CHEYENNE — Six workers at a Wyoming uranium mine inhaled the radioactive element while cleaning up a spill inside a processing building just days before the mine delivered its first shipment last year, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The workers’ urine tested positive for uranium at close to seven times the federal agency’s permissible level, the federal agency alleges in a Nov. 14 violation notice against Lost Creek LLC ISR, a subsidiary of Littleton-based Ur-Energy.
The spill happened Nov. 28, 2013, at the Lost Creek in-situ uranium mine in south-central Wyoming.
Some 1,500 pounds of yellowcake, a precursor of enriched uranium, surged onto the floor of a processing building while a worker was filling a 55-gallon drum.
The employees involved in the cleanup had no ill effects, and their exposure remained well below the maximum allowable annual limit, Ur-Energy president Wayne Heili said Friday.
The alleged violation ranked in the least severe of the NRC’s four categories of violations.
