Grant L. Shumway, Blanding, Utah, Utah Uranium Oral History Project

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GRANT L. SHUMWAY #1 running the nuclear power plants by 1980, or 1975, the year 1975 will use 37,000 tons of uranium, you see. In other words, almost that amount in that one year the AEC stockpiled for a full twenty years. While they were doing this, they were paying incentive bonuses for the prospector to go out and find these ore bodies and were paying the haulage up to a hundred miles to the mills and so on. Yet they were only able to come up with 50,000 tons of uranium. By 1980 if they don't use--if we don't use it--if we're not able, we as prospectors and mining engineers and geologists and so on, are not able to find a lot more uranium, according to the projections of 1980, all the present known reserves, which is approximately a little over two hundred thousand tons of uranium will be used by 1980. My goodness, this last--well we went to California on our trip to go see the San Onofre plant there, and it was quite interesting to me because I was able to relate the size of the ore bodies that we'd been mining to an electric generating plant, to get an idea of how much ore that it takes to operate one of these nuclear power plants. The big problem holding up a development of the nuclear power plant today, of course, is public ignorance. They just don, t 8