Full text of "Plutonium technology applied to mineral processing, solvent extraction, building Hazen research, 1940-1993 : oral history transcript / 1995"

See other formats

University of California • Berkeley

wrai nistory
The Bancroft Library

university 01

Berkeley, California

Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series

Wayne C. Hazen

PLUTONIUM TECHNOLOGY APPLIED TO MINERAL PROCESSING;
SOLVENT EXTRACTION; BUILDING HAZEN RESEARCH; 1940 TO 1993

With Introductions by

Frank M. Stephens, Jr.

and Joe E. House

Interviews Conducted by

Eleanor Swent

in 1993

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and
clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in
final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Wayne C.
Hazen dated July 22, 1993. The manuscript is thereby made available
for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the
manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Wayne C. Hazen requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Wayne C. Hazen, "Plutonium Technology
Applied to Mineral Processing; Solvent
Extraction; Building Hazen Research; 1940
to 1993," an oral history .conducted in
1993 by Eleanor Swent, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1995.

Copy no.

Wayne C. Hazen, 1994

Cataloging information

HAZEN, Wayne C. (b. 1917) Research metallurgist

Plutonium Technology Applied to Mineral Processing; Solvent Extraction;
Building Hazen Research; 1940 to 1993, 1995, xxii, 199 pp.

Childhood and education in Berkeley: University of California 1940; work
in Nevada mines with father Harold Lewis Hazen; metallurgical research,
Pan American Engineering Co.; research on plutonium production, Los
Alamos, WWII; designing vanadium and uranium processing plants in New
Mexico; Hazen Research, Inc., Golden, Colorado: developing solvent
extraction-electrowinning process, encouraging scientific creativity,
maintaining confidentiality, managing a family business, employee stock
ownership, problems with waste disposal.

Introductions by Frank Stephens, President, Iron Carbide Holdings Ltd.;
and Joe House, Vice President, retired, General Mills.

Interviewed in 1993 by Eleanor Swent for Western Mining in the Twentieth
Century Oral History Series. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS --Wayne Hazen

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION- -by Frank M. Stephens x

INTRODUCTION- -by Joe E. House xii

INTERVIEW HISTORY- -by Eleanor Swent xix

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xxi

I EARLY YEARS, 1917-1940 1

Mother's Family, the Biedenbachs 2

The Melones Mill , 3

Father, Harold Lewis Hazen, and His Family 4

Reworking the Delamar Mine Tailings, Nevada 8

The University of California 18

Professor Joel Hildebrand 19

Other Great Chemistry Professors 20

II WORKING FOR PAN AMERICAN ENGINEERING COMPANY 23

Doing Benchwork on Manganese Recovery 24

Superintendent of the Manganese Plant 26

Problems of Scale-up 28

A Settling Problem in Thickeners 33
Making Manganous Oxide by Direct Reduction of Manganese Dioxide Ore 34

III BATTELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE, 1943-1946 39

A Happy Experience 39

Work in Flotation of Iron Ore 41

IV PROCESS ENGINEER FOR DAY & ZIMMERMAN 43

V PLUTONIUM PRODUCTION RESEARCH AT LOS ALAMOS LABORATORY, 1947-1954 45

More About Grandfather Biedenbach 46

Radiation Hazards and Contamination 49

Production of Plutonium 52

The Production Units 53

Security Regulations 56

Problems of Unaccounted-For Loss 57

VI TRANSFERRING TECHNOLOGY TO MINING 65

The Uranium Boom on the Colorado Plateau 65

Totavi Development Company 69

Jim Lake 72

Openness in the Mining Fraternity 73

Dean McGee 75

Gus Henrickson 77

Separating Vanadium with DEPA 79

A Pilot Plant at Colorado School of Mines Research Foundation 80

Engineering Reality at Shiprock, New Mexico 83

Ion Exchange and Solvent Extraction 85

Reducing Iron and Vanadium: Technical Challenges 86

Transferring Extraction Technology from Vanadium to Uranium 88

Anaconda's Carbonate Leach Plant at Bluewater, New Mexico 88
Introducing Solvent Extraction at the Climax Mill at Grand Junction 91

Joe House of General Mills; New Uses for Amines 91
Kerr-McGee's Ambrosia Lake Plant; the first Major Use of Solvent

Extraction 93

Working with Stearns Roger on Engineering Design 94

Buck Keil Develops a Fluid Bed Reactor 95

Father, H. L. Hazen, Inc., and Edgemont Mining Company 99

An Arrangement with Susquehanna 101

Leaving Kerr-McGee to be Independent; 1961 102

VII HAZEN RESEARCH, INCORPORATED 103

Building the Organization 103

Al Ross, Ken Coyne 105

Maxie Anderson; the Bluebird Mine, Arizona 106

Archer-Daniels-Midland 109

Introduction to Banking Philosophy 110

First National Bank of Golden, Colorado 111

Ethics and Conflict of Interest 112

Working with Maxie Anderson 115

Climax Molybdenum as a Client 117

Financing Research 118

Associations with Gifted People; Paul Kruesi 119

Developing the Cymet Process for Cyprus 121

Development of Iron Carbide 123

Problems with Research Reports 127

Mary Piddock 130

VIII OUTSIDE VENTURES 132

The Apex Germanium Mine 132

Geoco 133

Barnes Engineering Company 134

Hazen-Quinn 135

Metcon 144

IX THE COMPANY ORGANIZATION 148

Forming the ESOP 148

An Operating Management Group 154

Sample Preparation Laboratory in Anchorage 167

The Lowry Landfill 169

Possibilities in High Pressure Extractive Metallurgy 177

Research on Coal 182

TAPE GUIDE 184

APPENDICES 185

A. Patents Issued to Wayne C. Hazen 186

B. Wayne C. Hazen, Selected Papers and Presentations and Resume 189

C. "Solvent Extraction of Uranium at Shiprock, N.M.," by W. C. Hazen

and A. V. Henrickson in Mining Engineering. September 1957 190

D. Biography, Joe E. House 194

INDEX 195

PREFACE

The oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century
documents the lives of leaders in mining, metallurgy, geology, education
in the earth and materials sciences, mining law, and the pertinent
government bodies. The field includes metal, non-metal, and industrial
minerals, but not petroleum.

Mining has changed greatly in this century: in the technology and
technical education; in the organization of corporations; in the
perception of the national strategic importance of minerals; in the labor
movement; and in consideration of health and environmental effects of
mining.

The idea of an oral history series to document these developments in
twentieth century mining had been on the drawing board of the Regional
Oral History Office for more than twenty years. The project finally got
underway on January 25, 1986, when Mrs. Willa Baum, Mr. and Mrs. Philip
Bradley, Professor and Mrs. Douglas Fuerstenau, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford
Heimbucher, Mrs. Donald McLaughlin, and Mr. and Mrs. Langan Swent met at
the Swent home to plan the project, and Professor Fuerstenau agreed to
serve as Principal Investigator.

An advisory committee was selected which included representatives
from the materials science and mineral engineering faculty and a
professor of history of science at the University of California at
Berkeley; a professor emeritus of history from the California Institute
of Technology; and executives of mining companies.

We note with much regret the death of three members of the original
advisory committee, all of whom were very much interested in the project.
Rodman Paul, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of
Technology, sent a hand -written note of encouragement just a few weeks
before his death from cancer. Charles Meyer, Professor Emeritus of
Geology, University of California at Berkeley, was not only an advisor
but was also on the list of people to be interviewed, because of the
significance of his recognition of the importance of plate tectonics in
the genesis of copper deposits. His death in 1987 ended both roles.
Langan Swent delighted in referring to himself as "chief technical
advisor" to the series. He abetted the project from its beginning,
directly with his wise counsel and store of information, and indirectly
by his patience as the oral histories took more and more of his wife's
time and attention. He completed the review of his own oral history
transcript when he was in the hospital just before his death in 1992.

Thanks are due to other members of the advisory committee who have
helped in selecting interviewees, suggesting research topics, and raising
funds.

Unfortunately, by the time the project was organized several of the
original list of interviewees were no longer available and others were in
failing health; therefore, arrangements for interviews were begun even
without established funding.

The project was presented to the San Francisco section of the
American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers
(AIME) on "Old-timers Night," March 10, 1986, when Philip Read Bradley,
Jr., was the speaker. This section and the Southern California section
provided initial funding and organizational sponsorship.

The Northern and Southern California sections of the Woman's
Auxiliary to the AIME (WAAIME), the California Mining Association, and
the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America (MMSA) were early
supporters. Several alumni of the University of California College of
Engineering donated in response to a letter from Professor James Evans,
the chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Mineral
Engineering. Other individual and corporate donors are listed in the
volumes. The project is ongoing, and funds continue to be sought.

Some members of the AIME, WAAIME, and MMSA have been particularly
helpful: Ray Beebe, Katherine Bradley, Henry Colen, Ward Downey, David
Huggins, John Kiely, Noel Kirshenbaum, and Cole McFarland.

The first five interviewees were all born in 1904 or earlier.
Horace Albright, mining lawyer and president of United States Potash
Company, was ninety-six years old when interviewed. Although brief, this
interview will add another dimension to the many publications about a man
known primarily as a conservationist.

James Boyd was director of the industry division of the military
government of Germany after World War II, director of the U.S. Bureau of
Mines, dean of the Colorado School of Mines, vice president of Kennecott
Copper Corporation, president of Copper Range, and executive director of
the National Commission on Materials Policy. He had reviewed the
transcript of his lengthy oral history just before his death in November,
1987. In 1990, he was inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame,
Leadville, Colorado.

Philip Bradley, Jr., mining engineer, was a member of the California
Mining Board for thirty- two years, most of them as chairman. He also
founded the parent organization of the California Mining Association, as
well as the Western Governors Mining Advisory Council. His uncle,
Frederick Worthen Bradley, who figures in the oral history, was in the

Ill

first group inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame, Leadville,
Colorado, in 1988.

Frank McQuiston, metallurgist, vice president of Newmont Mining
Corporation, died before his oral history was complete; thirteen hours of
taped interviews with him were supplemented by three hours with his
friend and associate, Robert Shoemaker.

Gordon Oakeshott, geologist, was president of the National
Association of Geology Teachers and chief of the California Division of
Mines and Geology.

These oral histories establish the framework for the series;
subsequent oral histories amplify the basic themes.

Future researchers will turn to these oral histories to learn how
decisions were made which led to changes in mining engineering education,
corporate structures, and technology, as well as public policy regarding
minerals. In addition, the interviews stimulate the deposit, by
interviewees and others, of a number of documents, photographs, memoirs,
and other materials related to twentieth century mining in the West.
This collection is being added to The Bancroft Library's extensive
holdings .

The Regional Oral History Office is under the direction of Willa
Baum, division head, and under the administrative direction of The
Bancroft Library.

Interviews were conducted by Malca Chall and Eleanor Swent.

Willa K. Baum, Division Head
Regional Oral History Office

Eleanor Swent, Project Director
Western Mining in the Twentieth
Century Series

December 1993

Regional Oral History Office

University of California, Berkeley

Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series
Interviews Completed, April 1995

Horace Albright, Mining Lawyer and Executive. U.S. Potash Company.
U.S. Borax. 1933-1962. 1989

Samuel S. Arentz, Jr., Mining Engineer. Consultant, and Entrepreneur in
Nevada and Utah. 1934-1992. 1993

James Boyd, Minerals and Critical Materials Management: Military

and Government Administrator and Mining Executive. 1941-1987,
1988

Philip Read Bradley, Jr., A Mining Engineer in Alaska. Canada, the

Western United States. Latin America, and Southeast Asia, 1988

Catherine C. Campbell, Ian and Catherine Campbell, Geologists;
Teaching. Government Service. Editing, 1989

William Clark, Reporting on California's Gold Mines for the State
Division of Mines and Geology. 1951-1979. 1993

James T. Curry, Sr., Metallurgist for Empire Star Mine and Newmont
Exploration, 1932-1955; Plant Manager for Calaveras Cement
Company. 1956-1975. 1990

J. Ward Downey, Mining and Construction Engineer, Industrial Management
Consultant. 1936 to the 1990s. 1992

Hedley S. "Pete" Fowler, Mining Engineer in the Americas. India, and
Africa. 1933-1983. 1992

James Mack Gerstley, Executive. U.S. Borax & Chemical Corporation;

Trustee. Pomona College; Civic Leader. San Francisco Asian Art
Museum. 1991

Robert M. Haldeman, Managing Copper Mines in Chile: Braden. CODELCO.
Minerec, Pudahuel; Developing Controlled Bacterial Leaching of
Copper from Sulfide Ores; 1941-1993. 1995

John F. Havard, Mining Engineer and Executive. 1935-1981. 1992

Wayne Hazen, Plutonium Technology Applied to Mineral Processing; Solvent
Extraction; Building Hazen Research; 1940-1993. 1995

George Heikes, Mining Geologist on Four Continents. 1924-1974. 1992

Helen R. Henshaw, Recollections of Life with Paul Henshaw; Latin
America. Homestake Mining Company, 1988

Boaestake Mine Workers. Lead. South Dakota. 1929-1993. Interviews with
Clarence Kravig, Wayne Harford, and Kenneth Kinghorn, 1995

ier c 1-c ar. i 1". r~

. 1935-1974. 1988

Ja»es Jensen, Chemical and Metallurgical Process Engineer : Making

le -teri~i Ixtraciir.g; Zslir.e; ar.i ra~.^ ar.c Heavy Ketals. 1 ? : '. -
1990s. 1993

Arthur I. Johnson, Mining and Metallurgical Engineer in the Black Hills;
Pegmatites and Rare Minerals. 1922 tc the 199CS. 1990

Evan Just, Geologist ; Engineering and Mining Journal. Marshall Plan.

Cyprus yir.es Corporaticr.. and Stanford University. 1922- 19^: , 19^9

Robert Kendall, Mining Borax. Shaft-Freezing in Potash Mines. U.S.
Borax. Inc.. 1954-1988. 1994

e-cff, A life ir. .^ir.ir.z. : Sizeris -- :-a-.rrar. -f Ne-—
Mining Corporation. 1909-1985. 1990

Jaaes and Malcolm McPherson, Brothers in Mining. 1992

Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr., Metallurgist for turnout Mining Ccrporation
and U.S. Atoaic Energy Ccr=ission. 193^-1982. 1989

Gordon B. Oake short, The California Divisior. c: Kir.es ar.d C-eclcg",
1948-1974. 1988

James H. Orr, An Entrepreneur in Minir.z i- N-rtr. zr.-i I-..-.T. America,
1930s to 1990s. 1995

Vincent D. Perry, A Half Century as Mining and Exploration Geologist
with the Anaconda Coapany. 1991

Carl Randolph, Research Manager to President. U.S. Borax fc Chemical
Corporation. 1957-1986. 1992

;--r. f'i'zi, Picr.eer ir. A^liei '?-.'.< Me -r.ar. ics , 5raier. y.ir.e, Chile. 19

1950; St.Josepl L&ai '. '*",*.-'•' '935-"96'- ~-''~-,~~ --~ — • -- *>--Cc
1960-1972. 1993

Joseph Rosenblatt, EIMCO. Pioneer in Underground Mining Machinery and
Process Eouip^nt. 1926-1963. 1992

Eugene David Smith, Working on the Twenty-Mule Team; Laborer to Vice
President, U.S. Borax & Chemical Corporation, 1941-1989.
1993

James V. Thompson, Mining and Metallurgical Engineer; the Philippine

Islands; Dorr. Humphreys, Kaiser Engineers Companies; 1940- 1990s,
1992

Interviews In Process

Norman Cleaveland, Pacific Tin Corporation

Donald Dickey, Oriental Mine

Frank Joklik, Kennecott

Marian Lane, mine doctor's wife

John Livennore, geologist

Mclaughlin Mine, model for resource development

Simon Strauss, Asarco, metals market analyst

Langan Swent, San Luis, Homestake, uranium mining

vii

ADVISORS TO THE SERIES, WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Professor Douglas Fuerstenau, Principal Investigator
Plato Malozemoff Professor, Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of California, Berkeley

Robert R. Beebe

Senior Vice President (retired),

Homestake Mining Company

Mr. Philip R. Bradley

Former Chairman, California State

Mining and Geology Board

Henry Colen

President, San Francisco Mining

Associates

Professor Neville G. Cook
Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley

J. Ward Downey
Engineering and Industrial
Management Consultant

Professor Roger Hahn, Department of
History, University of California,
Berkeley

*Mr. John Havard

Senior Vice President (retired),

Kaiser Engineers, Inc.

Mr. Clifford Heimbucher, C.P.A.
Consultant, Varian Associates, Inc.

Mr. John R. Kiely

Senior Executive Consultant

(retired), Bechtel, Inc.

