Stockpile or Shortage?

A group of Western miners flew into Washington last week with a hurry-up call for the Government to start stockpiling uranium concentrate. The miners told the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that they have been unable to sell enough of their ore since the AEC decided to stop expansion of U.S. uranium mills (TIME, Nov. 11) and that prospecting has virtually stopped.

The majority of the committee favored the stockpile idea, and its vice chairman, New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson, drafted a bill to authorize stockpile buying. The plan is for AEC to pile up 7,250 tons of concentrate a year, expand mill capacity from 17,500 tons to 24,750 tons by the end of 1959 In a few years when AEC's contracts to buy from Canada and Africa expire, AEC could feed the concentrate into atomic plants in place of the foreign concentrate that now supplies half of U.S. needs. By 1966 the stockpile would be eaten away. Cost of the plan to the U.S.: $5,000,000.

AEC would not commit itself. Yet it was openly concerned about the plight of the miners. Its raw materials chief, Jesse C. Johnson, was re-examining the wisdom of the moratorium on mill construction, will report to the congressional committee in mid-March.

Huge heaps of ore have arisen around western mines; in Wyoming's rich Gas Hills area. Vitro Uranium Co. now has 40,000 tons on hand. Vitro shut down its drilling rigs, laid off half its mining force, planned to discharge the other half this month—unless something happened. Throughout New Mexico's Grants-Ambrosia Lake region, only twelve rigs were drilling last week v. more than 40 before AEC's freeze. The New Mexico State Land Office last month could lease only six of the 30 tracts it auctioned, and high bids reached the princely sum of $118. The real danger is that if too many prospectors give up, the U.S. may be squeezed for uranium supplies in the future. AEC admits that known reserves of ore—75 million tons—will be used up in ten years.