wicked

This is dawn over the small village where we’re staying. Why am I up so early? No rest for the wicked!

Here I am in front of the helicopter taking us to today’s tour. You’ll notice that I’m not exactly svelte. Downright fat if you’re honest about it (which I am, but hey, I’m married to a world-class cook). The organizers of the tour didn’t keep that in mind when they planned out an excursion hiking up and down slopes steep enough to require ropes. Ah, you should have heard me huffing and puffing like a steam engine as my two younger, slimmer, more nimble companions skipped about like mountain goats. Me, I prefer the helicopter. I wonder if Martin will let me use one to get back and forth to the office?
Here’s the main mining camp, near the big uranium deposit the company is trying to define. There are other deposits scattered about, which is what gives this the potential to be a much bigger find than currently estimated.

The camp is besieged by black bears – our guide tells us that there are more black bears in this neck of the wood than he’s seen anywhere, and from listening to him, I think he’s worked just about everywhere.

The bears are nothing if not persistent and aggressive. Some time back, one of the helicopters broke down out in the woods. The mechanic couldn’t fix it in one day. He ate a fruit cup as he worked, put the nuts and bolts in the empty fruit cup, then put that on the back seat.

That night, a passing bear smelled the fruit cup. It smashed through the windshield to get inside, and ate the fruit cup bolts and all, then left. He came back the next night to eat more of the helicopter. The crew finally got the helicopter out of there – good thing, or the bear would have eaten all but the blades.

Life in the camps are pretty Spartan, but they always have good cooks to take care of the crew. Indeed, the food I had last night was some of the best of my trip, and my trip started in New York.
Here’s one of the drilling rigs. As they drill, another team builds the pad at the next site. Then they break it down and haul it off to drill some more. This results in …

… hundreds and hundreds of drill cores. Notice the pink rock in some of the cores in the photo? That’s hematite. The uranium is bonded with hematite when it isn’t bonded with magnetite. This is a very unusual uranium deposit for a lot of reasons that excite geologists ...
… and here’s a geologist, holding a gadget that detects radiation atop some promising-looking rock. The radioactive emissions are still pretty low, low enough that you don’t have to worry unless you handle some of the more radioactive bits and then eat, passing the dust into your stomach. I suppose, if you were especially stupid, you could also lick the rocks directly to poison yourself.

But none of that happens to these guys. They wear badges that indicate how much radiation they’re exposed to and ship them off every month. Every single one has come back negative … except for a badge that was accidentally left too close to a computer.

That’s right. The same machine I’m typing this on and you’re reading this on gives off more radioactivity than the rocks these guys work with. Made your day with that little factoid, didn’t I? Well, it’s too late for me … save yourselves!

Notice the glove the smart man wears as he holds up uranium bearing ore? The yellow stuff is where uranium has oxidized due to exposure to air. Now you know why “yellowcake” is yellow.

I don’t know if you can see all the “9”s on the display of the device here – this is a pretty promising piece of rock.

My last photo for the day – you’ll see green along with yellow on this rock. That’s because there is copper right alongside the uranium. As I said, it’s very interesting geology.

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