Noel Kirshenbaum
Manager, Mineral Products
Development, Placer Dome U.S.

Plato Malozemoff

Chairman Emeritus, Newmont Mining

Corporation

Mr. Joseph P. Matoney
Vice President (retired)
Coal, Kaiser Engineers, Inc.

Mrs. Donald H. Mclaughlin
Founder, Save San Francisco Bay
Association

Professor Malcolm McPherson
Massey Professor of Mining
Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University

*Professor Emeritus Charles Meyer,
Department of Geology, University of
California, Berkeley

Professor H. Frank Morrison
Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley

Professor Joseph A. Pask
Department of Materials Science and
Mineral Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley

*Professor Emeritus Rodman Paul,
Department of History, California
Institute of Technology

*Mr. Langan W. Swent

Vice President (retired) , Homestake

Mining Company

* Deceased during the period of the
project

viii

The Regional Oral History Office

would like to express its thanks to the organizations

and individuals whose encouragement and support have made possible

The Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Series.

DONORS TO

THE WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ORAL HISTORY SERIES

1986-1994

Organizations

American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers,
San Francisco, Southern California, and Black Hills Sections

Woman's Auxiliary to the AIME, Southern California and Northern California
Sections

California Mining Association

The Jackling Fund of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Corporations

Bechtel Group Incorporated

Cyprus Amax Minerals Company

Cyprus Minerals Company

Chemical Lime Company

Freeport-McMoRan

EIMCO Process Equipment Company

E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Co., Inc.

Hazen Research, Inc.

Homestake Mining Company

Kennecott Corporation

Krebs Engineers

Magma Copper Company

Newmont Mining Corporation

Phelps Dodge Corporation

United States Borax & Chemical Corporation
Wharf Resources, Limited

Patrons

Bechtel Foundation

James Boyd

Arthur C. Bradley

Catherine C. Campbell

Barbara H. and James T. Curry, Jr.

Donald Dickey

Wayne Dowdey

J. Ward and Alberta P. Downey

James M. Gerstley

Robert M. Haldeman

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

The Hearst Foundation, Inc.

Mrs. Paul C. Henshaw, in memory of

her husband, Paul C. Henshaw
James H. Jensen
Arthur I . Johnson

Arthur H. Kinneberg

Dean A. McGee

Mrs. Frank W. McQuiston, Jr., in

memory of Frank W. McQuiston, Jr.
Gordon B. Oakeshott
Vincent D. Perry
Plato Malozemoff Foundation
Public Resource Foundation
Carl L. Randolph
Joseph Rosenblatt
Berne Schepman
Langan and Eleanor Swent

Individuals

Claude J. Artero

Charles and Lois Barber

Rebecca Bender

Marjorie Bjorlo

Bruce A. Bolt

Clemence DeGraw Jandrey Boyd

James Brown Boyd, Harry Bruce Boyd,
Douglas Cane Boyd, and Hudson
Boyd in memory of James Boyd

Philip and Katherine Bradley

Albert T. Chandler

William B. Clark

Stanley Dempsey

John and Dagmar Dern

Elisabeth L. Egenhoff

Christine Finney

H. S. Pete Fowler

Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fuerstenau

Louis R. Goldsmith

Jayne K. Haldane

Bonnie, Russell, and Steve Harford

Mason L. and Marie J. Hill

Gael Hodgkins

Mrs. Bruce S. Howard, in memory of
Henry Harland Bradley

Lewis L. Huelsdonk

Ruth B. Hume

Howard Janin

Jack M. Jones

Alfred Juhl

Evan Just

Sheila Kelley

James C. Kimble

Noel W. Kirshenbaum

Nancy H. Landwehr

Carl F. Love

Plato Malozemoff

Sylvia C. McLaughlin, in memory of

Jay Kimpston Swent
Frances B. Messinger
L. Arthur Norman, Jr.
Patrick O'Neill
Richard W. Rees
Jane A. Rummel
Richard M. Stewart
Simon D. Strauss
John R. Struthers
Virginia Bradley Sutherland, in

memory of Helen R. Henshaw
James V. Thompson
John J. Trelawney
William I. Watson
Barbara A. Whitton in memory of

William B. Whitton
William B. Whitton

INTRODUCTION- -by Frank M. Stephens, Jr.

I first met Wayne Hazen when he came to work at Battelle Memorial
Institute in 1945. At that time we were neighbors in a war-time housing
development and Wayne was a chain smoker suffering from insomnia which he
tried to cure by playing the piano at all hours of the night, a habit
that did not endear him to the neighbors and led me to wonder what kind
of an irrational character I was becoming associated with.

Although Wayne's stay at Battelle was short, he and I remained in
contact over the years primarily through technical society activities,
and I had the pleasure of watching his technical contributions in the
solvent extraction area become the standards for the uranium and copper
industries.

Somewhere around 1970, Wayne and Hazen Research began to get
involved in fluidized bed roasting studies and I had the privilege of
being asked to help out on a consulting basis. After approximately two
years it became obvious that between Wayne and myself we had gotten Hazen
Research so deeply involved in this activity and in so much trouble that
there was nothing left for me to do but accept full time employment at
Hazen Research. Now the reason for relating this series of events was to
explain that while at the time I believed this to be an isolated case, it
proved to be a way of life for Wayne who consistently found ways of
getting into deeper and deeper technical holes just so he could enjoy
finding a new and novel but suitable way of getting out. In this mode
his staff used to spend hours telling him why he shouldn't do something
before they settled down and helped him do it. Wayne was never
interested in all of the reasons why something couldn't be done, he was
only interested in how to do it.

During my twelve years of working with Wayne at Hazen Research, I
learned to further appreciate his many talents. For example, Wayne
always reviewed the technical reports before they were mailed to the
clients, and he had the uncanny ability to drop a report on the floor and
have it fall open to the page which had the only glaring typographical or
technical error in the entire report. While this saved considerable time
in the normal proofreading schedule it was somewhat annoying to the rest
of the staff.

For those of you who are not insiders, it is probably worthwhile to
introduce you to Wayne's management style. If you were to draw a
management or organization chart for Hazen Research, (something which has
never been done) it would resemble an upside-down pyramid where top
management's sole functions were to offer support to the staff and to pay
the bills. Each year the auditor's report would note that "An
organization so conceived could not long endure." However, Wayne had the

perception to realize that if you wanted creative people to be
productive, you had to assign project responsibility to those people and
not try to micro-manage their research activities. This has resulted in
the excellent reputation Hazen Research has for making significant
improvements in many technical areas, and on occasion, as in the solvent
extraction world, revolutionizing entire industries.

To put things in the proper perspective, while Wayne considers
himself to be a world-wide traveler, his basic interest is his technical
activities. Because of this when Wayne decides to travel, he seldom gets
more than five hours from his starting point before he wants to know when
he can go home. It makes no difference if the Appian Way, the Khyber
Pass, or Mount Everest is just around the corner, Wayne would rather be
back in the office making sure that research quality is not being
sacrificed for quantity.

For those of us who have had the privilege of knowing Wayne Hazen
and the opportunity to work with him, probably his most outstanding trait
is his faith in the future and in the ability of mankind to solve
problems. In this respect he is a believer in the old "necessity is the
mother of invention," even to the point where it is justified to create
the necessity by pointing out how much better something could be if only
someone would take a new approach to a problem rather than being
satisfied with an almost good enough existing answer.

After knowing and working with Wayne for almost fifty years I still
wonder if my first impression may have been correct: i.e., is the world
really ready for an individual with these obviously irrational talents?
Apparently the answer is a definite yes.

Frank M. Stephens, Jr., President
Iron Carbide Holdings, Ltd.

December 1994
Lakewood, Colorado

xii

INTRODUCTION- -by Joe E. House

This introduction to the oral history of Wayne C. Hazen is similar
to the 'jacket piece' for a book. Since it is the editorial policy of
the Regional Oral History Office not to disclose the details of the text
of the oral history to the introducer, my comments concentrate on the
personality of Wayne Hazen as they relate to his contributions and
achievements. Although I surmise that the contents of the oral history
provide glimpses of Wayne's personality, I hope that my comments will add
yet another layer to the understanding and appreciation of the person.

I have often questioned the genesis of the chemistry of the personal
and professional relationship which exists between Wayne and me. An even
greater mystery is, how and why has this relationship lasted for almost
forty years; why is it that each time we meet, the relationship seems to
be yet another adventure? I expect other professional friends and
associates who know both Wayne and me are equally puzzled.

I first met Wayne in the fall of 1956 in a make-shift laboratory
located in a warehouse district in the vicinity of Stapelton Field in
Denver, Colorado. He and a staff of three, Gus Henrickson, Dr. Mayor
Goren and a Mr. Mitchell, were employees of Kerr-McGee. Wayne and Gus
had just commissioned a Kerr-McGee uranium plant at Shiprock, New Mexico,
based on the newly emerging technology of solvent extraction. I was
fresh out of academia, and a six-month employee of General Mills
Chemical, a division of Betty Crocker's company, General Mills. I
believe that Wayne's curiosity about how and why a food company was
interested in the recovery of uranium was the principal reason he agreed
to spend any time with me. Writer Samuel Johnson once said, "Curiosity
is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous
intellect." The "Johnson equation' is and has always been Wayne's
hallmark. Any and all things new or unusual in all realms of life
energize and excite Wayne's imaginative curiosity. His wide variety of
vocational achievements and endeavors, hobbies and recreational
activities are a product of his adventitious curiosity.

Wayne's curiosity is a propellant for his animated and exciting
responses to new ideas and challenges. When he has been launched, all
that one can do is to stand back and listen. He is not stopped by
comments, questions or corrections. He stops only to ask the listener (s)
what he has really said. Fiction, facts, legends, myths and hypotheses
flow in a descriptive and entertaining manner. Now comes the challenge!
Among all Wayne's verbiage, there are gems which merit detailed
examination. Wayne needs and expects help from his listener to separate
and define the facts and the fiction. I believe that he recognized this
fact very early in his professional career, and answered this need by
allying himself with the great Gus Henrickson who was a master at sorting

xiii

through the list, picking that one idea out of a hundred, and distilling
it in a way that would not only cause Wayne to listen, but also keep
Wayne focused in the direction necessary to further evaluate the merit of
the idea. Wayne requires space for his creative imagination to work and
a talented and well-trained group of listeners to define the limits and
keep him focused. One of Wayne's greatest talents is his ability to
select his listeners for the times at hand. Times change and so have
Wayne's listeners. This fact has helped keep Wayne current in his
thinking through the years and helps to explain why his influence is so
deep and far-reaching.

Some similarities in our backgrounds have enabled us to penetrate
our professional shells. We both had some of the same educational
backgrounds in the field of chemistry in the California systems, and this
gave us a common bond. We first became acquainted when we were both
concentrating our efforts on the introduction of new chemical
applications for mineral processing. Chemistry has been and continues to
be the bond that formed and nurtures both our personal and professional
relationships. The management and staff of the mining companies in 1956
were dominated by mining and metallurgical engineers, and a few
analytical chemists. We seemed to be able to agree very early on about
the approaches and methods to use to tell and sell our "chem-met" story
to our own management and about the potential new users of this new
technology. We hybridized a language to help narrow the gap which
existed between the disciplines of chemistry and metallurgy. Although
General Mills owned the tradename, "LIX reagents" (liquid ion exchange),
Wayne never missed an opportunity to use and to publicize the LIX word.
He called LIX the Coca-Cola of the mining and metals world.

Looking back, we both were employees of corporations which had a
keen appreciation for the role of research and did not impose a
predetermined view of what the outcome should be. Wayne and I were able
to exchange ideas, needs and approaches to solving problems more freely
than is practiced in 1995. Initially, Wayne needed new chemical reagents
for new applications in the recovery of metals. I needed a source to
evaluate and engineer applications for newly synthesized reagents for a
newly emerging technology called solvent extraction. Both of our needs
were first met on a large scale when Wayne convinced Kerr-McGee that the
world's largest uranium mill should use General Mills' new amine reagent.
Wayne has always been willing to take a calculated risk on new
technologies and ventures based on data obtained through scientific
research. He took a risk not only with a new technology, but also with a
new reagent produced by a food company. The risks paid off for both
parties as the uranium mill set new world-wide technical and economic
standards and helped to launch the uranium industry into the area of
private enterprise.

xiv

Wayne's excitement about this new venture exceeded that exhibited by
either the Kerr-McGee or General Mills management. Wayne's manifest
excitement about the new is contagious and is a major factor in the
adaptation and propagation of new technologies. He is a master of
proclaiming the new!

The success of Kerr-McGee's new uranium mills in Grants, New Mexico,
propelled both General Mills Chemical and Kerr-McGee into new arenas and
cast the personnel associated with the success to leadership roles in the
new technology of solvent extraction. Armed with success, confidence,
support from management, and encouragements from professional colleagues
(even a few academics showed interest) we initiated new efforts. Before
the Kerr-McGee uranium mill was commissioned, Wayne had lots of new ideas
about what other metals could be extracted by the development of new
chemical reagents yet to be synthesized. His imaginative new approaches
were a major influence on the direction of our research program. It is
beyond the scope of this introduction to identify all the many successful
new applications which Wayne commercialized using new reagents
synthesized by General Mills.

We both were so convinced that the future of this new solvent
extraction technology had the potential of completely revolutionizing the
metals recovery industry that we decided to present a jointly authored
paper at a meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Engineering
meeting in Salt Lake City in 1966. We titled the paper, "Chemical
Smelters." Armed with new reagents, even one for copper, Wayne presented
the paper with his usual fervor and conviction. What a mistake this
turned out to be. We had failed to recognize that our audience consisted
of many Kennecott Copper employees, and that an approval for a new
extension for their smelter's smoke stack had just been obtained. We
were pelted with questions and comments from the director of research on
down. Wayne turned many of the chemical questions over to me for
answering, but there were no satisfactory answers possible for that
audience. Wayne and I left for Denver immediately after the paper. What
a horrible and untimely title! Within weeks of the presentations both
words 'chemical' and 'smelter' became targets for the environmentalists
and they had the support of a very vocal and hostile press. Reflecting
on this incident prompts laughter and yet gives some credence to the
prophecies of this paper. In 1995 we are witnessing more and more
successful uses of 'chemical smelters' in both primary and secondary
recoveries of many metals, and 'chemical smelters' are providing the
answers for some of today's recycling and environmental problems.

The expansion of facilities and personnel, and new strategic
business and marketing plans followed the commercial successes of the new
solvent extraction technology. Competitors took notice and acted to
participate in the growth of this new field. Wayne changed from an
employee of a large corporation to the owner and manager of Hazen

Research, a research laboratory selling contract research to all types of
businesses. General Mills Chemical established a separate business unit
to be in a position to grow with the new technologies. Both of these
transitions took place over a few years, but during the transition,
Wayne's interest in the copper extraction business intensified and he
began to accumulate his own research data. The size, structure, and
charter of the two groups precluded the free exchange of information
which existed during the early stages. But Wayne and I kept in close
contact because we understood the needs and directions of not only our
own companies, but also of the industry which was changing. We respected
each others' new charters to meet these needs. This is illustrated by
the fact that Wayne accepted my invitation to meet with some of the top
management of General Mills to discuss the significance of the copper
extraction development and explore how General Mills could best
capitalize on this research break-through. Wayne accepted and came to
Minneapolis for the meeting. Two members of the board of directors of
General Mills and several executives gathered in the corporation's board
room for the presentation. Wayne's opening comments to the group
illustrate his forthrightness. He is never prone to tell any audience
what he thinks they want to hear if in any way he does not think that the
facts support the desires and intentions of the audience. He startled me
and all in attendance by his opening statement to the effect that,

... no one in the room can imagine the significance and
ramifications of this development, and what it means to the world's
copper industries now and in the future. Therefore, I am not going
to spend any time trying to convince you that this is a significant
development which is destined to change the future of the copper
industry. Rather than do that, I want to discuss just one topic
with you and that is, why General Mills should buy a copper
producing company or a copper ore deposit. That is the only way
that you will realize the maximum profit from this development . . .

Now if you don't think that was a shocker for a group of food
company executives to hear! Wayne suggested that they should become
miners and marketers of copper. The meeting lasted less than thirty
minutes. Wayne handed me a folder just before he boarded the plane for
Denver and said something to the effect of "this is the information which
I was going to review at the meeting, but this is just a rehash of what
we all know about the development. I thought that what that group of
executives really needed was a new challenge." Nothing excites Wayne
like a new challenge and his greatest pleasure is to present others with
new challenges. Some are true possibilities, others require a Gus
Henrickson examination, and an understanding of Wayne's bare-facts
approach which might be interpreted by some as bold bluntness.

