Prospecting For Uranium

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26813, 19 August 1952, Page 6

Prospecting For Uranium

From two countries which are traditionally lands of prospectors for minerals reports have come recently of prospectors of a new type. There is much that is different about, the new prospectors. Instead of the pick, shovel, and old wash-bowl, they work with geiger counters, searching, of course, for uranium ore, the most important raw material for atomic energy. But one similarity with old prospecting days is to be noticed in the reports of modern prospecting in Canada and Australia. It is interesting and rather odd in this age in which State control and direction pervades everyday life that the search for uranium in Canada and Australia has been left .o the most determined type of rugged individualist—the private prospector. Of course,

Canada and Australia are not the only countries with deposits of uranium ore. Deposits have been found at many places on the earth’s surface, the richest so far in the Belgian Congo. Without doubt, search will reveal many more deposits. But it is thought that the area prospectors are searching in Northern Saskatchewan will perhaps prove the richest source of uranium in North America; and the finds already made in Australia promise great things. If, as it is hoped, atomic energy is going to solve many of the world’s fuel and energy problems—and not blow it to pieces, as some fear—a country having natural uranium deposits will be in a tremendously advantageous position for development in the atomic age. Australia has been handicapped in the oil age because no considerable deposits of oil have been found in that vast cohtinent —the only great explored land mass that has completely missed the benefits of indigenous oil. The age of Australia's rocks has everything to do with this. Although Australia lies so close to the oil belt that runs through the islands to its north, it is in no way geologically related to it. Thermal changes associated with changes in sediments and intrusive and volcanic rocks eliminate vast areas of Australia as regions within which oil may be sought with any prospect of success. A leading Australian geologist said of an area which some thought gave indications of being oil-bearing that there was indeed once an oilfield there, but Australia was about 500,000,000 years too late for it. But Australia’s old pre-Cambrian rocks appear to be sources of high-grade uranium, mineable, apparently, quite near the surface of the earth. Also, there seems to be evidence that later limestones may also be sources of uranium. It is too early to say that oil will not be found in Australia by the modern exploratory methods now being employed; but if the increasing search ends in failure there may still be a strange compensation for Australia in the age and nature of its rocks.