"If you have a contaminated sand, you can isolate the contaminate from the sand grain. If you have a man made material and you have to isolate one fraction of that material from another, you can isolate one fraction of the material from another."
- Eric Coates, Ablation Technologies LLC
Casper-based Ablation Technologies LLC just may revolutionize the way Uranium is produced. The process of ablation was invented fifteen years ago to extract gold and after a recent patent approval, ablation is now being applied to Uranium production.
The new technology has plenty of advantages for mining Uranium, but most importantly, it reduces the cost of getting the ore to a mill site
Ablation Technologies' Vice President, Dave Scriven, says, "it lowers the cost of mining, of conventionally mining uranium. And so what it means for the state is that it opens up some uranium properties that otherwise may be uneconomic."
However, not only is it cost effective, it's also an extremely clean process. Eric Coates, Ablation Technologies' Executive VP, says, "this technology has a lot of advantages, but one of the key advantages is that it is environmentally neutral. And by that we mean that we are only using water and the ore from the formation itself. So, we don't introduce any chemicals. There's no long-term cleanup impact."
Compared to conventional methods of uranium extracting, this new method is time-efficient to say the least. To put this into perspective, this Ablation technology would have been very useful during the clean up of the BP oil spill of 2010.
Coates says, "they were using chemical methods to cleanup the oil. They were basically just taking the contaminated sand off-site to some sort of disposal facility. In this new process, you can disassociate the oil from the underlying contaminated sand."
The Ablation technology patent for Uranium use was first introduced by Dave Scriven a few years ago.