Wayne and I have not always agreed on all matters, and we have told
each other why we do not agree, but I do not believe that we have ever

xvi

been guilty of not respecting each other's point of view. As previously
suggested, we became competitors in an unavoidable way. General Mills'
potential customers employed Hazen Research to confirm General Mills'
data and /or evaluate a competitor's product for a specific commercial
use. The nature of research contracts paid for by clients precluded an
exchange of information. This was a very difficult situation for Wayne
to handle because he thought that he was violating my trust in him and
that there was a conflict of interest. To some degree we both were
caught in a vortex of growth that neither knew how to handle. But
neither ever put the other one in a position where it called for a
sacrifice of either personal or professional integrity. Wayne's
leadership of Hazen Research through the years testifies to the fact that
he is a professional of the highest integrity.

I am sure that the oral history covers Hazen 's role in the
development of the data for the designing and engineering of the world's
first commercial copper plant based on the new technology of solvent
extraction-electrowinning. This historically important plant, built by
the late and famous balloonist, Maxie Anderson, at the Bluebird mine in
Arizona is an example of both the working of competitive forces and my
disagreement with Wayne's interpretations of 'what really happened.' To
be absolutely sure, Hazen Research played a major role in building the
Bluebird mill for Ranchers Development, but it did not play the sole
role. Maxie 's first and keen interest in the technology came from his
visit to two pilot plants built by the sponsorship of General Mills at
Baghdad Copper and Duval. The data owned jointly by the two mining
companies and General Mills were reviewed by Maxie and his consultant, Al
Ross. Based on their observations and review of the data, they engaged
Hazen to confirm the data and develop the data for the design and
engineering of a new mill. The picture became more complicated when
another company, Archer Daniels Midland, introduced a new reagent for the
recovery of copper which had been evaluated by Hazen Research. Thus
Hazen Research found itself evaluating two different suppliers' reagents
for the same application. This really was a problem for Wayne, and we
mutually agreed that all discussions about Ranchers' new mill would be
conducted through the company engaged to build the mill. That company,
Bechtel, then became the clearing house. The Bluebird mill was built and
commissioned with Hazen Research providing the design data, General Mills
providing the chemical data, and Bechtel providing the engineering and
construction.

The world's first solvent extraction-electrowinning plant was a
howling success. All participating companies shared in the success and
all were launched into a new era for the recovery of copper. Copper
producers from around the world visited the plant and most of these
visitors also toured through Hazen Research. The new and revolutionary
nature of the technology was broadly acknowledged. Wayne's predictions
made in the General Mills board room that, "... this is a significant

XVX1

development which is destined to change the future of the copper industry
..." has not only proven to be accurate, but understated. The
following quote from Maxie's speech given at the dedication of the
Bluebird mill, January 24, 1969 has also proven to be true for Hazen
Research:

Not often does a small company have the opportunity to change the
course of an industry and add to a new technology.

The experiences of the Bluebird mill were great learning experiences
for all, but I believe that Wayne profited the most both professionally
and personally. He was able to structure a more disciplined approach to
do jointly sponsored research projects. He discovered that he was able
to put into practice methods that utilize his visionary talents and still
do research by contract.

Wayne is an outstanding speaker, although he will only avail himself
of such if "the audience and theme are special and unique," a direct
quote from Wayne to my request for him to give the opening address to the
International Solvent Extraction meeting in Denver in 1983. Wayne agreed
that the meeting met all of his criteria for delivering an address, and
he did just that. That must have been during one of Wayne's "blue sky
periods' because his address to that international audience was among the
most stimulating and creative speeches which I have heard. The only
other speech in that category was one given by the late and great
metallurgist, Anthony Gaudin, titled, "Mineral Processing on the Moon."
The main difference in the speeches was Gaudin 's was published, Wayne's
was extemporaneous, only guided by a brief outline. There were enough
new ideas and topics presented to have kept Gus Henrickson busy for some
time.

The growth of the solvent extraction technology in southern Africa
was faster and more extensive than it was in either North or South
America. Wayne and his wife joined me and my wife and Dr. and Mrs.
William Dresher, of the International Copper Association, Ltd., on a tour
of the mining industries in Zambia and South Africa. The world's largest
solvent extraction plant for the recovery of copper at Nachanga mine of
Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines was in operation, and next to this
plant, copper was still being refined using charcoal produced and sold by
the natives in small burlap bags stacked along the roads. The contrast
in technologies stunned Wayne and even silenced him. The experience in
Zambia was followed by contrasting experiences in South Africa, where
technologies for both mining and metals recovery were even more advanced
that those in the U.S. He was so impressed with their approach to
research that he invited a leading researcher in South Africa to come to
the U.S. to consider accepting the job of director of research for Hazen
Research. Although the offer never became a reality, Wayne's horizons
were stretched and strengthened by this experience.

xviii

Not all of our time spent together has been just for business
purposes. We, along with our spouses, spent several days at a game
reserve in Zambia. Although it was a bit difficult to keep Wayne
confined to a Landrover during the tours, his keen insight and
entertaining questions complemented the viewing of the wildlife.
Impromptu picnics at the Hazen mountain retreat, listening to his
rendition of a Chopin etude in his living room, or reviews of his trips
to the Himalayas, or his sharing of experiences piloting his airplane are
all shared and cherished memories. They testify to his broad interests,
energy level, and intellectual capacities and adventurous spirit.

My latest personal contact with Wayne was in Denver, March 7, 1995.
The occasion was a reception hosted by Hazen Research for friends and
associates of Hazen Research to celebrate the recent announcement of the
appointment of Wayne's son W. W. (Nick) Hazen, as the new chairman of the
board of Hazen Research, Inc. I met Wayne and his wife in the lobby of
the hotel and walked into the reception with them. On the way in, Wayne
told me that we would have to cover lots of ground fast because he and
Norma were going to the opera that evening to hear "Tosca" and that they
would be leaving the reception in less than an hour. How typical this is
of the man Wayne C. Hazen. He had already celebrated Nick's appointment
and was anxious to move on to the next event — an opera, yet another drama
in his life.

Joe E. House, Vice President (retired)
General Mills

March 1995
Minnetonka, Minnesota

xix

INTERVIEW HISTORY- -by Eleanor Swent

Wayne Hazen was invited to participate in the oral history series on
Western Mining in the Twentieth Century because of his pre-eminent
position in metallurgical research. His development of the solvent
extraction-electro-winning process is a major landmark in the history of
man's attempts to convert ores into useful metal. His research facility
in Golden, Colorado, is consulted by clients from all the world who want
reliable help in solving chemical and metallurgical problems. His
clients have included processers of fertilizer, grains, and all kinds of
waste as well as mining companies.

Wayne Hazen1 s oral history also tells how a successful business was
developed by a scientist who wanted to combine creativity with
entrepreneurship. I learned more of this when he took me on a tour of
the plant in Golden, Colorado, where the layout of the laboratories is
planned to foster individual accomplishment along with a lot of
interaction and cross-fertilization of ideas with other scientists.

Although our paths had crossed many times, I had never actually met
Wayne Hazen until we began work on his oral history. I took advantage of
being in Golden in 1991 and called on him at his office. The one-story
facility is modest in appearance, but very attractive. The decor
features examples of Wayne Hazen 's photographic skills: beautiful
flowers; aerial views of Southwestern mesas and mountains taken from his
own plane; scenes from his trekking holidays in Nepal, Zimbabwe, and the
Andes.

I told him of our series and invited him to participate. At first
he was ambivalent because of his own modesty and the investment of time
it would take, but once he agreed, he was a willing and cooperative
interviewee. The invitation letter was sent to him in November 1991. He
came to Berkeley for the first interviews on 22 and 23 July 1993.

We breakfasted together at his hotel on the Berkeley Marina and he
recalled sailing on the bay with his grandfather Charles Biedenbach,
University of California, B.A. 1886, M.A. 1894, longtime principal of
Berkeley High School. As we drove to the campus he pointed out places
where he has family connections since most of his relatives attended the
University. He recognized various buildings where he had lived and
studied during his own college years in the late 1930s (he received his
B. Sc. in chemistry in 1940). He told me that the tree-shaded esplanade
above The Bancroft Library was planned by his uncle Carl F. Biedbenbach
who attended the College of Agriculture in 1911-12.

Wayne Hazen skis and hikes, flies planes and helicopters, actively
manages research work of his company, and is imaginative and articulate.
He came to the interviews, which were held in a conference room at The
Bancroft Library, with a few notes in his hand to supplement a head

crammed with well-organized ideas. As the interview progressed it became
somewhat like putting together a jigsaw puzzle; he seemed to delight in
perceiving connections and themes in the progression of his career. I
suppose this is the same thought pattern that made him successful in
scientific research. Although I had known personally the Ambrosia Lake
period which he discussed in the interview, at the time I had been
unaware of the technological revolution which he sparked by pioneering
use of solvent extraction at the Kerr-McGee uranium mill. It was a
pleasure for me to recall and learn more about those exciting days. He
returned to Berkeley for a final day of interviewing on September 13.

In the summer of 1994 I was in Golden at a meeting of the Mining
History Association, and had the privilege of touring the Hazen Research
facility. We saw small but open laboratory areas where scientists use
computers and test tubes to deal with concepts, as well as larger shops
and outdoor patios where pilot plants of many kinds are built and
operated. Equipment is stored, redesigned, and recycled. There was a
feeling of informality but also of focused activity. Workers from
scientists to fork lift operators greeted Wayne by his first name; he
returned some greetings in Spanish. At this time we looked at many fine
photos and selected a few to include in the volume.

I was also treated to a tour of the extensive and beautiful garden
which his wife Norma manages at their nearby home, and then lunch at a
country club with a beautiful view of foothills and fairways.

Two colleagues wrote introductions for the Hazen oral history.
Frank Stephens, an expert in fluid-bed roasting, was a colleague in
research at the Battelle Memorial Institute, later became a partner in
Hazen Research, and then established his own business, Iron Carbide
Holdings. He is one of many in Wayne Hazen1 s corps of "alumni". Joe
House, retired vice president of General Mills, used Hazen 's research to
propel the food processing industry in an entirely new direction. These
introducers attest that Hazen 's wide influence has been not only
technological but personal.

When the transcript was sent to him for review, Wayne returned it
promptly with few corrections. He also went the second mile and worked
on the index. This was particularly welcome because of the complexity of
the technical terms and concepts. The tapes of the interviews are
deposited at The Bancroft Library.

Eleanor Swent
Interviewer /Editor

February 1995

Regional Oral History Office

The Bancroft Library

University of California, Berkeley

xxi

Regional Oral History Office University of California

Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)

Your full name /A/^y/]//^ (^ & J-. ft V

Date of birth 3~U AJ £ fO. / ¥ / 7 Birthplace

Father's full name //>gyft?£D LFuS/S /V/^Z *F

Occupation /^£TA-LLURd.(cAU ^rfG. Birthplace //I/ /f t) A/. 5".

Mother's full name /4/W//4 L/Fsrrt- fi / & 1> &*/ £A<^ f~/ /S/± Z.
Occupation %J//=~/= <g SM 0 ?~ f^j^A Birthplace '#£fl K £ L E V ^

Your spouse A/<^A M /? /T^ /? A/ C //^? <T ^X/

Occupation ^^xr g7 /^7^ ~A//T/^ Birthplace

Your children £.£/?/ r? ^ &~ ft l«/AY,\f (? uJ.ftffc^} *.£"{= C^L /J
V Z xi ^ /?X? /? X?

Occupation(s) I// e, £

Areas of expertise

Other interests or activities

Organizations in which you are active / <Z, i^

T
Where did you grow up? ^^r? ft p^ ^ y /tf^Co#'&S> C/)t-fs= ^ J?£*~ /t si( & ^

Present conununity_

Educa t ion '/•?£>? r^ f£ i. £ y /-t I ..

xxii

HAZEN, WAYNE COLBY

Office;

Home:

Chairman of the Board
Hazen Research, Inc.
4601 Indiana Street
Golden, CO 80403
(303-279-4501

3993 Eaton Street
Denver, CO 80212

Born:

June 10, 1917, Berkeley, CA

1940

BS Chemistry, University of California

1983-date

1961-1983
1954-1961

1946-1953

1943-1945
1940-1942

Hazen Research, Inc., Golden, CO, Chairman of the

Board

Hazen Research, Inc., Golden, CO, President
Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Golden, CO, Director of

Metallurgical Laboratories
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM,

Director of Plutonium Processing Research and

Development
Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio,

Research Engineer
Manganese Ore Co., Henderson, NV, Technical

Superintendent; Pan American Engineering Co.,

Berkeley, CA; Research Chemist

Member: Fellow, SME of AIME; American Chemical Society;

Sigma Xi; CIM; Registered Professional Engineer, CO

9/83

• MMSA

I EARLY YEARS, 1917-1940

[Interview 1: July 22, 1992] II1

Hazen: I suppose a good place to start is with some of my boyhood

recollections having to do with my first acquaintance with mining
and mining related activities.

Swent: What was your first experience with mining?

Hazen: It was at Melones, California. I was born in Berkeley in 1917, and
when I was about three years old the family moved to Melones. I
think Melones is underwater now; I think there's a Melones Dam
there. Dad was the superintendent of the cyanide plant owned by a
company called Hamilton, Beauchamp, and Woodworth. Have you heard
of that name?

Swent: I knew Selim Woodworth quite well.

Hazen: Well, Hamilton was E. M. Hamilton who was an early cyanidation

expert, a British citizen, I believe. As a matter of fact, I have
in my files E. M. Hamilton's book, signed with a notation to Dad
from him.

Swent: What was your father's name?

Hazen: Harold Lewis; he was known as Lew Hazen.

ended.

This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.

Mother's Family, the Biedenbachs

Hazen: Going back a little bit farther, my grandfather on my mother's side
was Charles L. Biedenbach, with the "L" standing for Louis. When
my brother was born, he was named Charles L. Hazen. Both families
thought the "L" stood for Louis (Lewis), spelled in accordance with
their own family history. [laughter]

We might speak a moment about my grandfather on Mother's side,
C. L. Biedenbach, who was born in San Francisco. His parents had
come around the Horn in a sailing ship, fleeing as refugees from
one of the oppressions in Prussia, and had landed in San Francisco
and started a small store. I believe it was a grocery store. My
grandfather and his siblings were born in San Francisco and raised
there. He grew up and moved to Oakland and eventually to Berkeley.

Pop, as my grandfather was known, was a very close friend of
mine. He was an early educator and also an early member of the
Sierra Club and so forth. He was the principal of Berkeley High
School for a long, long time. He was a widower at the time I was
going to high school, and he and I used to be very good friends.
Together, with his money and my energy, we had a small boat,
fourteen-foot sailboat, in Richmond. We used to go sailing on
Saturdays and sometimes even on schooldays in San Francisco Bay.

Swent: You said he graduated from UC also?

Hazen: Yes. I guess I don't know when it would have been, but since Dad
and Mother graduated in 1912 or 1913, we can go back maybe twenty-
five years.

Swent: Your parents must have been born about 1890 or so?
Hazen: Yes, that's right.

Swent: Your grandfather must have graduated from the University possibly
in the 1880s.

Hazen: I would think that would be right. I think he was the editor of

whatever the school paper was at that time. I remember his saying,
"I think that I knew all of the students on the campus by their
first names."

His wife was Lulu Colby, so that's where the family name Colby
comes from. He was very important in my life at various times.

Swent: It must have given you a lot of prestige, to be the grandson of the
principal of the high school.

Hazen: I don't think prestige is the word that I would use. The other
students felt that whatever good grades I got were obviously
because of this association. At that time I was living with him,
because my folks were out in Nevada during my high school years. I
used to ride to school with him in the morning to a certain number
of jeers and taunts from the other students.

When my grandfather retired I think he was perhaps seventy.
Elizabeth Cordes, who had been his secretary for many years, was a
relatively young lady, although from my vantage point she seemed
pretty old. I think she was maybe forty at the time, and she and
my grandfather were married at the time he retired. The rest of
his life was really wonderful, because Elizabeth was hale and
hearty and cared very much for him. They used to travel all
around. As a matter of fact, Elizabeth then became the only
grandmother I ever knew, although my first acquaintance with her
had been when she was the secretary at the school. They had a
wonderful life together, and she was a very good grandmother. I
think she died only last year.

We lived at 40 Hillcrest Road in Berkeley, which is not very
far from here, off Claremont Avenue.

The Melones Mill

Swent : You were at Melones first.

