Biggest Uranium Mill

All through the uranium country in the Western states, ore has piled high outside the mines as production outsped the expansion of uranium refineries. One of the biggest stacks of ore lies outside the rich ($60 million in proved reserves) Mi Vida mine of Charles Steen, the onetime oil geologist who discovered Mi Vida when he was almost penniless, thereby touched off southeast Utah's first big uranium strike (TIME, Aug. 3, 1953).

Ore has been collecting at Mi Vida's portal at the rate of 15,000 to 20,000 tons monthly, now lies in heaps 40 ft. high. The sight of such idle riches disturbed Steen, so he decided to build a mill himself. Last week he signed, for his Uranium Reduction Co., a contract with the Atomic Energy Commission to build an $8,000,000 to $10 million uranium-reduction mill, the biggest (by 50%) in the U.S.

Steen's mill, the eleventh in the nation, will go into production next summer, will refine ore (by the sulphuric-acid leaching process) from Mi Vida and other mines in the Big Indian Wash district, as well as from AEC's nearby stockpile. To finance construction, Steen will borrow $3,500,000 from New York's Chemical Corn Exchange Bank, $6,200,000 from the New York Life Insurance Co., thus bring a major insurance company into the uranium business for the first time. Steen need not worry about customers: AEC will take the mill's entire production until at least 1962.

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