The department put restrictions on the supplies, but the relief didn't last long. market prior to the dissolution of the bloc. Miners got some good news in 1992, when the Commerce Department determined the Soviet Union had been dumping cheap uranium onto the U.S. By 1987, the United States was importing nearly 15 million pounds of uranium, and domestic output fell by about a third to roughly 13 million pounds. That opened the door to high-quality, low-cost supplies from Canada and Australia. However, it left in place rules barring the use of foreign uranium until 1975, when it began to allow a growing percentage of overseas supplies into the market. storehouses so full of uranium stockpiles that the government stopped paying the incentives. Everyone with a jeep and a Geiger counter was out trying to get rich,' said Danielson.īy the 1960s, the program had packed U.S.

'It was crazy around this part of the country.

That set off a gold rush in the nation's vast Western region. It also paid out a $10,000 discovery and production bonus for each new source of supplies, which pencils out to roughly $95,000 in today's dollars. In the early days, the government offered a 10-year price guarantee for certain kinds of uranium ore. Trying to sort that out and find where there's a free market in uranium - I find that very questionable,' said Luke Danielson, an attorney and minerals consultant who closely follows the uranium industry 'It's been government-sponsored, government-subsidized just since the beginning.

It went through a brief golden age between about 19, beginning when the United States offered generous incentives to shore up its stockpiles of the nuclear weapons fuel during the Cold War. uranium mining industry is relatively young.

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