Hazen: As a very small boy I used to occasionally go down to visit Dad in
the mill at Melones. Over a history of half a century or so, it's
possible to make some rather startling comparisons about then and
now. In thinking about the early days of Melones, I remembered
going down to see Dad in the cyanide plant and passing the great
compressors, which had big, wide, flat belts and no guards around
the belts. I remember walking between the cyanide tanks and then
up on top of the thickeners, where things were pretty casual.
People would be doing titrations for cyanide, using mouth pipettes
to suck the cyanide solutions up. I think how different things are
now. I don't feel that that was necessarily a very good way to do.
Nevertheless, I think that much of the danger that's attributed to
the mining industry is vastly overblown. I might be hard-put to
think of any particular dangerous thing that happened to people in
the plants. There were always problems in mining, with rock falls
and so forth.

Swent: These things were terribly hazardous, but people knew they were
hazardous .

Hazen: That's right. In any event, it was a wonderful boyhood. I felt at
the time that it was a great way to live. It was a very small
camp, and our neighbors were miners from what is now Eastern
Europe, I think Yugoslavs. I still remember some of the names of
my boyhood companions: Rosco and Bayboy Jaitch. I wouldn't know
how to spell "Jaitch."

Swent: They were mining gold?

Hazen: Yes. They worked in the mines.

Every summer we used to see off in the horizon, or even closer
by at times, giant forest fires. There wasn't any particular
effort made at that time to attempt to control them. Well, they
had no way to control them, and I suppose nature was doing its
thing.

So I remember feeling [about mining], "Gee, this is kind of
neat," and it would be kind of fun to do when I grew up.

Swent: Your father had graduated from UC Berkeley in mining?

Hazen: No, metallurgy. Mother was a graduate here also, as was my

brother, Charlie. My uncle, Carl F. Biedenbach, was a landscape
architect and had done a lot of work on the grounds of the
Claremont Hotel. He had built some residences on Fish Ranch Road
by the Claremont and also had done a lot of architectural work—is
there a school for the blind nearby?

Swent: Yes, there was; it is now the Clark Kerr Campus of UC.

Hazen: He did lots of landscaping for that, and then I think particularly
the plane trees around the campanile were part of what he was
involved with as a landscape architect.

Most of the people I can remember in my family were UC
Berkeley graduates.

Father, Harold Lewis Hazen, and His Family

Swent: Was your father born in California?

Hazen: No, that's a different story. Dad's background was from early
Dutch ancestry in the early 1800s who came over. The name was
originally spelled Hassen. With the immigration from Holland, they
changed the name when they came here to Hazen. There had been a

gradual migration through generations. Dad's father was a banker
in Huron, South Dakota, so Dad grew up there. The family moved
from Huron—the banking business didn't turn out to be all that
great—to Monrovia, California. I've forgotten what they did.

He's told me about the train ride from Huron to Monrovia,
which apparently was pretty arduous, describing the fact that they
sometimes had to stop to let the buffalo herds cross the tracks.
It doesn't seem all that long ago to me, because I can remember my
dad talking about it, but when I stop outside of Denver, they have
a herd of buffalo as curiosities. My recollections of my father
are pretty clear, and my grandfather, and it doesn't seem all that
long ago to me. These changes and the implication for mining, too,
have certainly been sweeping. I consider that much of this change
will result in the gradual disappearance in the United States of a
lot of mining activities, probably most of the base metals. I
wouldn't expect to see big new porphyry copper deposits opened up
here.

Swent: It is nearly impossible now.

Hazen: Yes. I don't think I want to say whether it's good or bad; it's
just that that is the way things have gone. I think we've had
substantial changes in the society in other ways, and they have
their impact on mining.

Swent: What did your mother study at the university?

Hazen: She studied biology. She didn't ever get to practice it, because
they were married in 1914, fresh out of college, and Dad went to
work as a smelter metallurgist at Selby Smelter for AS&R.

Swent: Oh, yes. AS&R [American Smelting and Refining] is now ASARCO.

What was your mother's name?
Hazen: Anna Vesta Biedenbach.

Swent: Do you recall your dad mentioning any hazards or pollution or toxic
materials?

Hazen: I think they weren't called by those names.
Swent: No, but was there an awareness?

Hazen: Oh, sure, there was certainly an awareness and an awareness of
danger. They were always very safety conscious, but safety
consciousness then didn't have, for one thing, the depth of

knowledge of the hazard that could be associated in a lead smelter
with lead fumes.

Swent: Did your father have any ill effects, for instance?

Hazen: Dad died of cancer in 1966, and he was always a very healthy guy up
until then. Come to think about it, he was a Christian Scientist.
His mother was actually a Christian Science practitioner, so he
grew up with an atmosphere which said that nature does a pretty
good job; let's go along with what nature is doing. He didn't
carry it to a point of ignoring things which obviously required
medical attention, but his basic view of life and health was that
nature does a pretty good job as long as you do your part.

I have a very considerable feeling of affection, fondness,
reverence for my dad. He was a man of impeccable moral stature.
As a matter of fact, it was sometimes troubling. He just never had
any trouble at all telling the difference between right and wrong.
He wasn't ever troubled by many of the things that troubled
succeeding generations. He had certain simple-minded principles
that he lived by.

Swent: Very clear?

Hazen: Very clear. He didn't believe in drinking. He didn't believe in
alcohol. He couldn't see how that could be helpful as a Christian
Scientist. He couldn't see any reason why anybody would really
want to smoke. Part of the problem with drinking was that he had a
brother who became an alcoholic and died as an alcoholic. This
reinforced his opinion of the use of alcohol. Nowadays, I guess
Dad would be considered pretty straight. [laughter] He had some
simple-minded ideas like keeping your word: "Why would any problem
arise? I said I'd do it. Why would you worry about it?" That was
his approach to life, and he acted that way.

Swent: Wouldn't it be nice if there were more people like that still?

Hazen: It certainly would avoid a lot of problems that we have now. Of

course, there was a very, very fundamental aspect to Dad's view of
life which I share, and that is that I think one should conduct
himself in a way that he will accept the consequences of his
actions. I think this is a principle that the country has lost.
Now people no longer feel quite the necessity of being responsible
for themselves or for what they do. It seems pretty easy to find
somebody else who has caused the problem, and therefore those
others have to make it right. That has kind of become a way of
life, leading to the kinds of things we see now which I'm not much
in favor of, but perhaps that's my own bias.

Dad went to school here, and in his senior year his mother

died.
Swent: Where were your father's parents' names?

Hazen: His father's name was Louis Whitfield Hazen. His mother's name was
Isabella Fowler. They had all died long before I was born. His
father died quite early of a sudden heart attack.

Swent: They had moved from Monrovia to Berkeley?

Hazen: No, they lived in Monrovia. Dad came up here as a student from

Monrovia. When his mother died, he left and went back and worked
to support the family. I'm a little hazy about the chronology of
events. He somehow got the family situation straightened out and
came back and went to work at Selby. There were other kinds of
moves around. For a period of time they lived in Mill Valley.

As far as my acquaintance with the mining industry, I had a
very early feeling that this was pretty neat. The school I started
out in in the little town of Melones had the grades one through
four in one room, and the grades six through eight were in another
room. There were only a few people in each class. I got pretty
lonesome when my brother Charles, who is two years older than I,
went off to school, so I went to school with him. They had desks
and seats so that you could sit together, the old-fashioned kind;
they weren't the individual ones. So I got an early start in
school because I didn't want to be left home alone with nobody to
play with.

I think I was probably nine or ten years old when we moved to
Berkeley.

Swent: You said your parents were in Nevada at one time.
Hazen: I'm trying to think of the chronology of that time.
Swent: Did you live in Nevada at all?

Hazen: Yes, I did, but not at that time. I came back and went to school.
In high school I sometimes stayed with my grandfather, but for my
senior year I lived with a family named Budelman. Herman Budelman
had been a very influential part of the mining activities at
Tonopah, Nevada. I'm trying to remember the names of the mines,
but they don't come to me. When I came back from Melones, I went
to John Muir Elementary School, right close by here. I went to
junior high school at Willard and then went to Berkeley High. I
went through Berkeley High School, with my association with my
grandfather. I'm trying to think where Mother and Dad were at the

time. I think Dad may have been involved with a little mining
activity in Delamar, Nevada. This would have been in about 1932.

Swent: The Depression must have had its affect.

Hazen: Yes, indeed. Dad for a while had been a consultant in San

Francisco with a partner named Charlie Haley, who was also a mining
consultant. The business wasn't very good.

Reworking the Delamar Mine Tailings , Nevada

Hazen: One of the things that Dad did was to locate or hear about the old
tailings piles that had been left over at Delamar, Nevada, which is
maybe thirty miles from Caliente. It's almost on the Nevada-Utah
border. That particular mine, the Delamar Mine, had been a great
big mine in the late 1800s. It was run by a company that was run
by the Bamberger family. I don't know anything further about them
except that they were a big mining family. It had been a very big
operation. There were many millions of tons of tailings which had
been through the processing. What was unique about it was that the
mill had been in operation before there was a cyanide process, and
they had used chlorination roasting as the means of recovering the
gold. The tailings from the chlorination roasting, because the
process was inefficient, ran eleven dollars per ton in retained
gold.

Dad found out about these tailings, which had been covered up
with subsequent tailings from cyanidation, which only ran two or
three dollars per ton with still residual gold that had not been
recovered by the cyanide. So he conceived the idea that he could
take the old chlorination tailings, which were bright red in color,
rust-colored, because of the iron in the roasting, and cyanide them
and recover the difference between eleven dollars and the other.
That's a separate story of its own, too. Do you want to ramble
into it?

Swent: Yes, by all means.

Hazen: I don't want to be like somebody shooting rabbits and darting after
it when it comes up.

Swent: This is all pertinent. Your father was able to do this
successfully?

Hazen: Oh, yes. Now it comes back to me. Dad and Mother had some good
friends named the Howes--Harry Howe. Harry Howe had been a

machinery salesman in the mining industry. How they met, I don't
know. Harry started a small company called Western Machinery
Company.

Swent : It was known as Wemco, I believe.

Hazen: Yes. Harry Howe started selling second-hand machinery, and that
led to the development of the Western Machinery Company, which
resulted in further development. I think his son, Jack Howe, took
over the business.

Dad interested Harry Howe in supplying some used machinery.
Dad raised the capital for this enterprise out at Delamar--!
believe it was called the Delamar Cyaniding Company—and Harry Howe
provided the second-hand machinery, the diesel engines for power.
Also he obtained and purchased some of the old tanks which had been
left over from the Bamberger operations, which had long been shut
down. The mill was one of those collapsed structures that you see
around in old mining towns .

He went down the hill a little ways and began to put together
a kind of a cyanide leaching system in which he would sluice the
tailings down hydraulically with hoses into a pond, from which they
were picked up by a pump and pumped into these large steel tanks
which were round, probably thirty feet across and ten feet deep.
He pumped these tailings into that, and then let it soak in cyanide
solutions. There was a cocomatted bottom in these tanks, and after
the solution had soaked and the cyanide had dissolved the gold, he
would let the solution flow down through the filter bottom, the
cocomatting on the bottom of the tank. It was picked up by pumps
and pumped through zinc shaving precipitation. It went through a
Merrill-Crowe vacuum system and then through zinc boxes, they were
called, in which you stuffed zinc shavings that looked like they
were metallic excelsiors, or maybe steel wool but not as fine.
There were these long boxes that the solution went through from one
box to another, and the zinc precipitated the gold. At the end of
perhaps a week, you stopped the solution flow and went in manually
and picked out all of the residual zinc shavings. Down in the
bottom would be a black mud that you scooped out. I can remember
this, because that was my job at one time.

Swent: In the summer, probably.

Hazen: Yes, in the summer. My job was to scoop up that gold, and then
we'd take it out to the backyard and burn it. It would burn all
the excess zinc that was present and wind up with a kind of a muddy
sort of material that we boxed up and sent to the mint in San
Francisco for payment for the gold.

Swent: You sent that directly to the mint?

Hazen: Yes. The mint would take it because it was high enough grade gold.
Later on we put in a little furnace and smelted it to a gold bar.

Swent: What were you burning the zinc off in?

Hazen: [laughs] Would you believe it? We had a great big steel plate,

like a piece of old boiler plate. We would put all the zinc on the
top of this plate, throw a little gasoline on it, and light it.

Swent: For heaven's sake.

Hazen: The zinc would disappear into the atmosphere as zinc oxide fumes
disappearing into the wilderness.

Swent: Not only hazardous but environmentally unsound. What sort of
quantities were you doing?

Hazen: Oh, not very much, maybe two hundred pounds of material.
Swent: So it was a pile five feet across and a couple of feet high?

Hazen: No, because with this material we tried to shake out most of the
good zinc and put it back in the boxes, so this would have been a
sort of residue-like material that might be a few garbage cans
full. We'd let it dry and burn off the excess zinc.

Swent: You weren't contaminating the Nevada sky to any great extent?

Hazen: Oh, no. As I look back on it now, I think at least I would have
worn a respirator.

Swent: How much gold would you get from this? What sort of return?

Hazen: This was a very modest enterprise. There might be a thousand

ounces a month, which at $20 is $20,000 a month. It wasn't a very
big deal.

Swent: But it supported your family and the operation?

Hazen: It was a family enterprise with maybe a couple of other people. As
a matter of fact, both my brother and I went to college because of
that little grubstake operation started by Harry Howe and my dad.

Swent: Well, $20,000 a month in 1932 was a lot of money.

Hazen: But it had the usual problems, expenses, and making ends meet.
Swent: The Depression, then, was not a huge influence on this?

Hazen: I don't remember being very affected by the Depression because I

had a job. I was either going to high school and then to college,
so I would work during the summers. As a matter of fact, I took a
year off at one time and worked at Delamar as the assayer there.

To continue on with the story, from a technical standpoint
what was interesting was trying to locate and dig out these red
cyanidation tailings, because that's where the money really was.
We were faced with the problem of tunneling under a sandpile to
remove the center of it, which made a kind of an interesting mining
activity and requires a certain amount of timbering.

Swent: These were very large tailings piles?

Hazen: Yes. It was the old tailings pile, which was perhaps a half a

million tons, and the new tailings pile, which was maybe three and
a half million tons.

Swent: They had chlorination tailings that you were trying to get at?

Hazen: Only in the old pile. Therefore it wasn't the biggest of the
piles, but it was a very old one and was just sand.

Swent: You couldn't just scoop up the whole pile, though?

Hazen: No, because there were probably not all that many tons--maybe 5,000
tons out of 500,000 tons; it was the center. That old plant had
apparently been in operation for a while, and then the new
cyanidation- -that would fix it probably at around 1895 that the
plant was in operation. As far as this particular project, I had a
good experience because a part of my job during the summer was
operating the mill and helping in the mine. It was a very small
operation, so you only had one operator operating all the
cyanidation end of it, and you had one guy with a helper doing the
mining. That makes for a pretty small--

Swent: When you say mining, do you mean mining the tailings pile?

Hazen: Mining that sandpile. It was a long ways from hard-rock mining. I
remember my first acquaintance with mucking. We had a miner, a
Mexican named Billie McGuffie, would you believe it? Out of high
school one summer, I was his mucker. Even though it was sand, you
had to occasionally use a little dynamite to loosen things up.

Swent: What sort of equipment were you using?

Hazen: A shovel was a major piece of equipment, and a tram car and track.
Swent: You were shoveling it all by hand?

Hazen: Yes, until later on. There's a sequence of events, and we've kind
of gotten things out of sequence. The early work was in the
chlorination tailings. That supported the operation and provided a
little bit of money, and then Harry Howe and Western Machinery
agreed to put in more machinery to put in a larger plant, a real
cyanide plant. Because by regrinding the tailings you could take
even the $3 to $5 ore, which was the major part of these old
tailings (the 500,000 tons) and retreat it by cyanidation if you
put in a grinding circuit followed by good agitation—cyanide
leach, Oliver filters, a couple of thickeners, and the thickener
underflow was filtered.

Again, my acquaintance with the mining industry was pretty
direct.

Swent: You were getting a very good basic education, weren't you?

Hazen: I was getting a good basic education. In terms of what we do

nowadays, at the time when we were sluicing the main tailings, you
still had to loosen it up with dynamite. The operation had been
expanded; I think there were then six operators — about a 200-ton-a-
day plant. One of the jobs was to go with these big sluice hoses
and put them against a face of the sandpile so that the water—the
method of mining was to just sluice the tailings down to where they
could be picked up by a pump. It was a round-the-clock operation,
and I can recall thinking nothing at all of going into the
storeroom, opening up a box of dynamite, stuffing three or four
sticks in one pocket, putting detonators and fuses in my shirt
pocket, and going up to the dump, the face, using something like
either a pipe or a round wooden thing- -usually a pipe, probably a
one-and-one-half-inch pipe— and driving a hole in the side of the
sandpile, which was hardened because of its age and weathering,
then stuffing in the sticks of dynamite, putting a detonator in,
lighting a fuse, and going away until it went off. In terms of
what is considered permissible now, and thinking of the total lack
of any kind of supervisory or regulatory activity- -I'm not saying
that was a neat thing to do, but —

Swent: You're here to tell the story.

