Anfield Fires First Underground Blast at Utah Uranium Mine

Anfield Energy has set off its first underground blast in nearly 40 years at the Velvet-Wood uranium and vanadium mine in San Juan County, Utah, a small but concrete milestone in the company’s plan to bring a shuttered Utah uranium mill back into production.

At a glance

• What happened? Anfield Energy completed its first underground blast at Velvet-Wood since the mid-1980s, following a June 2026 blast permit from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
• Where is this? The Velvet-Wood mine sits in San Juan County, in southeastern Utah’s uranium country, part of the same Colorado Plateau district that fueled the 1950s uranium boom.
• What is the bigger plan? Feed ore from Velvet-Wood and a second mine in Colorado into Anfield’s Shootaring Canyon mill, one of only three licensed, permitted, and already-built uranium mills in the country, which the company wants to reopen.

What did Anfield actually do at Velvet-Wood?

Anfield announced that crews rehabilitated the first 700 feet of the mine’s decline, the sloped tunnel that gives underground access, installing rock bolts, wire mesh, ventilation, and utilities before firing the blast. Velvet-Wood last produced uranium and vanadium in 1984, and the Velvet deposit yielded roughly 4 million pounds of U3O8 between 1979 and 1984 under a previous owner.

CEO Corey Dias called the blast “a concrete step in rehabilitating the decline and moving the project toward dewatering of the historic workings.” The company still has to dewater the decline, a process it expects to take about three weeks, followed by two to three more months to clear water from the older underground workings before real development work can resume.

Why does a mill matter more than a mine here?

Utah already has a working example of why mills, not just mines, decide whether a district can produce again. Our Utah state report tracks Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill near Blanding, the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States. Without a working mill nearby, raw uranium ore has nowhere close to go for processing into the yellowcake concentrate that reactors eventually need, a step our uranium glossary entry walks through.

Anfield’s Shootaring Canyon mill, idle for decades but still licensed and structurally intact, is the other piece of Utah’s uranium puzzle. The company describes it as the hub in a hub-and-spoke strategy: Velvet-Wood and a second project, Slick Rock in Colorado, would be the spokes supplying ore, with Shootaring doing the processing. That is a materially different bet than starting a mill from scratch, since permitting and construction are already done. What remains is refurbishment, financing, and proving the mine side can actually deliver ore.

What would it take to reopen the mill?

According to reporting from The Northern Miner, Anfield expects to seek at least $50 million in financing over the coming months to refurbish and reopen Shootaring Canyon, with total mill-related capital costs, including contingency, running higher once a planned vanadium circuit and tailings facility upgrade are included. The company has targeted 2027 for restart in earlier updates, and it has already raised smaller amounts this year, including a roughly $6.9 million public offering, to help fund early project costs.

None of this is a done deal. Anfield still needs to finish dewatering and rehabilitating Velvet-Wood, secure financing well beyond what it has raised so far, and complete the refurbishment work at a mill that has not processed ore in decades. There is no current resource estimate tied to this specific rehabilitation milestone, and a construction decision on the mill upgrades has not been announced.

How does this fit the rest of the domestic uranium push?

The United States has leaned harder on ISR wells for its uranium supply in recent years, the approach our tour covers in Wyoming. A conventional underground mine and mill pairing like Velvet-Wood and Shootaring Canyon is a different, older style of production, one that depends on a decades-old but still-licensed mill rather than new wellfields. If Anfield can dewater the decline, line up financing, and get Shootaring running again, Utah would have a second operating uranium mill alongside White Mesa, adding real domestic processing capacity in a district that has not produced since the 1980s.