Treasure Hunt

Top-secret uranium was once an innocent element, mined chiefly for the cancer-treating radium associated with it. Before the atom bomb, no nation bothered to be secretive about its uranium resources. Even the U.S.S.R. described in detail the deposits found within its boundaries.

In last week's Science Magazine, Dr. D. B. Shimkin of Harvard's Russian Research Center reported on a uranium-prospecting trip he has made through Russian geological literature. Pay dirt, he said, has been found all the way from the Ukraine to far eastern Siberia.

As long ago as 1900, according to Shimkin, the Russians began looking for radioactive minerals. The best find was at Tyuya Muyun in the Fergana Valley of Central Asia, 200 miles east of Tashkent --where a mine was opened in 1908. By the end of 1913, it had produced 1,044 tons of ore containing vanadium, copper and about .82% of uranium. At 26 pounds of U-235 per atom bomb (a current guess), this early production could have yielded theoretically enough "fissionable material" for four bombs. The Tyuya Muyun mine was still producing in 1936, when it (and some radioactive waters near Ukhta) yielded enough radium for Soviet needs.

The ore in the Fergana Valley is rather like the carnotite of Colorado, a complex uranium-vanadium mineral. It is found in veins, some of them almost five feet thick. By 1933, the uranium content in the run-of-the-mine ore had risen to 1.23%.

Apparently the Fergana Valley is shot through & through with uranium deposits of various kinds. In 1923, V. I. Popov reported one at Uigar-sai that he said compared favorably to "many carnotite sites in the U.S.A." In 1928, intense radioactivity was reported at the western end of the valley.

Another promising uranium region is the Khamar-Daban Range near Lake Baikal, possibly extending to the Aldan goldfields. It was known in 1914, and has been explored intermittently ever since. Even in the Ukraine, close to Russia's oldest industrial centers, there are excellent indications of uranium. In 1940, A. E. Fersman reported that the pegmatites (coarse-grained granites) of the region are worth intensive study as possible uranium sources.

None of the geological literature quoted by Shimkin is later than 1944. What the Russians may have found by frantic searching since that time, Shimkin does not guess. But he believes that the uranium deposits found before the war in the Fergana Valley alone "appear to provide a possible basis for the development of atomic power in that region."

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