Hazen: Yes. Let's say that we didn't have a personnel division, and
safety was something that you paid attention to because it was
immediately apparent- -though the hidden dangers were not readily
apparent at that time. For example, this plant, which was composed
of a ball mill, three or four Devereaux agitators, two thickeners--

they were small ones, inside the building, so they were fifty-foot
thickeners — two Oliver filters, and a conveyor belt to take the
tailings away. Then in a separate building there were a couple of
diesel engines which were operating; there was the precipitation
system, which this time had converted to the Merrill-Crowe system,
including zinc dust precipitation. We had gotten away from the
early zinc shavings and had gone to zinc dust, so this probably
would have been in 1937. The operation had gone on long enough so
that this new plant had been built, which was funded, again, by the
used equipment from Western Machinery Company.

You had one operator in the mill on a shift. You wouldn't
even consider that now, leaving one person alone with that much
machinery.

Swent: You might not be allowed to.

Hazen: There are many reasons why you wouldn't consider it, one of them
being that there is a safety hazard that is substantial. I think
that from a safety standpoint—we always thought about it, and we
always worried about it. There was only one particular accident
that I can remember in the seven years of that operation, which I
was involved in; so it might be worthwhile telling that story, too.

Swent: Please do.

Hazen: The lead operator was a Mormon named Art Horgan. He sometimes

would lease a mine and try to pick out a few tons of ore that had
been left behind in the old workings. When this mill got started
at this little town of Delamar (I wonder if I don't have a picture
of the little town of Delamar as it was when we first got there?),
all the buildings were stone buildings with wooden roofs. All the
roofs were gone, but the stone buildings were there. What we took
over as a home had been a lodge of some sort which didn't have a
roof or anything. When Dad first got out there, the first thing he
did was to cover the roof space with tenting material, canvas. I
remember the big day when we got water into a pipe on the back
porch.

Anyway, Art Horgan was on graveyard shift. One person was
running the mill, and another person was running the powerhouse,
which generated the electricity.

Swent: What kind of fuel were you using?

Hazen: Diesel. These were big Fairbanks-Morse diesel engines. The other
duties were to take care of the Merrill-Crowe precipitation system.
So one man took care of the plant — the mill— and the other took
care of power generation and the Merrill-Crowe precipitation. But

if there was a problem, these two people could get together,
because these buildings were only twenty yards apart.

Swent: When you say plant or mill, do you mean grinding?

Hazen: I mean the grinding, plus agitation, plus thickening, plus filters,
plus tailings disposal—the plant.

Swent: But the Merrill-Crowe system was subsequent to that?

Hazen: No, it was used to recover the gold from the solution that came

from these other--. So there was the mill, which was step one. It
ground the ore, cyanided it, discharged it as tailings, and
collected the solution, which now had dissolved the gold. That
solution containing the gold went over to the other building, where
a vacuum was pulled in the typical Merrill-Crowe system, then zinc-
dust fed. Then it went through bag filters, and the precipitated
gold was collected in these filter socks. So one operator took
care of the diesel engine, the power generation, and the care of
this--. In the total complex there were two people.

One summer on the graveyard shift I was running the
powerhouse, and Art Horgan was involved--! 've forgotten, but at
times there was a third man who was doing the sluicing up on the
hill with these hoses. Art Horgan came and said that he needed to
have me help him start a sand pump which had become plugged, and
that was pretty common. Wilfley pumps are wonderful. Do you know
the Wilfleys?

Swent: No, I don't. I just know the name.

Hazen: That whole history of the Wilfley Company as well as of the Denver
Equipment Company and its growth, and A. C. Damon, is another
story.

The Wilfley pump had sanded up, and Art said, "I don't want to
open it up and take it apart, so let's see if we can get it clean.
You hit the switch to jog it." If you just turned the power on, it
would sit there and buzz, and after while it would burn up the
motor. So you just jogged it to see if you could jerk it, to break
it loose. He grabbed the v-belts, because there was no guard, and
pulled at the same time as I was doing this. It came loose and
started, and it carried his hand around the pulley, taking fingers
off. That was the only accident we had. It just took off the tips
of his fingers.

Maybe some more of that story is interesting. This was on
graveyard shift, so it would have been maybe two o'clock in the
morning.

Swent: That is when most accidents happen, don't they?

Hazen: Yes. Art was a husky guy and a hard worker. We walked up to where
I lived with Mother and Dad in this old stone house. By that time
the house was pretty "uptown," because we had running water and
there was a shower and all kinds of things. At two o'clock in the
morning we were walking toward it, and as an impressionable kid I
was sick; I was sick to my stomach. He had put a big bandage
around his hand, and we were walking along, and I all of a sudden
got terribly sick. It just hit me. So he was supporting me as we
walked up toward the back of the house. Mother's and Dad's bedroom
was on that side. It was summer, and the window was open. Art
called, "Mrs. Hazen, there's been an accident." Mother looks out
the window and sees Art supporting me. She thought, "My baby!"
[laughter]

We went into the house, and it soon became apparent that my
troubles were not as serious as Art's. She took care of him.
Mother had to be the nurse if anything happened.

I don't want to give the impression that we didn't think about
safety, but somehow or other the ideas of safety were not developed
to the degree they are now. I think it's much better to be quite
aware of safety. But that's the way things were done then.

We've kind of gotten away from a lot of things. We've drifted
away from Melones, haven't we?

[tape off for lunch break]

Hazen: I want to comment on safety. I don't think it's the fact the
people were oblivious to safety; it's just that there were
different standards of safety in those times. I don't think
anybody deliberately ever wants to hurt anybody else. Sometimes
there has to be some kind of a balance. You can be so concerned
everlastingly with just the safety aspects that you wind up not
doing anything, because to do anything involves some kind of a
hazard. I certainly approve of the efforts which are being made in
this country and in others to see that people are guarded in safety
aspects and in all aspects of life. Sometimes it can be-come
regulatory-driven so that it passes that which is safety and
becomes crippling to try and get anything done.

Swent: Do you think sometimes, too, that when an outside agency assumes

too much responsibility for it, then the individual worker doesn't
feel responsible for taking care of his own safety?

Hazen: Probably some of that, too. Added to which, it opens up a

wonderful field for litigation and for claiming injuries. If you

continually focus on and tell people that if anything happens to
you, you have a cause of action against somebody else, then you're
opening the door to having people no longer be as concerned about
their own safety, but every slight pretext becomes a lawsuit.
That's carrying things too far.

I guess we were at Delamar, illustrating that story in that
time. Even with the safety precautions being of a different order
than they are now, this one accident in seven years of operation
with heavy machinery, poisonous chemicals, and all of those
activities which now would be guarded so carefully, the safety
record really was pretty good. I'm not pleased that somebody lost
the ends of his fingers, but--

Swent : It could have been far worse.

Hazen: Indeed. I'm certain that during that same period of time there

were other hazards that had taken a greater toll of life — like an
automobile, for example. That brings up another subject, too. At
that time the whole picture of medical practice was different, both
in regard to the technology and also in regard to regulatory
requirements. There was a particular incident that I look back on
that kind of struck me. There was a Russian who was hired by my
father at Delamar to be a welder. The way Dad came upon him was
that he was a brother-in-law of Dimitri N. Vedensky. Nick
Lomakovsky was Dee's brother-in-law. Mary Lomakovsky was Dee's
sister. Nick had come over from Russia and had been part of the
czar's army, fighting the war against the bolsheviks. He had come
out through China, as I believe Dee did also. I think Plato
Malozemoff did, too.

Swent: Plato did also, yes.

Hazen: Nick had a heart attack while working out at Delamar. There was
nothing there at the camp, so we took him into the town of
Caliente, where there was a doctor. The doctor did all of the
things he could do, but there was not available anything like the
kind of equipment we have today, nor was the doctor as fearful of a
malpractice suit. I'm not sure I know all of the things that he
did, but I know that the thought that perhaps he had not done [all
he could] or had done something wrong was never any part of the
picture. There weren't consultations saying, "Do you think if we
don't do something-or-other, then somebody else may bring suit?"
That whole atmosphere, which sometimes now surrounds medical
practice, was absent at that time.

Nick didn't live. I think he died in about two weeks, and
then Dee's sister, Nick's wife, moved back to San Francisco.

Swent: Did you know Dee at that time?

Hazen: Dee had been a babysitter for me and my brother.

Swent: You haven't mentioned that yet.

Hazen: Oh, my heavens. We have to get me to college, don't we? And I
haven't even gotten out of Delamar.

Swent: We haven't really finished high school. Was there anything

significant that you did in high school? You mentioned John Muir
School.

Hazen: And then I went to Berkeley High School, where I was in contact
with my grandfather.

Swent: And with the Budelmans.

Hazen: Yes, I was living there with the Budelman family until I graduated
form high school. When I graduated from high school, then I spent
a whole year at Delamar, putting money aside so that I could go to
college. While I was there I was assayer, bookkeeper, on night
shift, and these sorts of practical things. I guess I was sixteen,
because I remember that I had my seventeenth birthday and then
entered college that September.

Swent: Did your older brother go to Cal also?

Hazen: He went to Cal also. He had been through the same business of

working out at Delamar for a year or so. He also had been through

Berkeley High School, and when he graduated he went out to Delamar,

worked, put money aside, and came back to Cal.

Swent: Did he stay with your grandfather also?

Hazen: No. It was kind of a mixed period. This would have been in the
early thirties, when Mother, Dad, my brother, and I were living
with my grandfather at 40 Hillcrest Road. Then Dad went out to
Delamar, then my brother went out there for a while, then Mother
went out, and I stayed with the Budelmans. We were all doing what
we could to take care of the problems that we had.

When my brother came in a year ahead of me to the University
of California, he had been out at Delamar having the same kinds of
experiences that I had had.

Swent: Did he also go into the field of mining and metallurgy?

Hazen: No, he was in commerce; I think it would be called business now.
He was always interested in athletics and not interested in
science. People are different. These things which appeal to me
about mining and metallurgy were not so appealing to him.

Swent: Were you a good student in high school? Did you get good grades?
Hazen: Yes, I got good grades. I think part of it was because I studied.
Swent: Because the principal was your grandfather?

Hazen: That certainly was a part of it, and part of it was that I didn't
spend much time in athletics and other things. These things were
not as interesting to me. My brother was always involved with
them, and I was not. Yes, I got good grades. I don't think there
was anything particular in that period of time except that
relationship with my grandfather in general. Other than that, high
school was just high school.

Swent: You were sailing. Of course, in those days people from the Bay
Area didn't go up skiing the way they do now, did they?

Hazen: No.

Swent: You've become a skier since then?

Hazen: Yes. Most of these kinds of things I started after I was fifty or
sixty. We were talking about flying, and one of the things I feel
a singular pride in is that I got my commercial helicopter pilot's
rating on my seventieth birthday. I really felt pleased at the
fact that I could keep on with something as interesting as that.

The University of California

Hazen: As regards college, I lived in a fraternity house, ATO, and had the
usual experiences.

Swent: This was on LeConte?
Hazen: Yes.

Swent: We drove by it this morning, and it is now part of the Graduate
Theological Union. If anybody had told you that in the late
thirties —

Hazen: It would have been a surprise. I've been thinking about that, too,
Lee. I have a picture at home of the class in the fraternity. I
was looking at some of those boys and thinking that at about that
time, which was in the late thirties, we would listen in the
fraternity house to Adolf Hitler raving, to Churchill's declaration
of war, and the invasion of Poland by Germany. That would have
been in about 1939. So many of the people in that photograph were
in uniform--ROTC--and went on to war.

Swent: You were taking it seriously, then?

Hazen: Oh, yes. These were pretty serious times. Added to which, you're
involved and have to go to school and have to learn what you're
supposed to. I was singularly fortunate, as I think I told you,
that the University of California, in my opinion, probably had the
best education that was available in the world for people who were
in the chemistry department. I thought it was absolutely wonderful
to have a chance to be taught by such people.

Swent: Talk about some of the people you were studying with and what you
were studying at that time.

Hazen: My peers?

Swent: Yes, and people like Joel Hildebrand.

Hazen: I was very fortunate in being in this particular class, because not
only was it a class that was singularly fortunate in having the
lecturers and teachers that we had, but there were also some people
that I knew who were outstanding young people. Bob Connick was one
of that class. Bill Perkins was another.

Swent: Bob Connick became a professor of chemistry here at the University,
didn't he?

Hazen: Yes. Bill Perkins went from here to Stanford to get his Ph.D. and
then was involved with a business in Palo Alto. At that time he
was very much interested in things like what caused the Los Angeles
smog.

Professor Joel Hildebrand #//

Hazen: I was singularly fortunate also because the instructors we had,
like Joel Hildebrand, made a lasting impression because of their
skill—not only their greatness in their contributions to science,
but the skill that they brought to their lectures. One in

particular that I always remember is when Dr. Hildebrand was
presenting some of the history and development of chemistry. On a
rather rudimentary basis, the subject was conservation of matter,
and he was talking about the early days when things burned. There
was something given off which was called phlogiston- -the famous
phlogiston theory. So he set fire to some pyrotechnic display, and
there was this voluminous cloud of purple smoke, and he said, "Now,
that's phlogiston." For people who had any understanding at all,
that was just the smoke that comes from the combustion of oxygen,
but it was a very graphic way to demonstrate the state of knowledge
of the time that he was referring to. Even after fifty years I can
recall having a basic understanding about conservation matters
because of having had opportunities with people like Joel
Hildebrand.

Other Great Chemistry Professors

Hazen: At that time G. N. Lewis had just retired. He was seen around the
chemistry department occasionally. He was the giant of chemistry
who propounded the octet theory of electron structure. Also, he
and Merle Randall wrote a book on free energy. The Free Energy of
Chemical Substances (or Chemical Compounds) , by Lewis and Randall
has been a basic understanding of the principle of free energy in
chemistry. I had the opportunity to attend the classes taught by
Merle Randall. I think Professor Giaque was the one who did a lot
of pioneering work in cryogenic activities. And Willard Libby;
Wendall Latimer; Gerald Branch in organic chemistry. The impact of
all of these people—to still have recollections of specific
understandings that I had because I was exposed to people like this
is a tribute to the University.

Swent: What was the state of chemistry at that point?

Hazen: I look back on it now and say, "For heaven's sake." They didn't
really even talk about neutrons and the nucleus of matter. They
talked about protons surrounded by little billiard balls that were
running around, called electrons. Neutrons were known, but there
was not any part of the understanding that was brought to
chemistry. I think Ernest 0. Lawrence was doing exciting things
with cyclotrons. There was all of this explosion of knowledge,
much of it in the physics department, but of course there was a lot
of it in the chemistry department, too, especially with the advent
of radioactivity, new understandings about the reason why chemical
compounds — resonance theory, organic chemistry. All of the ideas
that were just beginning to be understood were taught about that

time, so I remember that as being a time of great excitements for a
student.

Swent: Chemistry and physics were much more separated at that time,
weren't they?

Hazen: Oh, yes, very much so. I think, too, that it was a pretty intense
time. You just worked real hard. You didn't have very much time
for other kinds of courses other than those that were increasing
your knowledge of what the subject was.

Swent: Did you do a lot of laboratory work?

Hazen: Lots of it. The instructors were all very bright people, many of
whom went on to become well-known people who made contributions to
the department of chemistry. I've forgotten their names and what
their positions were.

Swent: Did you write papers or do experiments?

Hazen: Mostly experiments.

Swent: Were they experiments that had been done before?

Hazen: At least as far as I was concerned they were all brand-new,
[laughs] I didn't know very much, and I wasn't a very good
experimentalist. As I look back on it now, I think the teacher was
really wonderful. Always the emphasis was on, "Yes, but do you
understand it? Is the principle clear?" rather than repeating
something that you had learned. You had to. be able to use it. I
remember physical chemistry in particular was with Professor
Eastman, who was pretty thorough. At that time, I said, "This is
pretty hard stuff." You had to work, but it was a great time, very
interesting.

I was involved with a lot of kinds of student activities. At
one time I was the president of the Interfraternity Council. I
don't know if that is still in existence. I think the name of the
first president of it was Jimmy Dietrich.

Swent: Fraternities were a big part of campus life then, weren't they?

Hazen: Oh, yes. How are they now?

Swent: I don't really know, but I suspect they are less.

Hazen: The ATO's, as far as I was concerned, were a particularly congenial
bunch of people. My brother was the manager of the fraternity for
a number of years, and I was the president of it for a year after

my brother left school. I was trying to think of the impact of
that. As far as I was concerned, the fraternity was a very
positive and beneficial part of life. I understand now why it was,
too; there was a place where I belonged. I was accepted into a
group, so I had that kind of comfort and stability that I would not
have felt had I tried to be in a rooming house.

