WISE Uranium Project - ABOUT
(last updated 30 Nov 2025)
Contents:
- online since October 17, 1995 -
(initially as a subsection of the World Information Service on Energy site, and, since June 13, 2005, at the current URL)
Major content of this site includes:
- Facts on the uranium mining and nuclear fuel industry in the world:
- Statistics and Maps: up-to-date statistical data (
) and maps of the world (
) on many aspects of uranium and nuclear fuel - by country,
- Deposits and Mines: detailed information on known uranium deposits and mines, including name, operational status, size, grade, economics (if available) and ownership - by country,
- Conversion, Enrichment, and Fuel Manufacturing plants: nuclear fuel facilities - by country,
- Companies: a list of known uranium mining and exploration companies - by name, partly with links to subsidiaries and project sites,
- Current issues: news (
) concerning uranium mines (separate for planned/operating/former uranium mines, and regulatory issues), and other nuclear fuel facilities - by country: check what's going on near you, see what happens in other parts of the world; returning visitors check the latest news on the News page.
Searches for news topics across countries are possible with the News Filter on the News page, here some example searches:
In addition, these searches can be narrowed down to continents or countries of your choice.
- Annual reviews of current issues and news on uranium mining (discontinued)
- Educational material on uranium mining, nuclear fuel production, and its impacts:
- The Activist's Guide to Uranium Mining
- introductory papers (
) on various aspects,
- detailed texts (
) on uranium radiation properties, toxicity, and radiation exposure,
- slide talks (
/ 
): introductory presentations on a topic, comprised of series of images, mostly with audio comment, with selectable level of detail, with automatic or manual timing,
- online calculators (
): to study
- scientific phenomena, such as the decay and ingrowth of radionuclides in a decay series, neutron activation, alpha-neutron reactions, and the biokinetics (transport and deposition) of ingested or inhaled uranium inside the human body,
- the material flow, energy consumption, and waste arisings of the various stages of nuclear fuel production, including also "exotic" processes, such as tails re-enrichment, and downblending of highly enriched uranium,
- the economics of nuclear fuel production, such as feasibility of uranium mines, cost of once-through vs. recycled nuclear fuel, enrichment cost optimization, depleted uranium value realization by re-enrichment,
and test the impacts of parameter variations.
- Glossary
- Tools for the assessment of the impacts of proposed and existing uranium mines:
- online calculators () for the assessment of
- radiation releases from uranium mine, mill, and tailings sites,
- resulting radiation doses for miners and residents,
- geotechnical stability of tailings deposits,
Where monitoring data is available for a given site, the calculators can help to evaluate the resulting health hazards. Otherwise, the calculators can model those health hazards, based on generic data, combined with site specific data, where available.
In addition, the site covers these loosely connected topics:
Well, quite interesting, but why does it all look so 90's?
- Quite simple: because it is 1990's!
Why isn't it suitable for use with handheld devices?
- Because they had not been invented yet in the 1990's!
Why is it all so text-heavy? Some cat pictures here and there would be nice!
- Ehm, our resident office cat hasn't given permission to use the pictures on the website 😼︎
And, why do so many pages resemble railway timetables?
- Because we do like railway timetables! 🚂︎
In general · About the calculators
- The most ambitious anti-nuclear site is possibly the Wise Uranium Project, whose aim seems to be to give anti-nuclear campaigners all the information they need to attack uranium miners.
Nuclear on the net, by Ted Mole, in: Nuclear Engineering International 
, May 1996, p. 27-29 [no longer online]
- [WISE] Uranium Project: selected "bad news" about uranium (extensive)
IAEA Nuclear Knowledge Management, International Nuclear Information System (INIS) Internet Directory, International Atomic Energy Agency , Aug. 22, 2006 [no longer online]
- An obvious observation is that some of the strongest critics of the industry are, in fact, very well-informed. Indeed, easily the best website on uranium mining throughout the world is run by WISE (World Information Service on Energy), a strongly anti-nuclear organisation.
Public opinion: how do we get it on our side? , by Steve Kidd, in: Nuclear Engineering International, February 2008, p. 12-13
- No. 1 in list of 25 Best Uranium Blogs and Websites in 2025
FeedSpot
- In the absence of government or industry-led recording of incidents and failures, several informal datasets of TSF [tailings storage facility] failures and incidents have developed. One of the most comprehensive records of tailings incidents and failures is the dataset maintained by WISE Uranium (2025).
☞ refers to: Chronology of major tailings dam failures
Capturing the Near Misses Ahead of TSF Failures, by Justin Willis, BHP, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, in: Proceedings of Tailings and Mine Waste 2025 , p.867-880, November 2-5, 2025, Banff, AB, Canada (156MB PDF)
- A test was run to compare the results obtained by a standard radioactive decay and ingrowth calculator available on the Internet (WISE 2000) and a RESRAD-BUILD source containing one curie (3.7E10 Bq) each of Cf-252, Cm-243, Am-243, Pu-242, and Pu-241. [...] The results for each of these radionuclide series were within a 1% error range, probably due to round-off error, except for the Cf-252 series.
