Uranium exploration in India - Perspective and strategy

Exploration for uranium, together with other strategic elements like Th, Zr, Nb, Ta, REE, and Y, is the sole responsibility of the Atomic Minerals Division (AMD) of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), which is the Government of India organization established to conduct all functions related to research and development of atomic energy. To meet the growing industrial and agricultural demands for energy, DAE is having a nuclear power programme to generate 10,000 MWe by 2000 AD. This programme is based almost exclusively on natural uranium fuelled thermal reactors, followed by plutonium fuelled fast breeder and thorium based reactors, the last two planned to be operative by early next century, and in such a programme, uranium is to play a critical role for the next three to four decades. The planned strategy for the near future envisages large inputs of indirect methods of exploration in areas selected on sound geological reasoning and concepts, together with substantial increase in drilling activities, so as to discover new concealed deposits, possibly of higher grade and large tonnage, besides finding extensions of the presently known deposits and exploiting the small tonnage numerous low grade deposits be developing suitable mining and low cost heap leaching techniques, as also economic extraction of uranium from refractory ores, clays and iron oxides