I’ve been to Uranium City twice. Once with Getty in 1980 and once with the regional geologist here at the PreCambrian Lab in 2010.
It was a happening place at one time , early fifties, now about 40 people and a real ghost town for the rest of it.
Exploration crews pass through, Rare Earth’s in the area and Vanadium, also Diamonds.
During the big boom years of the Cold War this was THE place to obtain Uranium.
All those supplies and equipment came in from Edmonton, and the Northern Alberta Railway forwarded it all to Clearwater River, stored in 2 large warehouses. They had 4 months of open water with those barges to get everything up there.
I have two graduate students working up there with the remediation of the Gunnar Mine. Amazing
Thanks Wayne. I think Uranium City will have a rebirth in the not too far future. It is a magical area, difficult to relate what you sense when you are there. Virtually the entire periodic table is laid out there in abundance. Exploration crews searching and drilling for Uranium find Cobalt instead. Gold crews find Diamonds. Copper-Zinc exploration finds banded Iron formations. 2.8 billion year old marine volcanic vents!..could this be the origins of life? Native peoples have found large chunks of Lodestone, a rock that is in itself a magnet. Medicine men use it for medicinal purposes and revere it.
The air and the sky, the outcrops and the land seem to want to say something. When we are ready they will reveal more.
There is a lot of exploration up there Wayne. There are however a myriad of problems these days. The first is excessive and extreme regulations, the second is obtaining $$'s for exploration work. The ‘Juniors’ can only go so far, then the big guns step in but even then cash is tight. The third is consultation with Native Bands, as stakeholders, usually the least of the problems but it will cost, and then simply logistics. If you can pass all that then you have to do years and years of economic assessments and analysis.
999/1000 targets are duds economically, and of that one that’s a ‘hit’ then again 999/1000 develops into a Mine! It’s a big risk but also a big reward.
What would be and should have been a great benefit and boon would be a RailRoad from Prince Albert up into the North, into the Athabasca Basin, flattening like a mushroom with a line East connecting to Flin Flon and West to Fort McMurray. Now that would create a lot of development.
Alberta has Railroads to the North, all the way into the North West Territories and Manitoba does as well all the way to Hudsons Bay. Just never happened here, still Frontier!
There is also a considerable amount of very interesting exploration and exciting finds just to the North of Saskatchewans border into the North West Territories. Landlocked, how do you get product to market?
Suggest you read this carefully and consider whether different fractions are needed as stated. We know what you meant, but you need to say it.
This is fortunately not reminiscent of the alleged Naderite at the paper-mill emissions hearing who when he heard the wastewater pH would be between 6.8 and 7.2 leaped up and cried 'We will not accept this sellout, we demand a pH of ZERO!
The old Gunnar and El Dorado Uranium Mines have undergone heavy remediation over the past 8 years , that includes everything from Tailings Ponds to Underground workings, to rivers and streams. El Dorado is complete and Gunnar has a bit to go yet. Outside of those two the area is pristine.
When ‘we’ started up those mines our exact knowledge was far from complete when it came to extracting Uranium, about radiation and its effects and treatment of waste effluents from processing.
Today’s technologies and laws have made unbelievable advances in remediating these situations safely and with great care for the land.
Yeah pH 7 is Neutral. Another strange thing is ‘0 deg F’, which is just another number. Logarithms are one of the few things in Math that were actually easier to do on a slide rule. Not quite as accurate but it worked well enough. Got man to the moon!
I guess if you really wanted to give that Naderite a case of the vapors tell him (or her) the atmosphere’s full of di-hydrogen monoxide, and WHAT should we do about it?
Yes, if you are satisfied with three significant figures, slde rules are fine. A friend of mine had a twenty inch slide rule; I never asked him if it was good for four sig figs.
When I was doing calculations in quantitative analysis, I used a four place log table.
I still have my 10 inch slde rule–but use a calculator when I need serious calculation.
Well don’t get me wrong but I do not use a slide rule any longer and my Texas Instrument Scientific Calculator works and performs just dandy, as it does for my students. Once every 3 years or so I bring in the old slide rule just to show them and boy are they curious and fascinated, they love that old tech manual stuff, for ten minutes anyway.
Dial phones and 4 speed portable record players too. Always good for a laugh. It’s like “Whaaat”.
Late 60’s and early 70’s ‘Made in Yugoslavia’ N Scale with a bulb that will light up a table, jackrabbit start after its juiced but doesn’t move and you give it a nudge and takes off at 150mph, then 2 feet later keels over on it’s side. Arnold coffee grinders. Display only now. You needed faith to be a N Scaler, that some day…We had great rolling stock though ( mostly).
I learned the new math. Like if 2 is equal to 3 and 3 is equal to 2 then 2 plus 2 is 4, 5 and 6 simultaneously. [swg] All elephants are pink. Nellie is an elephant therefore Nellie is pink.
I fooled around with N scale for a time due to my brother-in-law “Big B’s” malign influence, but eventually returned to O gauge. N gauge was fascinating though, how they packed those motors into such small engines. And now they’ve got sound in the engines and lights in the cars! Amazing! No smoke yet, though.
Here’s a brief video of “Big B’s” clubs traveling roadshow layout. You could tell it’s a North Jersey club just from the Susquehanna locomotives!
Well you always throw in a factor of i to the i_th power (sqrt(-1)**sqrt(-1) for theFORTRAN folks and sqrt(-1)^sqrt(-1) for the BASIC crew). That actually truns out to be a positive real “number”, where number is in quotes as the value for the can range from essentially zero to ininity in steps with ratios of e to the power of 2*Pi. One the weirder tidbits from my Complex Analysis class.
Or you could have fun with Christian mathematics. Some examples to get you started:
1=3 (commutative)
1=2 (for Roman Catholics)
2=3 (not technically true in the underlying Jewish tradition, as the criteria for 2 vs. 3 witnesses are Talmudically different – Mr. Klepper will know the appropriate ‘weighting function’.)
pi also equals 3 (this helpfully simplifies many trig functions)
1=365
(If we extend scope to the Judeo-Christian tradition, we could always get into gematria and Kabbalistic numerology, which vastly expands the fun use of mathematics as operations of power, for example utilizing numerical classes of locomotive numbering to show an underlying unity of things in the multiverse, or something…)
