Successful Application of Innovation in Uranium Process Design

摘要

Paladin Energy has successfully built and commissioned the only two uranium projects involving conventional mining operations in the past 25 years. It has achieved that outcome through innovative process design and consequently offers the industry the spectre of a new paradigm in proven uranium process technology, where the orthodoxy of acid versus alkali process routes will no longer prevail. The company has continued its application of innovative thinking during the early operational and optimisation phases of both projects, and in the process emerged as a major uranium producer - one of only four non-sovereign major producers in the industry.As a consequence of process analytical tools not previously available and senior management, both executive and non-executive, who were willing to take risks others would not, the company is poised to complete the transformation from emerging to mature technologies (at both ends of the pH spectrum) within a decade, rather than the many decades required in the past. All of this has been achieved through the step-wise application of innovation in process design. Admittedly, not all steps were either large nor necessarily in a forward direction, but the intellectual diligence and commercial confidence required to make them has borne substantial fruit.