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India Finds Uranium In Icy Ladakh

Scientists have for the first time found uranium in 'exceptionally high concentration' in Ladakh, the icy Himalayan region in Jammu and Kashmir that has strategic significance for India.

Samples of rocks analysed in a German laboratory have revealed uranium content to be as high as 5.36 percent compared to around 0.1 percent or less in ores present elsewhere in the country.

India badly needs uranium to fuel its nuclear power plants and the proposed India-US nuclear deal is all about importing it. The Ladakh find may cheer those opposed to the deal even though detailed exploration and mining may take years.

The Ladakh block lies between the Indian plate in the south and the Asian plate in the north and is bounded by the 'Indus and the Shyok suture zones'. Collision between the two plates 50-60 million years ago formed the Himalayas.

The earth's crust that got crushed and melted during collision and pierced the surface, cooled and solidified becoming 'magmatic' rocks dotting what geologists call the Ladakh 'batholith'. It is in these rocks that uranium is found.

'The presently recorded uranium rich zircons from young magmatic intrusions of the Shyok suture zone and associated sequences is the first record from these remote regions,' Rajeev Upadhyay, a geologist at Kumaon University in Nainital, told IANS in an e-mail interview.

'In geological terms, these uranium-bearing magmatic rocks exposed in Ladakh are very young (between 100 million and 25 million years ago),' he said.

Other uranium rich rocks in India such as in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan are very old geological terrains known as the Precambrian (2,500-3,000 million years old), he said.

For his study, reported in the journal Current Science, Upadhyay took samples from thick exposed granite from a place north of Udmaru village in Leh district. The village in the Nubra-Shyok River Valley is situated on a volcanic rock formation known as the Shyok Volcanics.