594
SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER
as
the advance of technology has found alternative uses for coal and oil,
so the march of technology is finding new uses for uranium oxide, and
the frontiers of such new applications, in medicine, for instance, is
again largely a question of price. Nevertheless, so far as the
immediate future of the uranium industry in South Africa is concerned,
it is the changes in the world political situation and in the varying
demands for uranium resulting from changes in the atomic energy
programme in the United Kingdom and elsewhere as well as the increase
in the total world production of uranium, which are the factors of
greatest importance and these have necessitated a considerable
reorganization of the arrangements originally entered into between the
mining industry and the Combined Development Agency. There were
divergencies of immediate interest between the high-cost producers and
the low-cost producers within the industry and differences of immediate
interest between the industry (which desired continuity of production)
and the consumers, who did not wish to be burdened with stocks which
could not be immediately of avail. The contracts were due to expire
between 1964 and 1966; they have been extended until 1970; inside the
industry it was agreed to sell 'quotas' inter se against
payment of royalties and to concentrate production among a smaller
number of mines and of plants. The arrangements arrived at by
consultation were finally announced at the beginning of February 1961:123
Following
on the new arrangements, there will now be seventeen mines supplying
uranium to thirteen treatment plants during the years T961-3. As mines
cease uranium production the number of treatment plants operating will
be reduced. During 1964-5, eleven plants will be operating and in 1966
the number will fall to eight; for the remaining four years, j967-70,
there will be six mines supplying five treatment plants.
Nevertheless,
though the profitability of the South African gold-mining industry is
liable to be affected by the vicissitudes of uranium as a source of
power, the future of South African mining is still primarily a question
of the supply of gold from existing or potential mines. The doom of the
South African mining industry has been so often predicted that it is as
well to close this chapter by pointing out that since the end of the
war, not only has the Orange Free State field been opened up, but three
new mines are in process of being opened up in the Kinross area, to the
east of the present Far East Rand, and that there is no reason to
suppose that the widespread prospecting activities now being carried on
elsewhere will be devoid of success.
123 The announcement appeared in the Press on 3 February 1961.
