Charles D. Snow, Ivins, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, 21 February 2003 : Saving the Legacy tape no. SL-589

Page 26

harle D. now 21 bnr 200 One morning it was very cold. It was about twenty-five below z r , and th diesel fuel in the tank that Howard Bartlett was working from was cold enough that h noticed that it appeared that he was getting better core recovery because it was freezing the core. A call was made to Denver. Where can we get a refrigeration unit to chill this diesel fuel, and we'll freeze this core? Of course, the refrigeration unit of such capacity was not within the realm of economics or capabilities of the remote area we were in, so the fellow by the name of Charles Spielman says, "Well, I ran into a paper where the Bureau of Mines had chilled diesel fuel with dry ice. We wound up using dry ice to cool the diesel fuel, and we started coring, and starting obtaining excellent recovery, and we froze a lot of core and learned the technique that actually provided the information to carry the project forward. WIN: So you developed a whole new system in order to recover cores and make sure you could then determine what was in the different strata- CHA: The problem was that a lot of the uranium ore at the Gas Hill District was what they called "out of equilibrium." The gamma count didn't always indicate how much uranium it contained. Some times you'd have gamma count, and you'd just be counting some of the isotopes up from the uranium, and the uranium had been moved recently and left behind the daughter elements, so you often were mislead by what you found out. So the coring was in part to get chemical analysis for that determination. WIN: So did Utah Construction pick up the option and retain that property? CHA: Utah did acquire Lucky Me, and in fact, carried forward. We were there through the development stage, and we actually took the samples that were used to help design the mill. To obtain a bulk sample for the mill, we drilled what we called auger holes; 25