Anfield applies to restart Shootaring Canyon mill

10 April 2024

Anfield Energy Inc has submitted its production reactivation plan for the Shootaring Canyon uranium mill to the State of Utah's Department of Environmental Quality. The Vancouver-based company said it is targeting the mill restart for 2026 - it has been on standby since 1982.

Shootaring Canyon (Image: Anfield Resources)

The plan outlines an increase in mill throughput capacity to 1000 tonnes of ore per day from 750 tonnes per day and an increase in annual uranium production capacity to 3 million pounds (1154 tU) from 1 million pounds (385 tU). The Shootaring mill is one of only three licensed, permitted and constructed conventional uranium mills in the USA.

"The plan addresses the updating the mill's radioactive materials licence from its current standby status to operational status and the increasing of both throughput capacity and the tripling of licensed production capacity," the company said. "Following approval of the reactivation plan and mill refurbishment, Anfield will be able to both recommence uranium production and start vanadium production in 2026 - joining a select group of North American and US uranium producers meeting the resurgence in uranium demand."

Anfield acquired the Shootaring Canyon mill in 2015. The conventional acid-leach facility had been owned by  Uranium One since 2007, but the Canadian-based and Russian-owned company's mining operations are focused on in-situ leach production methods. The mill - built in 1980 - commenced operations in 1982 and operated for about six months, before operations ceased due to the depressed price of uranium. During its period of operation, it produced and sold 27,825 pounds of U3O8. Surface stockpiles at the facility include an estimate of 370,000 pounds of U3O8 at an average grade of 0.147%. Anfield agreed in August 2014 to acquire the mill plus a portfolio of uranium assets from Uranium One in a deal worth USD5 million.

Anfield said early-stage refurbishment of Shootaring will take place during the review of the restart application, preparing the company to complete refurbishment as soon as the restart application is approved.

"We at Anfield are very proud of achieving the important milestone of submitting the production restart application for Shootaring," said Anfield CEO Corey Dias. "This is an achievement which has taken close to 18 months of engineering and design input to complete and caps a decade of methodical and strategic progression in asset development.

"Since acquiring the Shootaring Canyon mill in 2015, we have maintained the facility, waiting for the right market conditions to return the mill to production status. With uranium reaching highs of greater than USD100 per pound earlier this year, and a global environment in which demand is expected to continue outstripping supply, we believe this is the ideal time to advance our uranium assets to production."

Licensing and testing progress for innovative thorium-based fuel

10 April 2024

Days after announcing the start of accelerated irradiation testing and qualification of its patented ANEEL thorium and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel at Idaho National Laboratory, Clean Core Thorium Energy announced it has completed the first phase of the Canadian nuclear regulator's pre-licensing review process.

Clean Core's management team and the INL project team pictured in front of the ATR (Image: Clean Core)

ANEEL has been developed for use in pressurised heavy water reactors and Candu reactors (its name is taken from Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life). The company says it can offer significantly improved performance with existing proven heavy water reactor systems by leveraging thorium's "inherently superior" nuclear, thermal and physical properties while retaining the same external dimensions and configuration design as in currently used natural uranium fuel bundles. It can be used to replace current fuel bundles, without any significant modifications to the reactor, to reduce life-cycle operating costs and waste volumes, increase safety and accident tolerance, and result in additional proliferation resistance, the company claims.

ANEEL is the first thorium-based fuel for Candu reactors to successfully complete the first phase of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) pre-licensing process for new fuel designs, Clean Core said.

The Vendor Design Review (VDR) process has included submissions across nine focus areas, building a licensing basis and safety case for the fuel. The pre-licensing process has provided an opportunity for Clean Core to demonstrate understanding and compliance with Canadian licensing requirements and seek detailed feedback ahead of a formal licence application, the company said.

The regulator concluded that the company "generally understands and has correctly interpreted the high-level intent of the CNSC's regulatory requirements as applicable to fuel design and qualification", Clean Core said. The executive summary of the assessment report will be made publicly available by the CNSC in the near future.

"The work performed through the VDR and our engagements with the CNSC highlights Clean Core's regulatory and commercial readiness. This is a critical step forward for our ANEEL fuel technology and in advancing nuclear power generation across Canada and globally,” Clean Core CEO and founder Mehul Shah said.

Testing begins

The completion of Phase 1 of the Canadian VDR comes as irradiation testing and qualification of the fuel is about to begin in the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in the USA. This follows Clean Core's signature in 2022 of a strategic partnership project agreement with INL.

 ANEEL fuel experiment capsules being staged at the ATR (Image: Clean Core)

As part of that agreement, INL has received more than 300 ANEEL fuel pellets fabricated by Texas A&M University's Department of Nuclear Engineering under INL's quality assurance requirements. INL has developed the irradiation test plan, performed pre-irradiation characterisation of the fuel pellets, designed and fabricated the experiment hardware and test trains, assembled the test trains, and finally inserted the experiment into the ATR.

The CCTE-ANEEL-1A irradiation experiment is to begin this month and achieve burnup targets of up to 60 GWd per tonne. As each planned burn-up target is achieved, the test capsules containing irradiated ANEEL pellets will be sent to INL's Materials and Fuels Complex for destructive and non-destructive post-irradiation examination.

"Irradiating homogeneously blended thorium and uranium oxide in ATR is a first-of-a kind experiment for INL and the US DOE,", said Michael Worrall, a nuclear engineer at INL and Principal Investigator for the CCTE-ANEEL-1A experiment. "We are excited to see the potential of the ANEEL fuel technology and what the future of this technology holds."

The ATR is a pressurised water test reactor which operates at very low pressures and temperatures compared to a large commercial nuclear power plant to produce large-volume, high-flux thermal neutron irradiation in a prototype environment. The one-of-a-kind reactor can be used to study the effects of intense neutron and gamma radiation on reactor materials and fuels.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News