Swent: You ate there as well as living there?

Hazen: Yes. Where else for $30 a month could you get room and board? I
think it rose; inflation may have gotten it up to $35 a month.
It's hard to imagine times when things were that inexpensive.

II WORKING FOR PAN AMERICAN ENGINEERING COMPANY

Hazen: After I got out of school, Dee [Dmitri] Vedensky offered me a job
at Pan American Engineering Company.

Swent: You haven't talked about his babysitting yet.

Hazen: Dee Vedensky was a Russian whose parents had been aristocrats in
Russia and who had fled the revolution. They had come through
Harbin, China, and over to the United States. He was a fine
pianist, and he had made his living at various times playing the
piano in various places, maybe in silent movies or dance halls. He
was a graduate of the University of California. How my father and
he had gotten together, I don't know, but at one time he had served
as a babysitter for my brother and me very early. So there had
been an association, and Dad and Dee Vedensky knew each other and
had had some acquaintance.

When I graduated in chemistry, Dee offered me a job at Pan
American Engineering Company for about $135 a month.

Swent: That was probably quite a lot of money at that time.

Hazen: It was fine.

Swent: That was here in Berkeley?

Hazen: Yes. I was married and had a son, Lee Colby Hazen. I was able, on
that salary, to support a small family. Pan American Engineering
Company was where I worked for Plato Malozemoff.1 At that time the
company was fundamentally involved with the development and sale of
jigs, a device for making mineral separations based upon difference
in density. This would have been in 1940, and Plato was my boss.
I was assigned the job of working on a process for recovering
manganese from various United States ores. There was an impending
war, and many people were concerned about the need for raw
materials .

Malozemoff, A Life in Mining; Siberia to Chairman of Newmont
Mining Corporation, 1909-1985. Regional Oral History Office, University of

Doing Benchwork on Manganese Recovery

Hazen: The United States government had various programs, one of which was
for the development of processes to recover manganese. How it
arrived, I don't know, but Dee Vedensky had obtained a contract for
developing a process for the recovery of manganese, first from the
Artillery Peak deposit in Arizona and then from the Three Kids
deposit near Boulder City, Nevada.

Swent: What is manganese used for?

Hazen: Steel. Manganese is a basic ingredient in some steels.

Swent: Was this process one that Vedensky had acquired, or had he
developed it?

Hazen: I'm not sure that I know. I was in the laboratory and worked as an
analyst, doing benchwork for the development of this process. I
know that Dee and Plato were the metallurgical brains behind it.
It used sulfur dioxide to dissolve manganese. Pan American offices
and laboratory were right next to the Cutter Laboratories, down
toward the Bay. They had bench space, and we worked on the
processes for the recovery of manganese by electrolysis. There was
another man named Dr. George Parsons, who was handling the
electrolytic end, and I was handling the hydrometallurgy from the
laboratory point of view. The process that Dee had envisioned--
where he got it, I don't know- -was for the use of sulfur dioxide to
dissolve manganese. My role in that, under Plato's supervision,
and Dee's role was to develop the flow sheet for the recovery of
manganese as a purified manganese oxide, manganese nodules which
could be used in the steel industry.

As I think about those days, I think that the laboratory work
first involved the use of flotation on Artillery Peak ores. Those
ores were not as high grade, and under the circumstances it was
felt desirable to switch over and begin using the Three Kids ores,
which were higher grade. The process itself involved grinding the
ore, then subjecting it to leaching with sulfur dioxide. The
reaction between manganese dioxide and sulfurous acid in water
solution--SOz forms sulfurous acid--forms manganese sulfate and
manganese dithionate--MnS02 and MnS206.

The puzzle was how you actually get this reaction to take
place, because S02 is a gas, and therefore you have a lot of sulfur
dioxide over whatever vessels you try to do the leaching in. After
you did the dissolving, then you had the usual problem of
separating liquids and solids. That's one of the fundamental evils

of any metallurgical process; you have to separate the liquids and
solids.

Swent: You were doing a miniature process. What size were you using?

Hazen: This was in beakers, like in a one-liter beaker. We would go

through and make all the measurements- -how much sulfur dioxide you
had when you started and what you had when you finished. In the
development of this, the liquids and solids were separated, and now
you had to get the manganese out of the solution. The choice was
made that it would be done by evaporating the solution until there
were crystals formed. The crystals were manganese sulfate and some
manganese diathionate. Now, since the water was largely gone by
crystalization, the salts—manganese sulfate and diathionate--were
then roasted. What happened with this was that reversed the
leaching process. The manganese converted back to the oxide, and
the sulfur dioxide came off; so now you could use the sulfur
dioxide to leach a new batch. So this was a cyclic system.

Sounds great on paper, and it seemed to be successful enough
so that additional funding was supplied. By the way, the M. A.
Hanna Company was involved in this, and I don't know what the
relation was from the financial point of view. The M. A. Hanna
Company of Cleveland were the people who were really the client. I
suspect that Pan American Engineering and M. A. Hanna had an
agreement as to how that would be handled, and the government was
then probably paying the bills.

Swent: You mentioned a defense plant corporation.

Hazen: DPC, yes. That was the government's agency. That was the agency

developed by the government to build plants for the defense effort.

Swent: Would they have funded this?

Hazen: No, I don't think they did at that time. I think M. A. Hanna was
developing it on their own at that time. It seemed apparent that
it would be successful—and it wasn't; it was a giant failure.
Perhaps that isn't fair, either; because many things were done
under the wartime effort which then had limited life. That's a
story we'll get into in a moment.

The man that I had contact with was Mac Lake, Sr. Dee
Vedensky reported to Mac Lake, and Mac Lake was the representative
of M. A. Hanna. M. A. Hanna was run at that time by George
Humphrey, who was really the young man in Cleveland, Ohio, who took
over this almost moribund company from Mark Hanna, the politician
in Chicago. M. A. Hanna Company really was started by Mark Hanna,
and George Humphrey made it into the giant company that it was,

kind of an iron ore company. Mac Lake was the man that I saw as
the big client, and George Humphrey was El Supremo, the big boss.
He later became secretary of the treasury under Eisenhower.

What I was up to as a young chemist- -it looked like it was
successful, and in the laboratory it was, so we built a pilot plant
at Pan American.

Swent: How big was that?

Hazen: Like one ton a day of ore. We had all of the parts that were

required: the agitation systems, and we worked on ways of having
the contact between the sulfur dioxide and the manganese. We did
lots of very interesting ways to get the contact. Metallurgy was
more difficult then, particularly after the reaction was done and
the separation of the liquids and solids by thickening, because
this slimy material that was left after the manganese dissolved
refused to settle and at that time there were no settling agents
like Separan. There were various kinds of things tried until
finally we found some kind of a guar gum that came to our aid, and
we were able to get some settling to take place so that we could
separate the liquids from the solids.

Nowadays, with the advent of all the chemicals that there are
for separating--Separan and things like that, which you've probably
heard of--it has been so helpful in the uranium industry. At this
plant we didn't have those things, but we had some others. As a
matter of fact, we were involved in developing things, and my
chemistry background was useful.

Then we built a roaster, got the manganese sulfate, and
roasted it. The thing was looking pretty good, so it was decided
to build a major plant. That, I think, is where the Defense Plant
Corporation came in. The plant was designed, and I was given the
job of being the technical superintendent of this plant to treat a
thousand tons a day of ore. It was perhaps three or four miles
west of Lake Meade, about fifteen miles from Boulder City, Nevada.

Superintendent of the Manganese Plant

Swent: Is there any standard scale up or down? If you're thinking in

terms of a thousand tons per day mill, is a one-ton-per-day pilot
plant sort of the standard?

Hazen: Oh, there are lots of rules of thumb, and these change with the

times. Of particular importance, they depend upon the novelty of

the process. Nowadays, if you have an ore that you are going to
separate by flotation, you can build a full-sized mill just from
bench scale flotation tests, because there have been so many of
them built that people know how they scale up.

Swent: Go to thousands of tons a day with nothing in between?

Hazen: Right. There was a time when it was very fashionable to build big
pilot plants, because that would lessen the impact. The objective
of a pilot plant is different from the objective of the laboratory
work. The laboratory work defines the process. What you do
ordinarily in a pilot plant is take this process and put it in
simulated real equipment --real equipment but small size. Then you
make it work, day after day after day, because there are always
things that recycle, and you have to sure that when things recycle
that after a while there isn't some component unbeknownst to you
which has built up in the recycle and after a while kills the
process. That's one reason.

Another reason for having a pilot plant is that it is really a
place where you can come to grips with engineering problems. The
art and the understanding of things like agitation, thickening, and
so on is so much advanced now over what it was then that you don't
need as much in the way of this engineering; there have been so
many plants built that you know how agitators work, and you have
basic chemical engineering equations for handling power
requirements and so on.

Those were not as available at that time under the

circumstances, so we built this little plant. A ton a day may be a
little large; maybe it was a thousand pounds. In any event, the
scale-up factor from one ton a day to a thousand tons a day turned
out to be inadequate. The pilot plant worked okay.

I just thought of an interesting anecdote that happened during
that pilot plant. We got our sulfur dioxide in one-ton cylinders
as liquid S02. When the truck came in, we had a kind of a winch,
and we would hoist up this one-ton cylinder of liquid sulfur
dioxide, place it in the appropriate cradle, and put the pipes on
it so that it could run into our pilot plant where it was used.
Somehow, when we were piping it up and put the wrench to it, the
whole valve broke off, and this thumb-sized stream of liquid sulfur
dioxide shot across and lit right into the intake system for many
of the air cooling systems that were in the office building of Pan
American. [laughter] The entire building had to be evacuated. It
was just incredible, because suddenly all the secretaries and
everybody got a big blast of sulfur dioxide.

My boss at that time was a man named Eliot Underbill. I have
had no contact with Eliot, and I don't know what happened to him.
He came from Searles Lake chemical engineering activities. I
believe that was his background. He was a chemical engineer and a
very fine guy. By that time I was the one who had had the most
experience with this process, so I was the superintendent of the
pilot plant. From that I was made the technical superintendent of
this new plant at Three Kids. So I moved out there.

Swent: Who built it?

Hazen: P. J. Walker Construction Company.

Swent: Did you select them?

Hazen: No, I was not involved in that. By that time the program had

expanded, and there were more people involved. They were beginning
to assemble a team of engineering people, and my concern was the
process end of it. Therefore, to the extent that the processing
impacted the engineering, then I would be involved. The P. J.
Walker Company then began to be influential, and I moved out there
during the latter stages of construction to help get it
commissioned and get started.

Swent: Did you have your family with you?

Hazen: No, we were separated at that time. I had a son, Lee Colby, who

went with his mother. I moved out to Nevada, and the main problems
I had during the construction period of that plant surrounded
establishing the analytical procedures, analytical laboratory-
getting the laboratory ready and commissioned and so on. Dates
escape me at the moment, but I would suppose this was about 1943.

Problems of Scale-up

Hazen: That plant is a wonderful example of problems that can arise. In
the first place, there was beginning wartime scarcity—scarcity of
people, scarcity of skills, and all kinds of things. In the
construction of it, everything had been kind of rushed. It was
basically the same process that had been in the pilot plant,
excepting that now, instead of having a rotary kiln for roasting
the manganese sulfate which was six inches inside diameter by
fifteen or twenty feet long, we now had something that was eleven
feet in diameter and three hundred feet long. This is one of those
things where you cannot make a small one an exact counterpart of a
big one, because some things scale up in proportion to their volume

and some things scale up in relation to their area, and area and
volume scale up at different rates because one is a square and one
is a cube. As an example, in a small rotary kiln, if you have a
gas flame at one end, you'll have a certain gas velocity going
through the tube. If you get a great big one, say going from six
inches to eleven feet, you're still going to have a great big
burner, but the ratio of the gas supplied by the burner that is
required to get the temperature in the big one is quite different
from the ratio of gas that is required on a small one. So you wind
up with different gas velocities, and particularly if you have your
temperature range going from room temperature to the discharge
temperature over a space of fifteen to twenty feet, you will have a
different temperature profile than if you have it going from
ambient temperature to discharge temperature over three hundred
feet. And the times are going to be different; residence times
will be different. You have to have the larger one so you can get
the volume; but when you get the larger one to get the volume, then
you have changed these parameters.

So as to your question about what the scale-up is, it's a
skill and a science all its own. We can talk about some examples
of scale-up. I scaled up one process from ten milligrams to ten
kilograms. Ten milligrams is a hundredth of a gram, and a kilogram
is a thousandth; so that's a hundred thousand to one scale-up. But
it had to do with plutonium, and the process permitted it. If you
hold ten milligrams at a hundred degrees Fahrenheit for two hours,
you can hold ten kilograms for two hours and expect the chemistry
to be the same. So it depends upon what you are doing, and I have
to be careful of the answer I give. You have to be careful when
you think about these things, and so it was with this.

In the circumstances under which the development of the
Manganese Ore Company and that Three Kids plant took place, there
was not--

Swent: --the knowledge to recognize the danger.

Hazen: Certainly not with me, to recognize the danger that was inherent in
this .

Swent: So you weren't even expecting the problems?

Hazen: A great deal of the history of that plant was improvising. It
might be instructive and fun to go through some of the specific
problems. The reason I happen to be well acquainted was having
been through the laboratory and then responsible for the technical
part of the activity of the plant, wondering why things didn't

work. Then I had the privilege of writing the report when it was
all done. When it was all closed down and all done, I spent three
months in San Francisco writing the report.

Swent: After it was closed down?

Hazen: Yes. I'll have to think through the timing, but it was decided

that the war, particularly as regards the submarine interdiction of
supplies to the United States of manganese ore, some of which was
coming from Africa and some from South America- -they no longer
needed to fear that it would be shut off, so therefore this was not
being a very successful plant—it was working, but it was
limping—and there were better uses for the men and material. So
they shut it down.

In any event, the first part of this operation was the
contacting of a slurry with sulfur dioxide. In the pilot plant we
got the sulfur dioxide by buying a cylinder; in the big plant you
got your sulfur dioxide because it came from the exhaust of the
rotary kiln in which the manganese sulfate was being decomposed.
Remember that S02 was recycling? So now you have a different
animal. You have a combustion gas which has a lot of sulfur
dioxide in it, which somehow or other you have to get into
solution. It's easy to do in a pilot plant; you just put a pipe in
the side of the tank, open a valve, and the sulfur dioxide goes in
it. But if it's coming back with 10,000 cubic feet a minute of
combustion gas and being carried, you have a different problem in
engineering. We attempted to solve that by using absorption
towers. These were giant wooden towers. I probably have the only
existing copy of the report in my office. I've referred to it at
various times for examples of what not to do, an illustration for
young engineers .

These giant wooden towers were filled with slats internally,
almost like cooling towers, so that the gas went up through it, and
the ore /water mixture rained down, bumped around by all these
slats. The contact between the gas and the liquid caused the
manganese dioxide— the liquid would absorb the S02 and make
sulfurous acid, which would react with the manganese dioxide that
was in it. By the time the ore got down to the bottom, it would be
fairly well leached. Then it would be picked up by a pump and put
down through another tower from the top. Where the gas had gone up
here [gestures], now it went down here. So you had separate
counter-current passage of the gas in the slurry until the last
tower, where there giant suction fans, which was what basically
caused the flow of gas.

Well, the suction fans didn't last. They started out being
made of stainless steel, which just ate up in a matter of a few

months or a few weeks . We thought we had done various things to
check out corrosion in the pilot plant work, but that combination
of things was not present in the pilot plant.

Swent: Was it a different temperature as well?

Hazen: In the pilot plant we had built a small scale of that, but it

wasn't very difficult to get a fan. As a matter of fact, natural
draft almost did it on a small scale, whereas on the big one the
problem was that we had to pull--the source of that gas was two
football fields away. You had fans over here [gestures], sucking
on it to create the vacuum so that the combustion gases would go
that way. So the scale, the dynamics, the gas flow, and
everything- -our understanding of it was inadequate. Looking back
on it, I think it was a marvelous experience but not very
comfortable at the time, because always there was this pressure to
get the production going.

Another example of the kind of thing that can happen to
you--and we've been talking about differences between pilot plants
and large plants in development of processing from a metallurgist's
standpoint—we took the manganese sulfate and the manganese
dithionate and evaporated them in solution. We evaporated the
solution until we got these solid pink crystals. We took these
crystals and put them in various kinds of roasters and roasted
them, and it seemed like it was all right. But when we got out in
Nevada we were operating with a furnace, which was basically a long
tube some 350 feet long and 11 feet internal diameter, a
brick-lined rotary kiln operating at, I'll guess, 1,500 degrees
Fahrenheit .

