For your immediate information, here is my take on the first day of technical sessions at the SME Annual Meeting & Exhibit in Denver. The first obvious conclusion is that the world is not about to run out of energy any time soon. The key note speaker from Peabody Coal assured us that the U.S., with 37 percent of the world’s coal reserves, has enough coal to supply all our energy needs for at least 250 years. At the end of the day in the final session devoted to uranium, the speaker assured us that the U.S. has enough uranium to supply all our energy need for thousands and potentially millions of years. All we need to do is mine the coal and mine the uranium—or at least one of them.

 

All we need are the permits and the willpower. In the case of coal, all we need is the technology to keep the air clean. In the case of nuclear, all we need is for Yucca Mountain or WIPP to take the 15-ft deep, football-sized pile of reactor waste currently with no ultimate disposal place—or of course we could reprocess this stuff, but that is not a mining tchnology so I will not pursue the issue here.

In between these two good news sessions, I listened to speakers from the gravel and quarry pit mining sector. I congratulate them. The quality of their presentations was superb—original, insightful, thoughtful, and relevant.  I recommend reading their papers and accessing their websites. Start on the SME site and follow the links. They too assured us that they can supply U.S. needs for the foreseeable future. One caveat though: their most difficult problem is getting to the resources before the builder of half-million dollar homes get to the land. As one speaker put it: “you got to get to the resource before the houses get there. And don’t worry if you meet half way, expensive homes next to gravel pits are pretty common on the outskirts of Chicago.”  

The bad news about mining came from Canada. Another of those sad and sorry stories about the shortage of people to work the mines. Another of those dreary, repetitive wails about making the mining industry attractive to old people like me, to women like my daughters, to immigrants like me, and to aborigines (the Americans around me that I polled weren’t even sure who he was referring to.) Contrast this with the guys from the West Virginia University who happily brag of record enrollments for their five year degree in both civil and mining engineering. And if you join that course, you get a full scholarship. I liked the get-up-and-go and solve-the-problem attitude. 

Overall good discussions with enthusiastic students, eager suppliers, and talented engineers. I reconnected with the human part that is the best part of mining regardless of whether they heat their homes with oil, gas, ethanol, coal, or nuclear-derived electricity. My only recommendation from the day’s discussions: stop dancing around age and other politically correct categorization.  Pay enough and make study/work conditions conducive to success and lifestyle, and they will come regardless. After all, if these categories are no longer an issue in the U.S. navy, as I am assured they are not (by my son who I acknowledge was born a militaristic optimist) why should the mining industry still bounce them around or bounce around them?