Open pit Imouraren

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The open pit Imouraren is in digestion befindliches uranium mine in northern Niger .

geography

Geographical location

Imouraren is located in the rural municipality of Dannet , which is part of the Arlit department in the Agadez region. The area around the southern edge of the desert Sahara west of the high mountains Aïr located mine is very sparsely populated. About ten kilometers east of Imouraren runs the French Route d'Uranium ("Uranium Route"), which connects the city of Arlit over a length of 650 kilometers with the south of the country.

geology

It is a sandstone-bound uranium deposit from the Jurassic and Cretaceous . Located at an average depth of 130 meters, the deposit is eight kilometers long and 2.5 kilometers wide. The uranium content is an estimated 179,000 tons of natural uranium with a uranium content of 0.07%. Imouraren is considered the largest uranium deposit in Africa and the second largest in the world.

history

The deposit was discovered in 1966 by employees of the French nuclear energy center Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The development of Imouraren was originally operated by a consortium to which the Office National des Ressources Minières (later SOPAMIN ) for the Nigerien state, the CEA and the US company Conoco belonged. Due to falling uranium prices, the project was put on hold in the 1980s. Conoco withdrew.

When uranium prices rose again in the 2000s, France again expressed its interest in imourars. The French Areva group resumed exploration in 2006 and took a majority stake in Imouraren SA, which was founded in 2009 to exploit imourars. The investment totaled more than 1.9 billion euros . Funding was originally expected to start in 2015. In May 2014, the government and Areva agreed to set up a strategic committee with a view to current uranium prices. Mining is unlikely to start before 2020.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Abdourahmane Idrissa, Samuel Decalo: Historical Dictionary of Niger . 4th edition. Scarecrow, Plymouth 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-6094-0 , pp. 390 .
  2. ↑ a b Imouraren Uranium Mine, Niger. mining-technology.com, accessed June 26, 2013 .
  3. ^ Uranium in Niger. World Nuclear Association, June 2013, accessed June 26, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Abdourahmane Idrissa, Samuel Decalo: Historical Dictionary of Niger . 4th edition. Scarecrow, Plymouth 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-6094-0 , pp. 267 .
  5. ↑ a b Le projet Imouraren (Niger). (PDF; 900 kB) Areva, March 2013, accessed on June 26, 2013 (French).

Coordinates: 18 ° 5 ′ 26 ″  N , 7 ° 26 ′ 27 ″  E