Swent: That sounds enormous.

Hazen: It's a great big one. It's like a big cement kiln. What happened
was --you remember my saying that when you have a temperature
profile and a time/temperature relation on a small scale, when you
scale up you kind of change the time and have different physical
factors? Instead of having a small amount of material tumbling
over as it goes down, now you've got tons and tons of material
falling around, and the dynamics are different. We had noticed in
the small work in the pilot plant that this stuff kind of got
sticky sometimes, and on something twenty feet long, you could
reach in with a big stick, a piece of iron or pipe, and break up a
lump. You can't do that when it's a couple of hundred feet away
and weighs twenty tons.

So we began finding that this was sticking. As it began to
get sticky, when it got over the sticky stage it would be hard. So
it would go through sort of a plastic condition and then become set

up, a very hard material. Some of it would keep rolling through
and come out the end, just as it was supposed to, but there was
enough of it clinging to the walls so that gradually, over a period
a few weeks or so, there would be an accretion and buildup. Then,
instead of having an aperture of eleven feet for the gases to go
through, you could look in and see that it had been narrowed down
to three feet. That throws everything all off, because now you
can't get the gases through, you can't get the right temperature;
everything just goes to pieces.

What to do? There was a contribution by a man named Gilbert
Seil, of whom we may speak again in a moment. There were a number
of consultants: John Sullivan of Battelle [Institute]; Gilbert
Seil of Day and Zimmerman; Walter Badger for evaporators, a famous
name in evaporation; and some others. What Gilbert Seil
recommended and which was done was to take a three- inch diameter
pipe about a hundred feet long and put it on rollers, so that you
have the combustion end of the keel, and extending out from it is
this great big length of three-inch diameter heavy-walled pipe. On
the front end of that it had a pointed end, like a chisel.

So here it is, on rollers and aimed right at the bottom end of
that kiln, fixed it up with the appropriate pulleys. Then they
connected a fire hose to the end of the pipe. When these rings in
the kiln got bad enough, they'd shut the kiln down for a short
period of time, and with a great deal of commotion shoved that pipe
in, scraping along the bottom of the kiln until it chiseled right
underneath where this big doughnut thing was, and then turned the
water on. So all of a sudden you had a fire hose of cold water
injected in underneath a red-hot concretion, and the resulting
steam explosion broke everything lose.

Then they pulled the pipe out, started the kiln rotating
again, and these big boulders would keep running down to the end of
the kiln. When they got to the end of it, they had to get out
somehow, because they wouldn't fit in the chute. So it was
exciting times when we did that, but at least it kept things going.

I.t was kind of fun. I learned a lot of things. It was a very
interesting experience, a very informative period.

Swent: How long a time was it going?

Hazen: Two years.

Swent: Oh, quite a while.

Hazen: Yes. Then the word came. The Defense Plant Corporation said,
"Okay, you guys, you've got some output, but it looks like it's

going to be so long until you get on your feet." All of these were
in the class of solvable problems. Many plants have difficult
start-ups, but this one was really tough.

Swent: Were you the only people working on manganese recovery?

Hazen: That's the only time I think that process has ever been used on

manganese. I think there were other ores that were being used, but
these would probably have been handled by flotation or something
that didn't need this much processing, a higher grade to start
with. And then they began getting the raw ores that were 48
percent manganese from overseas, so the supply was not interrupted
and the need was not there.

I'd think that you'd have to say that by any ordinary
commercial standards, that plant was a failure. But it had a lot
of very interesting and to some extent novel problems for
metallurgy. It was the first and only, as far as I know, of its
kind, but we had a lot of places where it was--we had 300-foot
diameter traction thickeners. You know, that's a pretty big
thickener; they're enormous. These were center-well construction
and had long tunnels underneath them.

Swent: These were all specially built for that job?

Hazen: Oh, yes. If I recall correctly, they were concrete. They were

lined with something that was supposed to be impervious to acid but
which proved over a time period not to be so. Since this was an
acid solution—all of this was very acidic solution—we had lots of
corrosion problems that appeared. The overflows of thickeners were
lead-lined troughs, and I think now the art of lead lining— lead
burning, we called it, soldering together pieces of lead and so
on— was a reasonable skill to expect a crew to be able to do. I
wonder if anybody would ever be able to do lead burning now.
Probably not. Lead is not very popular, but it was sure popular
with us, because it was one thing that would stand the corrosion.
But its physical characteristics were not so great.

A Settling Problem in Thickeners

Hazen: There were some other new things done, too. Just from a technical
standpoint, I think that is the kind of thing that would be great
to have as a case study for young metallurgists, to figure out what
they would do with some of these problems. In the thickeners the
solutions gradually built up to about 130 grams per liter of
contained manganese, which then gets to be dense and viscous; so

now you have a whole different settling problem. The contact
between the sulfur dioxide and the whole method of making the
contact, we chose something comparable to the evaporation tower or
cooling tower as a model for how to do the contact, but there were
other ways suggested that might be better. The idea that it's
basically recycling is a sound one, excepting that there was no
place between the furnace where the sulfur dioxide was driven off
the manganese; there was no surge in that before it went to the
leaching circuit. So if anything happened to the leaching circuit,
you almost had to shut down the roaster, or something had to happen
to the roaster. You almost had to shut down the leaching circuit
right away, because they were close-coupled; the suction fan and
leaching tower provided the suction for the combustion gases. If
anything happened, it was so close-coupled. Nowadays you'd have to
find some way to put some kind of storage in between those two.

Making Manganous Oxide by Direct Reduction of Manganese Dioxide Ore

Hazen: There were a number of other things that were done that were kind
of new. One of them was a part of the purification. This was a
wonderful, wonderful plant for a young metallurgist, because there
were impurities in these solutions that you had to precipitate out
by adjusting the pH just right. What would you use as a reagent to
adjust the pH? Lime is a possibility, but if you used lime you
would be removing sulfate because of forming calcium sulfate. The
whole process was based upon recirculating, so if you pull sulfur
out as sulfate, you're going to put it in from something else.

What we decided to do was to make manganous oxide, which is
like calcium oxide. Instead of lime based upon calcium, it's an
alkali based upon manganese. We took some of the ore and put it
through a direct-fired kiln run with a reducing atmosphere. When
you say to people that you ran your direct-fired kiln with a highly
reducing atmosphere, they raise their eyebrows, because ordinarily
it's hard to run gas flames without just the right amount of
oxygen. But it worked, and we made the green manganous oxide by
direct reduction in a direct-fired rotary kiln and used that
manganous oxide. That was kind of a novelty from a chemist's
standpoint.

Swent: You had the product right there at hand.

Hazen: Yes. Another thing was the make-up sulfur. We had to buy a lot of
sulfur because there were losses of all sorts. To do that we had
molten sulfur and injected it into burners, and then we burned the
sulfur just as though it were oil. So "instead of making carbon

dioxide, we made sulfur dioxide, which wasn't any particular
invention; people had been doing that to make sulfuric acid for
years. But it was another integrated part of everything. If you
ran short on S02, you had to suddenly get the sulfur burners going,
and those aren't easy to start up and shut down at a moment's
notice.

So all of this close-coupled stuff was basically a mistake.
Nobody would build a plant like that. It came about because of a
combination of rushing and inadequate training, and nobody had ever
built a plant like that before. So this was just a marvelous
experience. Having the experience of starting in the laboratory,
then having been the superintendent of the pilot plant, and then
having been the liaison between engineering an process engineering
with P. J. Walker while it was built, and then being in charge of
technology for the plant, I couldn't very well say, "Gee, I wish
those guys had done better." As I say, it was very illuminating.

Swent: It must have been terribly disappointing.

Hazen: Character building is what it is called. If you feel that you need
examples of things that don't work out as great successes, there
you have them. During that experience, however, my friendship with
Vedensky was firmed and continued. He was a pretty important guy
in my life through all that experience. A very good friend, a very
decent guy, very interesting, and a great chess player. I think he
and Plato Malozemoff used to--Plato plays the violin, doesn't he?

Swent: Yes. They played music together, I know.

Hazen: I remembered that. Regarding the pilot plant, I mentioned George
Parsons, who had been in the electrolytic manganese end of it, but
there was another guy, Bob Ramsey, who was a young engineer. Bob
became a good friend. He left, and I haven't followed his career
closely enough to know what the various steps were, but he worked
probably as part of the war effort in Washington, D.C. He was
always interested in writing. As a matter of fact, he was taking
lessons in creative writing at the time when we knew him. He went
on and became the editor of the Engineering and Mining Journal at
one time, and then I think he went to work for St. Joe Lead for
quite a period of time. Then I think he worked for Newmont, but
I 'm not sure.

Swent: Yes, he did, and he wrote the history of Newmont, Men and Mines of
Newmont [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1973).

Hazen: I think back, trying to relate and make sense of what was happening
then with what's going on now. We make other kinds of mistakes in
metallurgy, but this kind of mistake would be gross negligence to

repeat. As I say, I probably had the only easily accessible copy
of the technical report, because the report that I wrote was
basically a critique of what happened.

Swent: Who asked you to write it?

Hazen: Hanna.

Swent: You came back to San Francisco to Pan American?

Hazen: No, Mac Lake, Sr., had an office here. I may be mistaken about
that. I've forgotten just how it came about, but there was an
office in San Francisco; some arrangement had been made through
Hanna, so there was an office there where all the files were, and I
used all those files and put together the technical critique of
what happened at that plant. I went through all the design of
these slats for the absorption and basically what was wrong—all
the problems that I've been reciting.

Swent: Has anybody ever referred to it to learn from it?
Hazen: No, not that I'm aware of.
Swent: It was just filed?

Hazen: I don't think anybody even knows about that plant anymore. You're
raising an interesting question.

Swent: It would be a good learning reference.

Hazen: You bet. I use it. Every once in a while I go look at it and

remember what it was, and then I go through and say, "Why didn't
that work on a big scale?" Because I was so sure. Gee whiz, I
must have been twenty- three years old, and I knew almost everything
in the world. Certainly I knew all there was to know about that
process, and then to have things happen. I look back on it now and
try to recall that and say, "I'm pretty sure that what we're doing
is just great. What is it that I perhaps am not seeing, just as I
didn't foresee that? Is there something about the scale-up?"

I gave a couple of lectures at the Colorado School of Mines on
this subject of scale-up, because from Los Alamos I had had the
experience of these wild scale-up factors that people did.
Consider that the people who just had radiation could never see
what they were doing. They were building plants based just upon
the results--scale-up as a number loses its significance, so you
have to be thoughtful; you have to think. I ran into this — and
perhaps we'll get into this perhaps with another example of the
Cymet operation- -when the people responsible, in charge, said, "We

won't believe that the process is okay until it has run at--" and
then they made everybody pick his own number: ten tons a day,
thirty tons a day; everybody had his own number. Until it is run
at that scale, we won't believe it. I've often been thoughtful
about that, because that was an approach frequently taken and often
used by financial people. They felt that if you just did it on a
big one, it was okay, which isn't always true. What counts is what
you're doing.

Getting back to this manganese ore company experience that I
had, I think it was a very important part of my learning, and it
had its impact always on me, the fact that things don't work just
like you think they're going to. It's wonderful to have these
experiences early enough.

Swent: Is there anything there of that plant now?

Hazen: I've never been back. I just don't know.

Swent: Was the plant destroyed? You couldn't sell those things.

Hazen: The last I heard, people had taken the contents of those thickeners
and recovered what manganese they could, and then some people put
some flotation equipment in and tried to make a flotation
concentrate from Three Kids deposit. I would expect that by this
time all the equipment has been cannibalized, and probably the site
has been cleaned up. I'd like to go sometime and see that. I
lived in Boulder City at that time. I married Claire Wernecke,
whose father was Livingston Wernecke.

Swent: Of Alaska?

Hazen: Yes, Keno Hill. He worked for the Bradleys. Claire and I lived in
Boulder City at that time, and that's how I got acquainted with
Phil Bradley, because Livingston, Claire's father, worked for the
Bradleys in Alaska.

Swent: He was a well-known geologist.

Hazen: Yes. He was killed in an airplane accident in Alaska.

After that plant closed down, I came back and wrote the
report. At the time, the principal consultants we had who made an
impact on me were John Sullivan of Battelle Institute; Gilbert Seil
of Day and Zimmerman; Mr. Badger. There were some others, and many
government people. But these people in particular I had an
acquaintance with. And Mac Lake, and through Mac Lake, George
Humphrey. I was puzzled about what to do, because my draft board
was making noises. I received an offer from John Sullivan to go to

Battelle Institute. As a matter of fact, I had an offer also from
the Hanna people to get into the steel end of their business.

III BATTELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE, 1943 to 1946

A Happy Experience

Hazen: But the work at Battelle Institute was directly war related and
seemed like a better place for me to be.

Swent: That was in Ohio?
Hazen: Yes, Columbus, Ohio.

Swent: I think that since then they've put in a western branch, but at
that time it was only in Ohio.

Hazen: It was established by the will of Gordon Battelle.
Swent: I think it's called Battelle Memorial Institute.

Hazen: Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, a very famous place.
I was lucky to be there at the time when it had a very strong
metallurgical leaning. It was run by Clyde Williams, who was the
director of the Institute at that time, and John Sullivan was head
of the division having to do with metallurgy. He offered me a job
there working on flotation of iron ore. That was a very happy
time, a very happy experience working there at Battelle. We moved
to Ohio, and it was there that I met Frank Stephens, A. J. "Lefty"
Thompson and Tony Scott. A. C. Richardson was the boss of the
department. Robert (Bob) MacDonald, Adam Wesner. John Sullivan,
"Sully," was the big boss to whom I reported, but I reported to him
through A. C. Richardson. I was assigned this particular job of
working on flotation of iron ore.

Swent : Did you learn from this how to operate your own research company
later?

Hazen: All of this added up.

Swent: This was a similar kind of research institute to your company?

Hazen: Right.

Swent: Did they give you your independence?

Hazen: No, it wasn't run with that philosophy. It was a very fine place

to work, but the job of the senior guys was to get contracts. They
would get big contracts for a couple of years of study by major
companies.

Hazen: A note about those people I mentioned: Sully was the big boss, as
I say, and A. C. Richardson was the boss of the division. These
other names were people that I worked with on a daily basis, and we
all had a good time together. We got to know Frank and Sally
Stephens there very well, and Claire and I had our first child,
Claire Elise, while living in Columbus. Sally and Frank Stephens
were raising a young family. Adam Wesner took a few months off,
because, he said, "There is a wonderful new chemical called DDT
that is easy to make, and you could make a bundle of money if you
could just—because everybody wants DDT, because it is so
absolutely wonderful." He took some time off and put a little
chemical plant in his garage, and he made DDT and sold it. He did
fabulously well for a while, and then he came back to work.

Lefty Thompson was at Battelle for quite some time, and then
he left and went to Socorro, New Mexico. He and Betty lived at
Socorro for many, many years, where he was professor in New Mexico
School of Mining and Technology. We'll connect with him a little
later in our story, when I was at Los Alamos. I guess it was only
maybe a year ago that I got a call from Betty saying that Lefty had
passed away. He was perhaps eighty-five, and he was having a wild
tennis game and collapsed on the court of a heart attack. He was a
great human being, Lefty was.

Tony Scott left Battelle and went up to the Iron Range and set
up a company in Hibbing, Minnesota, to sell equipment to the iron
people. I connected up with Tony Scott many, many years later when
I went on a consulting job tip to Hibbing. He has passed away, too.

Bob MacDonald went to Newmont and ran the Newmont laboratory
in Danbury, Connecticut. I occasionally had contact with Bob over
the years, and not too many years ago Mary Ellen, Bob's wife, died.
Bob has moved to Golden, Colorado, and he married the widow of Al
Schlecten, a professor of metallurgy, a very fine guy. She had
been widowed for many years, and Bob was a widower, so those two
got together. Isn't it strange how history develops?

Work in Flotation of Iron Ore

Hazen: While I was at Battelle, I became very interested in the problems
of surface chemistry, as in flotation, and in problems of the
kinetics and the basic chemistry that was going on in the flotation
operation. Because of the experience that I had had in the
laboratory work before and the chemical reactions and ideas of
equilibrium, I tried some things on the flotation of magnetite,
using these chemical principles, which resulted in a patent on the
flotation of magnetite by adding an ion exchange resin. I don't
know that we need to get too technical about it, but the reason for
bringing it up is that this thinking, then, has passed through and
resulted in some of the work that I did on uranium.

Swent: The ion exchange?