RESRAD-BUILD is a computer model for analyzing the radiological doses resulting from the remediation and occupancy of buildings contaminated with radioactive material. The RESRAD-BUILD models were developed and codified by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois.
[Note: the Cf-252 deviation has since been eliminiated by using a more recent nuclide database.]
☞ refers to: Universal Decay Calculator
Verification of RESRAD-BUILD Computer Code, Version 3.1 , March 2003 (1.4MB PDF)
- The Uranium Mill Tailings Cover Calculator, a clone of the RAECOM code (Radiation Attenuation Effectiveness and Cover Optimization with Moisture Effects) was used to calculate radon fluxes. This code is readily available and widely used and can be found at www.wise-uranium.org (last updated July 2, 2004). Umetco attempted to use NRC's 1989 code, but it is no longer compatible with our computer hardware setup. To verify that results would be compatible with those yielded by the NRC code used to perform the September 2003 runs, the Sep-03 RUN 2 was re-run using the cover calculator cited above. As shown in Table B.2, the results were very similar, with the radon fluxes just slightly higher than those yielded using the NRC code.
☞ refers to: Uranium Mill Tailings Cover Calculator
Report amending Final Design and Reclamation Plan for GHP No. 2/Mill Area, Gas Hills, Wyoming Site , Umetco Minerals Corp., Feb. 2006 (10.4MB PDF)
- [Cameco subsidiaries] PRI and Crow Butte generally agreed with the shares of front end nuclear fuel costs for 2006 from the Wise Calculator [...]. AHUG [Ad Hoc Utilities Group] noted that while costs vary by company, the Wise percentages "are generally reasonable," [...].
☞ refers to: Nuclear Fuel Cost Calculator
Uranium From Russia, Investigation No. 731-TA-539--C (Second Review) , Publication 3872, U.S. International Trade Commission, August 2006
- A quick and easy way to determine the Rn [Radon] flux through a soil or multiple-layered cover system can be found on the internet.
☞ refers to: Uranium Mill Tailings Cover Calculator
Cover System Design Guidance and Requirements Document , by Stephen F. Dwyer, Ronald E. Rager, John Hopkins, LA-UR-06-4715, Los Alamos National Laboratory, April 2007 (5.9MB PDF)
- Conversion factors and a useful calculator can be found at www.wise-uranium.org/cunit.html.
☞ refers to: Unit Converter
Volcanogenic Uranium Deposits: Geology, Geochemical Processes, and Criteria for Resource Assessment , by J Thomas Nash, Open-File Report 2010–1001, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia, 2010 (4.6MB PDF)
- For comparison purposes, the same parameters shown in Table 2 were used to estimate the radon emissions [from the proposed Piñon Ridge Mill evaporation ponds] using the on-line program that is available from the World Information Services on Energy (WISE) website, also attributed to the Nielson and Rogers (1986) model. It is not known if or to what degree the on-line program has been independently verified; however, the program produced the same results as generated by the model and scenarios used in this assessment.
☞ refers to: Uranium Mill Tailings Radon Flux Calculator
Evaporation Pond Radon Flux Analysis , Piñon Ridge Mill Project, Montrose County, Colorado, by Steven H. Brown, SENES Consultants Limited, Englewood, Colorado, Aug. 30, 2010 (561kB PDF)
- The total committed effective doses calculated [with WISE Uranium's Uranium Radiation Individual Dose Calculator] for the ingestion or inhalation of uranyl nitrate (soluble) or uranium dioxide (poorly soluble) were very similar to the values given by the IMBA software.
[IMBA is a commercial Internal Dose Calculation Software coming at a price tag of at least GBP 2600 , or at US$ 5000 ]
☞ refers to: Uranium Radiation Individual Dose Calculator [free]
A quantitative comparison of the chemo- and radiotoxicity of uranium at different enrichment grades , by A. Rump., S. Eder, A. Lamkowski, et al., in: Toxicology Letters 313 (2019) 159-168
- The online WISE uranium project has a handy activity calculator for thermal [neutron] activation.
☞ refers to: Neutron Activation Calculator
Info for Experimenters: Experiment Process , Ohio State University Nuclear Reactor Laboratory [boldly shrugging off the calculator's disclaimer...]
- Wise Uranium – Neutron Activation Calculator is widely considered the gold standard for simple to use online NAA [neutron activation analysis] activity calculators.
☞ refers to: Neutron Activation Calculator
A Neutron Activated Sample Activity and Dose Rate Calculator , by Thomas Morrow Valentine Jr., Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, December 2022 (2.28MB PDF)
[emphasis added]
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