In Situ Leaching of Uranium

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Jorge June 22, 2019

Sedimentary deposits contain an appreciable portion of the world’s supply of uranium.

Predictions of nuclear fuel usage in the United States indicate that these reserves will
have to be tapped if the domestic industry is to be the major supplier of fuels for the
nuclear reactors. Techniques developed within the petroleum industry are a base on
which to build economically attractive fluid mining processes for the recovery of these
uranium values. The problems central to the success of such mining processes are the
containment, control, and recovery of a narrow band of pregnant leach solution as it
progresses from the point of injection to the point of production.

Occurrence of Uranium
Uranium is not a particularly rare element in the earth’s rust. Kirk and Othmer state
that uranium is more abundant than cadmium, bismuth, mercury, and silver. About
one-third of the world’s uranium reserves are in sedimentary deposits. To date, most of
the uranium mining has been in arkosic sediments.

Sedimentary sandstones, generally, contain little uranium. Two notable exceptions to

this rule are the carnotite deposits of the Western United States and Kazakstan in the
Soviet Union. The carnotite deposits of the Western United States are irregular and
scattered, and yet much of the uranium required to meet the predicted needs of the
nuclear power industry will have to come from these domestic reserves or be imported.
As already mentioned, the immediate future is critical to the continued growth of the
nuclear power industry, and a crucial part of that future is the development of
techniques for improving the recovery of uranium from these sedimentary deposits.

Actual Application in the U.S.

The trade literature is essentially void of material describing in situ solution mining
operations. In fact, it would appear that the process has been tried in only one
operation. In 1968 Anderson and Ritchie discussed an application which had been in
operation since 1961 at Shirley Basin, Wyoming. They reported an interesting
permutation of the control methods suggested by Gardner and Ritchie in that the
commercial operation made use of the natural groundwater flow to help control the
movement of the pregnant solution to the producing well bore. These authors reported
quick response and short flood-out times. The flood-out of a pattern on 25-foot spacing
required about a month. They also reported that within the flooded area essentially all
the uranium values were removed. Therefore, the problem is to operate the pattern in a
manner which yields maximum recovery of the pregnant leach solution.

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At that time Continental Oil Company investigated the feasibility of using the process to
produce the uranium from some properties in southwestern South Dakota. Research
done while evaluating that venture investigated acid requirements, leaching efficiency,
grouting procedures, and fluid-flow control. Because of many of the same problems
which still confront the nuclear energy industry, e.g., governmental regulations and the
market uncertainties, we concluded that continued development would be premature.
This work was never published, but the results are in general agreement with those
reported for the Shirley Basin operation.

Laboratory Results from Linear Cores

As part of the aforementioned feasibility study and in order to become better
acquainted with some of the basic problems associated with an in situ leaching
operation, a series of experiments were carried out with dry sandstone from a South
Dakota ore body.

The laboratory procedure consisted of cutting 1″x 1″ x 8″ pieces of core from a large
slab, sealing the longitudinal surfaces with an epoxy resin, attaching inlet and outlet
headers to the ends and injecting a partial pore volume of a 5 percent H2SO4 solution
into the core. (This partial pore volume of acid is called a slug in oil field terminology.)
The slug was pushed through the core with water, and the effluent was collected in
alternating 2 and 5 ml samples. The 5 ml samples were analyzed for uranium content,
and the 2 ml samples were tested for acidity.

Following the flood experiment, the epoxy resin was removed from the flooded cores,
and the sandstone was sent to the same analytical laboratory for determination of
residual uranium. The difference between the uranium content of the extracted and
unextracted sand was used to establish the efficiency of the leaching process. This value
was compared with the recovery efficiency obtained by analyzing the effluent stream. In
all cases the results showed that more than 95 percent of the uranium originally present
was flushed from the core.

Injection into a Liquid-Saturated Reservoir

Initially the fluid moves away from the injection well in a circular pattern. Later the
fluid responds to the effects of the pressure sink at the producing wells and begins to
form cusps because the pressure gradient, and hence the fluid velocity, is greatest along
the line connecting the injection and producing well. Finally the cusps break into the
producing well when about 72 percent of the area has been swept.

If a fluid slug is moved through such a reservoir by an inert displacing fluid under the
same favorable mobility ratios, the slug will progress through the bed as a distinct well-
defined zone as shown in Figure 4. Initially the slug has a well-defined annular shape,
which gradually begins cusping, and at breakthrough time a large part of the slug still
resides along the edges of the swept portion of the reservoir. Several pore volumes of the
inert fluid must be injected to obtain a reasonable recovery of the slug.
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Combining our knowledge of fluid flow behavior with our knowledge of the
concentration profile of the leach effluent from a linear core, presents us with the real
problem, viz., getting a narrow zone of uranium-enriched leach solution to move into a
producing well bore with a minimum amount of injected fluid, and a minimum loss of
pregnant solution.

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