Anthony Engineering Services
Here are but a few of the Uranium mining projects that I have been associated with over my 30 year career in extractive metallurgy. Beginning with Palangana Dome in 1976, a Union Carbide solution mining project situated on a salt dome north of Benavides, Texas, uranium was recovered using a Bureau of Mines Multi-Stage Upflow ion exchange column.From that early experience and from observing how some of the other early mines recovered uranium from cascading up-flow columns I was able to design an ion exchange (IX) system that eliminated the transfer of resin from stage to stage. Each time the resin was transferred it would degrade because of physical attrition. My design was simple. Solution flow between IX columns was based on gravity. NO PUMPS!! Also the IX column was configured to allow elution (stripping the resin) thereby eliminating the need to transfer resin from column to column.
All of Uranium Resources, Inc. projects (5) utilized this designed. Tenneco, Conoco, Caithness Minerals, Cameco's Crow Butte ISL, and recently (2005), the Alta Mesa project in South Texas have used this efficient and simple design. The secret to the design was a perforated weir that allowed water to seek sufficent head to drive the flow across the remaining columns in series. When a column became saturated and needed to be eluted, all that was required from the operator was the opening of a valve to bring a freshly eluted column into the loading cycle, followed by the simultaneous closing and opening of feed valves on the loaded and following "catch" column.
The picture titled "Benavides Loading/Elution Column" on the right depicts what the ion exchange system looked like at URI's Benavides Project. For more info, contact me at harry@hanthony.com.
