Utah's Uranium Boom - a snippet - Steen's strike triggered a mineral rush that rocked the entire Colorado Plateau. Shortly after announcement of the Mi Vida find, Vernon Pick, a middle-aged electrician from Minnesota, discovered the Delta Mine northwest of Hanksville. After blocking out approximately 300,000 tons of ore with an in-place value of forty dollars per ton, the Delta's monthly production averaged 1,500 tons. Two years later Pick sold his mine to international financier Floyd Odlum for $9 million and a custom-converted PBY airplane. Odlum renamed the mine the Hidden Splendor, but soon after his purchase the highly touted vein pinched out. Local wags then dubbed the mine "Odlum's Hidden Blunder." Note. ex....
UTAH URANIUM PRODUCTION
Selected Years - Pounds - Value
1955 - 2,219,000 - $ 9,454,000
1960 - 6,539,000 - $ 27,843,000
1970 - 1,635,000 - $ 6,742,000
1980 - 2,397,000 - $ 68,248,000
1982 - 2,895,000 - $ 111,080,000
1987 - 5,320,000 - $ 145,610,000
Ex.... 30 square mile Lisbon Valley Project is located in the Lisbon Valley Mining District. Over 85 million pounds of uranium oxide (U3O8) were produced in the district at an average grade of 0.4% U3O8 (8 pounds per ton).
Pratt Seegmiller of Marysville remembered some yellow rock he'd seen in the back country years before. After racking his brain to remember the site, he staked the Freedom and Prospector claims, which proved to be among Utah's richest deposits.
Joe Cooper, a road contractor in Monticello, partnered with his father-in-law Fletcher Bronson and earned over $25 million on the Happy Jack Mine.
Texan Blanton W. Burford and his partners sliced into an eight-foot vein of high-grade uranium ore while bulldozing a road into their claims on Rattlesnake Mountain near Moab.
School teachers, insurance brokers, used car salesmen, and shoe clerks around the nation converged on the Colorado Plateau to seek their fortune. Even a group of high school students staked forty claims and later sold them for $15,000. By the mid-1950s, almost six hundred producers on the Colorado Plateau were shipping uranium ore. Employment in the industry topped 8,000 workers in the mines and mills. Another bonanza in penny uranium stock established Salt Lake City as "The Wall Street of Uranium." The AEC had turned the tap and caused a flood.
But by 1964, after producing almost 9 million tons of ore valued at $250 million, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that "it is no longer in the interest of the Government to expand production of uranium concentrate." The market was saturated. There were 71 million tons of reserves--enough to satisfy United States needs through the next four years. For the first time, private enterprise was invited to purchase uranium oxide and the AEC put federal buying on hold. During the late 1960s the industry rallied again with mining by large companies for developing nuclear plants. But the furor was never the same. Ostensibly, the uranium boom was over for that cycle - history repeat itself -