Canada and China work on Thorium Candu Fuel and India May Start Mining 1 million tons of Thorium

From NextBigFuture.com

1. Mining Weekly – India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) would permit private miners to process beach sand and supply monazite tailings to the government-owned Indian Rare Earths Limited (IREL) to increase the latter’s capacity to extract thorium and uranium.

At present, private miners were allowed to extract rare earths from beach sand but not process radioactive monazite, which, under the Atomic Energy Act, was categorised as a ‘prescribed substance’ and the sole domain of the government.

Private miners were forced to stockpile beach sand with monazite content higher than 5% at their own cost or put it back into the mine if monazite content was lower.

According to an official in the Mines Ministry, the DAE proposed to make amendments to the Atomic Energy Act so that beach sand miners could hand over the monazite tailings to IREL for further processing into thorium and possibly uranium, if economically feasible.

The DAE hoped to secure supplies of at least one-million tons of thorium from beach sand processed by private miners, and increase the supply of monazite to IREL.

Data from the Atomic Mineral Directorate for Exploration and Research has shown that India’s monazite reserve was estimated at 10.70-million tons. The province of Andhra Pradesh accounted for the largest reserves estimated at 3.74-million tons, followed by Tamil Nadu with 2.16-million tons, Orissa with 1.85-million tons, Kerala with 1.51-million tons, West Bengal with 1.22-million tons and Bihar with 0.22-million tons.

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