On this magical day 50 years ago, Th’ Gaussling was born into the world.  Yes, I am a 9/11 baby and today is L-Day. Remember your Roman numerals?  Once a perfectly respectable though bland day of the year, 9/11 has become the new Pearl Harbor Day. Everybody remembers where the hell they were 9/11/01.  I turned 44 that day. 

To celebrate this day, we decided to do an unusual thing. We went uranium prospecting.  I borrowed a Geiger Counter and we headed up to the mountains near Idaho Springs.  A few weeks back in a chance encounter with a retired hard rock miner, I learned of an old mine that was allegedly dug with the hope of finding uranium. Looking like a thousand other abandoned mines, this mine has been silent for many years. [Sidebar: This fellow didn’t look like Gabby Hayes, though his chums certainly do. Hardrock mining is a tough business.]

Our miner seemed credible. When asked, he did know about pitchblende and other uranium-bearing ore deposits in the area. He said that there used to be a “big operation over that ridge over there” (pointing east). The miner was very cautious about giving too many details. Most people asked him about gold, so his curiosity about me was piqued when I starting drilling into the particulars of uranium.  Mining is a very secretive business. Gold fever is real but other metals will cause this enchantment as well.

So, we pulled along side the narrow dirt road this morning with sample bags and a GM counter.  This model is a survey meter with a thin metal (aluminum) window protecting the GM tube.  So, we could not pick up alpha’s at all and probably very few beta’s- just gamma’s for the most part.  Given the penetrating ability of gamma radiation, with it’s low ionization aptitude, a large fraction of the gamma’s sail through the tube undetected.

At our home along the Front Range of Colorado, the meter will pick up maybe 8-15 counts of background radiation per minute on average. Cosmic rays, solar radiation, and radiation sources from the rock and soil make up the background rate.

Scrambling over the mine tailings, we found sporadic upticks in the count as the detector approached the pile. Overall the detectable radiation was qualitatively 3-5 times the background rate found at home. The counter (which is calibrated) rarely indicated higher than 0.1 MR/hr.  While the mine tunnel was open, I declined to enter, prefering to work on the tailings pile.

While there is clearly radioactive material in the mine tailings, the sum total of the radioactive species seemed quite low.  Of course, I do not know what the situation is with the alpha emitters.  No individual rock was even remotely hot.  The GM tube near the ground was picking up the sum of all the emissions in the area.

It would seem that the miner was partially right about the mine. They might have been digging for uranium, but it would appear that they did not find much of it, given the lack of development and the apparent lack of significant radioactivity in the tailings.