Carnotite (Uranium Vanadate) – K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O
I’m going kick off this new mineral themed weekly blog post by talking about the mineral Carnotite (Named after the chemist M. A. Carnot (1839-1920)). This is a bright yellow radioactive ore composed primarily of uranium, vanadium, and oxygen. What causes a mineral to be defined as an ore is determined by whether or not you can mine it at a profit. Therefore a mineral’s status as an ore can change depending upon economic shifts and changes within the local and global market.
Carnotite had it’s “claim to fame” in The United States during the Cold War when the Atomic Energy Commission started to make high demands for uranium, one of Carnotite’s primary constituents, . Why would the federal government want to stock up on uranium? The answer might be quite obvious. Some Nuclear fission weapons, like the one dropped on Hiroshima, require the use of the isotope Uranium-235 (enriched from the more commonly occurring crude Uranium-238). The Uranium atom has the highest atomic mass therefore it releases more energy whenever the atom is split in a nuclear reaction.
Reading Edward Abbey’s autobiographical book “Desert Solitaire” inspired this blog post. Carnotite commonly occurs as a dust in sandstone and is found in abundance around the Colorado River and in the canyon lands of Utah where Abbey worked as a Park Ranger during the 50s. In the book he speaks in great detail about how the presence of Carnotite led to a mining boom in the region surrounding Moab, Utah during the Cold War as prospectors and corporations poured into the region hoping to get rich off of the land’s natural resources. By the end of the Cold War the demand for Carnotite also dwindled leaving the town’s larger population without the industry to support it. This summer I’ll be visiting Moab so I hope to learn more about this subject then and maybe catch a glimpse of one of the larger mines built to extract the once precious ore.