The finished product bears the appetizing name of “yellowcake”, but there is nothing edible about it. The yellow solution coming out of the McClean Lake plant in Canada, operated by the Canadian subsidiary of the French giant Orano (formerly Areva), is uranium oxide concentrate. ” Grid “ at high temperature and transformed into small black crystals, it is put in barrels before leaving, by truck, for the United States or being shipped to European ports.
It will still have to undergo an enrichment phase before it can be used as fuel for the reactors of nuclear power plants. At a time of forced decarbonization of Western economies, this “yellowcake” has become the gold of the moment.
It is 700 kilometers north of Saskatoon, the economic capital of Saskatchewan, in the heart of the immense Canadian territory, that the precious ore is extracted. This province, larger than France and seventy times less populated, is full of mineral wealth. Its subsoil contains twenty-three of the thirty critical and strategic minerals selected by Canada as being necessary for the energy transition, such as potash, lithium, copper, helium, rare earths, but also, and above all, uranium.
Canadian uranium reserves are estimated at 588,500 tonnes, or 10% of the world’s known reserves. A financial windfall, while the price of ore has quadrupled since 2020, reaching the threshold of 100 dollars per pound (94 euros for 0.45 kg) in February.
Innovative extraction technique
In the middle of a taiga landscape, a mixture of meadows browned by winter snow and boreal forest, dotted with countless lakes, two of the largest and most promising deposits in the world have been discovered in the sedimentary basin known as “de Athabasca. Promising, even strategic, because their average uranium content is around 18%, when the world average of exploited deposits is less than 1%.
After that of McArthur River, the richest in number of reserves, which entered production in 1999, the Cigar Lake deposit benefited from an investment of 2.4 billion Canadian dollars (1.6 billion euros). Since 2014, it has been operated by the Canadian Cameco Corporation, within a joint venture made up of Orano and the Japanese Tepco. It is thanks to these Saskatchewan mines that Canada became, in 2022, the second largest producer of uranium in the world, behind Kazakhstan, providing 15% of global production.
You have 69.24% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.