Port Hope restarts production

Thursday, 18 June 2009

Uranium hexafluoride production has resumed at Cameco's Port Hope conversion plant, after almost two years of interruptions to operations.

Inside the Port Hope plant (Image: Cameco)

Production initially resumed at the Ontario plant in October 2008 after a 16 month outage,

but was suspended again in December 2008 when the company ran into problems with its sole supplier of hydrofluoric acid (HF), an essential feedstock for the conversion of uranium oxide (U₃O₈) to gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF₆).

 

Cameco announced in May that it had signed a contract with its historic supplier of HF under "mutually beneficial" terms but is continuing negotiations with other suppliers to broaden and diversify its supply base. The company says those negotiations are continuing to make progress.

Hot time at Key Lake   Operations at Cameco's Key Lake uranium mill in northern Saskatchewan have been unaffected by a forest fire that came as close as 6 km to the plant. According to press reports, the fire is now in retreat after a change in the wind direction.   Key Lake is the largest high-grade uranium milling operation in the world, with an annual production capacity of 18.7 million pounds U3O8. It is in a remote, heavily wooded area, and Cameco said it has well-developed plans in place to deal with such fires.

The Port Hope plant uses a chemical process to convert U₃O₈, uranium concentrate powder, to gaseous UF₆, the feedstock for the world's uranium enrichment facilities. Cameco also operates a plant at the site to convert U₃O₈ into uranium dioxide (UO₂) powder, used to manufacture fuel for Canada's Candu reactors which do not require enriched uranium fuel. 

The company says its 2009 fuel services production forecast of 8 to 12 million kilograms uranium remains unaltered by the restart.