Hazen: The ion exchange portion of it, because uranium chemistry and its
practice went through a tremendous metamorphosis in the late
fifties, and I was very involved. All of this has been very lucky,
hasn't it? It all just ties together. It has all been consistent
with a certain area of metallurgy, which has had some impact on
mining.

Swent: Flotation was not a new process. It had been around, but there
were new chemicals; is that right?

Hazen: Yes, that's right. I think flotation is absolutely marvelous and
underutilized. You see, something has happened to the mining
industry in the course of my lifetime. I'm not sure that I
understand all the dynamics, but the tremendous power that there
was — I'm talking about technical power. I think of Anaconda's
giant laboratory in Tucson and the work that has been done in
Newmont's Danbury laboratory. I don't know of any company that
wasn't supporting some fundamental technical activity of
importance. They're all gone. Kennecott still has some laboratory
but not much connected with mining activities. Anaconda had a
tremendous staff in Tucson and pilot plants and everything else.
They let all the people go, and as I understand it they gave the
facility to the university.

What happened? What is going to bring any new understanding
to mining? Certainly as far as the United States is concerned, I
think Hazen Research is the sole survivor of this kind of activity.
The Colorado School of Mines Research Institute is gone. Roshan
Bhappu has a small company in Tucson, but it's not very many people
any more. I would say that on the North American continent you
probably have Lakefield in Canada with substantial activity, and
Hazen Research.

Swent: Pan American just ended, didn't it?

Hazen: Yes. A man named Kirk was the driving force behind that

enterprise, a partner of Vedensky. He died, and then the whole
opportunity to produce machinery and sell it- -jigs and so
forth- -kind of disappeared during the war. I don't think they
survived very long at all. I never heard of them again after that
episode. Plato was gone, Dee was gone.

Swent: It's interesting that there's no research going on now other than
yours .

Hazen: I'm thoughtful about it as to what it might mean for the country.
If you are a country which all of a sudden comes upon what you
consider a tremendous problem, hazardous wastes and cleanups, you
find that a very substantial portion of this problem is occasioned
by the presence of heavy metals. You talk about lead, cadmium,
zinc, mercury. In California the lead levels are such that even if
you let the water stand in a faucet you'll get enough lead from the
brass that the faucet is made of, so they say, to give you a
problem. I don't know enough about the evidence for damage, but at
least the regulatory people think there is reason to be concerned.

Now, all of a sudden your country is faced with a very serious
problem, and what is required is superior, excellent technology
having to do with something that the mining people used to deal
with all the time. It does not require a different skill to take
mercury out of the New Almaden mercury ore than it does to take
mercury out of a waste dump that was occasioned because you got
fluorescent tubes in the waste dump. You get all these fluorescent
tubes, and when they wear out, what are you going to do with them?
They have some mercury and some rare earths. Because of the way
things are, you can't bury it. So what do you do? A nation facing
those problems must call upon the skills that were generated by the
mining industry, and they're not there.

Swent: They're not being generated now?

Hazen: No. Philosophically, I wonder whether sometimes in our zeal to
cure one thing we are perhaps raising some long-term problems.
It's a little hard to peer into the future—that is, with any
assurance.

IV PROCESS ENGINEER FOR DAY & ZIMMERMAN

Hazen: We're at Battelle, and I had done work mostly in flotation. Then
one day I received a letter from my old friend Gilbert Seil, whom
you remember we had seen back in the days of Three Kids deposit of
manganese ore. He was one of the advisors there. Well, he worked
for a company called Day and Zimmerman in Philadelphia, an
engineering company. He had convinced the management that they
should start a metallurgical arm which would do process
engineering.

I left out the name of a very important guy, Dean Holzgraf.
He was part of the effort in the pilot plant at Pan American and
then had gone along and was kind of my right-hand man at Three Kids
mine. When that enterprise folded up, I've forgotten just where
Dean went, but he went someplace.

In any event, Gilbert E. Seil had become acquainted with me
and with Dean. Dean was the chemical engineer. Gil Seil asked us
if we would be interested in joining with him as the first
employees of the division that Day and Zimmerman was going to
start, doing chemical processing. Well, this sounded like pretty
neat stuff.

Swent: A brand new thing?

Hazen: You bet. I left Battelle and that association and moved to

Philadelphia. For a Calif ornian, Philadelphia turned out- to be a
pretty hard city to live in. It was during the war, and I finally
found a house for the family by going down to the place where the
Philadelphia Daily Enquirer was printed. When papers came out and
were being picked up, I got a copy right then. Every day I would
rush toward anything that was for rent and finally found a place.
I got there just ahead of a couple of other people for a row house.
You know what a row house is?

Swent: Yes. A house with joint walls with the next house.

Hazen: Yes. Nevertheless, it was kind of exciting, because we were
starting a new activity. Doc Seil was very aggressive and a
well-known man in refractories — chromium refractories and things
like that. He was a very knowledgeable chemical engineer and a
very kindly guy. A little rough but very thoughtful. It was an
exciting kind of an activity, a very interesting thing to do.

Doc and I went to Chicago on the plane together one day to
make a presentation to a chemical company to do some process
development work for them and to give them some advice. Doc wasn't
feeling very well, and as we were walking back to the hotel I said,
"Doc, you just look terrible."

He said, "I don't feel very good."

I said, "You look yellow." He had had an operation perhaps
two or three weeks before for appendicitis. As we were eating
dinner, I said, "This ain't very good. I'll give you a choice.
Either we go to a hospital, or we go home."

He said, "Well, let's go home."

So I made arrangements, and by this time he was failing. We
got on the airplane, got off, and got him to the hospital in
Philadelphia. He died the following morning of yellow jaundice.
Is hepatitis the same thing?

Swent: I think so.

Hazen: He was bright yellow. It was dreadful.

Swent: It must have been terrible for you, too.

Hazen: Yes, that blew the whole thing. Dean and I were not well known in
the company, and nobody cared; so we were assigned to a pipe
accounting division. That was the kind of basic engineering that
didn't have any appeal to me, so I hunted for another job.

V PLUTONIUM PRODUCTION RESEARCH AT LOS ALAMOS LABORATORY, 1947-
1954

Hazen: Through an advertisement in Chemical Engineering News I saw a job

listed at Los Alamos, which I applied for and was interviewed. Dr.
Frank Pittman of Los Alamos made a tour. He said he had
interviewed 150 people or so, and I was one that they asked to come
back for a further interview. I didn't get the job they offered,
but they said there was another one that might be of interest. The
job was going to be the plant superintendent of plutonium
production activities.

Instead the job that opened up was research and development
for new process opportunities for plutonium. Boy, it was a great
day when I got that, because other opportunities were, for example,
going into Carolina to a textile plant. The whole thrust of what I
was interested in, the whole thread of this activity had been
broken by Doc Seil's death.

So I went to Los Alamos.

Swent: So by chance you got the research job rather than the production

job?

Hazen: Yes. One of the men who was interviewed, Bud Venable, got the

production job, so he and I got pretty well acquainted during the
next six or seven years.

Swent: Was this after Los Alamos was opened up, or was it still a deep
secret?

Hazen: It was still called the Manhattan Project. The Atomic Energy
Commission had not--

Swent: Did you have to go into town for your mail?

Hazen: Yes, a lot of that stuff. There was a lot of stuff you had to take
care of going into the working areas, but the town itself wasn't
anything.

Swent: You lived in Los Alamos?

Hazen: Let me think about that. I kind of forget, because I have lost

sight of how it was at the start. At the start, by this time the
war with Japan was over, and the major thrust of the work was
continuing development of atomic weapons from an engineering point
of view and the development of the hydrogen bomb. My association
with the physicists and so forth was related to work that we did
for them in making different kinds of shapes and configuration
sizes and purities and so forth of plutonium for weapon centers and
then certain parts of the hydrogen weapon. I've forgotten the
details of that, and I don't know how much of the stuff is still
classified. Although almost anybody can build them, it doesn't
mean that I can discuss them.

The other part of my activity was recovery. In any part of an
operation handling americium, plutonium, curium, and things like
that, if anybody does anything, sooner or later somebody has to
recover the residues from what they've done; and in the
manufacturing operation itself there are residues created. Well,
these residues have to be processed to recover any contained
plutonium, because you can't throw them out in the waste dump.
That was very interesting.

That Philadelphia episode with Day and Zimmerman was kind of a
detour.

Swent: A bleak one.

Hazen: It wasn't a very happy time. I certainly was not on any path that
was taking me back—particularly after Doc was gone, there wasn't
anything that could ever lead back to the mining industry.

More about Grandfather Biedenbach

[Interview 2: July 23, 1993] ##

Swent: There was one item about your grandfather that you didn't mention
yesterday, and I thought we should pick it up.

Hazen: That had to do with my grandfather being very much an outdoorsman.
As I said, I think he was in the Sierra Club. I may be
mis remember ing that, but he was always very active in these kinds
of conservation, outdoor things. In the summertime he used to
serve as a guide to take parties into Yosemite Valley by mule.
I've often thought of how wonderful it must have been to go into
Yosemite Valley when they had to go in on the back of a mule and
then wander all over the valley and have nobody else around.

Swent: Did he know John Muir? Did he speak of him at all?

Hazen: I guess I can't be sure about that. I'd be surprised if he hadn't.
I hadn't thought about that. Where are Muir Woods?

Swent: Over in Mar in County.

Hazen: I know that my Uncle Carl, who had done quite a bit on Fish Ranch
Road, spoke of John Muir at various times.

Even in my grandfather's time teachers weren't paid enough so
that you didn't have to work in the summer.

Swent: You never went with him into Yosemite?

Hazen: No. That was probably before I was born.

Swent: But you were well aware that he had done this?

Hazen: Well aware. We used to have some old pictures around of Pop.

Swent: You've just hired on at Los Alamos.

Hazen: Yes. My wife was in Berkeley having our son, Nick, at the time; so
I went to Los Alamos while she was in Berkeley, and after our son
was born, she joined me there. When I went there, the man that I
reported to was Dr. Frank Pittman. The job that I had was to pull
together, you might say, a plutonium activity which was already
there but which had certain assignments that needed to be done.
They decided that this would be done better if they added to the
staff and put somebody in charge of this group of people who were
doing recovery activities of plutonium. This was at a pl'ace called
DP West. I don't know what the DP stands for, but it probably has
something to do with plutonium; I never thought about it before.

The people in that activity were divided into two sections,
one of which was the group of people who had been concerned with
producing plutonium for weapons by whatever methods that seemed
appropriate, but not in anything which would be called a particular
plant production facility. The other people were doing chemical

research and development, usually recovery of plutonium from
strange other things. Plutonium was used as a component of many
other kinds of things—explosive devices and so on, for atomic
research and development. Usually this wound up with some kind of
a waste product that contained plutonium that you couldn't just
sweep out the door, so it would all be sent to the DP site, where
it would be recovered. Since you had most of the chemical elements
of the periodic table that you had to separate plutonium from, it
was a good place to get a good education in chemistry and also
plutonium chemistry.

Plutonium chemistry was pretty well known, because people like
Glenn Seaborg and others who were involved in the development of
all of this radiochemistry had worked things out pretty well
without having very much material to work with. You usually did it
just by the analysis of solutions.

When I got there, Frank Pittman took me- -of course I had been
through all of the clearances and had all of that stuff taken care
of.

Swent: We should mention the organization. You were hired by the
University of California, weren't you?

Hazen: Yes, and I think they had their contracts with the Manhattan
District.

Swent: Which is the army.

Hazen: I don't know how that contractual relationship worked, but I was an
employee of the University of California during the time that I was
there. It was really very wonderful activity. You were given a
house, and life was made as easy as possible for you. The rent was
low; if it snowed, somebody came and cleaned off the snow; if you
didn't have enough firewood, somebody would deliver firewood. As a
matter of fact, we even had fireplaces, which we regularly used.
Of course, it is a beautiful place.

Swent: You said you had a jeep as well.

Hazen: Ah, yes. When I came, I was given the keys to the house and the
keys to a jeep. Life was made pretty easy. But we worked hard.
Mostly the focus was on work, and we were continually aware in all
the work of the security aspects and the contamination aspects of
the materials we were working with.

Frank Pittman gave me a dissertation for a couple of hours on
my first day there of how an atomic bomb was made, what the role
was of plutonium in this, and the various kinds of activities that

had to go on to produce one. In general, it gave me a very clear
idea as to what we were going to be doing, and that was basically
to develop a more production-oriented activity for plutonium. This
activity then involved building a unit that would be able to take
plutonium nitrate from Hanford [Washington] , which was boiled down
to something like syrup- -plutonium nitrate has very high
solubility—and convert it into plutonium metal, which would then
go as a component of atomic weapons after the initiators and all of
the other stuff was put on it.

Frank Pittman outlined to me what was expected of me, and I
then met my staff. The head of the chemistry activity was a man
named A. V. Henrickson, Gus Henrickson. He was a Swede and a very
fine chemist. He'd had some time at Oak Ridge and had been at Los
Alamos for a few years by the time I got there. He headed the
chemistry end, and a man named Bob Ryland was the one who handled
the engineering section. This was essentially my staff. There was
another man hired at the same time I was, Bud Venable, who was to
pull together and take care of production activities of another
sort than those related to the chemistry. He was the one who
worried about some of the metallurgical aspects and if there was
machining of the plutonium required. Ultimately, when the research
activities were completed by the R & D group, he'd go over the
production aspects of it as production manager.

Swent: He's the one you said went on to Rocky Flats?

Hazen: Yes. Rocky Flats was founded, but Venable went up to Rocky Flats
when it was being started. The technology that was used at Los
Alamos was transferred, I believe, to Rocky Flats.

We might talk for a moment about the radiation hazards and
contamination.

Radiation Hazards and Contamination

Swent: We'll also want to follow through on the process from the, syrup to
the metal.

Hazen: One of the things that you were continually aware of, always and

forever, was contamination. Plutonium is an alpha emitter, and as
such the alpha particles can be stopped by, say, a sheet of paper.
But it's pretty poisonous in the sense that if you get it ingested
into your body, it then goes through the blood stream and lodges in
the bones. If you have a very powerful alpha emitter in the middle
of your bones, then it kind of messes up the blood production and

the physiology. I'm not sure I know the details, except that it's
pretty deadly; you don't want to have very much of it.

Swent: But the radiation itself can be stopped by a piece of paper?

Hazen: Yes. Radiation itself is easy to control.

Swent: You don't need lead shields and that sort of thing?

Hazen: No. Just put it on the other side of a window pane or something

like that, and you're okay. But you have to keep adjusting it, and
therefore the eternal challenge was to see that all of your
engineering, all of your facilities, and so forth, were built with
an eye to this problem of keeping it away from people.

Swent: Breathing it would be the danger?

Hazen: I don't think you want to drink it, either, but at least if you

drink it you have a better chance of excreting it than if you get
it in your lungs. If you get it in your lungs--it obviously gets
there as small particles, as a dust, and therefore it's pretty easy
to get into the bloodstream, which is where the damage is done.

Swent: So you were controlling the air?

Hazen: Yes, and we did all kinds of things. As I look back, I would say

that ever present was the thought of contamination. You had things
around in the buildings called Filter Queens, which were like
vacuum cleaners, that sucked the air through a piece of blotting
paper that looked like a filter. These pieces of paper were then
taken and analyzed for their alpha activity; they were put under a
counter to see if they had any alpha activity indicating the
pick-up of plutonium.

So the air was continually monitored. When you went into the
working areas, you had to change clothes. You had to wear booties,
and you had to throw the booties off when you would go from one
place to another. Everything that you could think of was done,
including having differential air pressure, so that the highest
pressure was in the place where people were working, and then the
pressure diminished as you got closer and closer to the plutonium.
So if there was a leak of some sort, it would be towards the
plutonium, and the air around that was filtered.

Of course, everything was done in glove boxes. A reasonable
configuration of a glove box would be a box that was perhaps eight
feet tall, maybe ten feet long, and maybe three feet deep, which
had plastic sides so that you could see through. Then it had
portholes about six inches in diameter. Through these portholes

were attached long rubber gloves sealed to the plastic. If you
approached a glove box and put your hand through these portholes,
you would be putting them inside these rubber gloves. These were
shoulder-length rubber gloves, and you could reach inside and
manipulate the plutonium or anything else that you were working
with inside. That way you had no contact; there was no way the
plutonium could get to you. Of course, you wore a respirator, too.

So you had special clothing, booties, respirators, and you
worked with rubber gloves.

Swent: Film badges?

Hazen: Always film badges. Every so often—I've forgotten the frequency,
perhaps every few months- -you had to go for two days to the
hospital, where all your urine was collected and monitored to see
if there was any plutonium content in the body. People were always
wandering around with radiation detectors, counters, along the
floor and on the walls, seeing if there were any hot spots. You
can detect alpha pretty easily. If you found some contamination,
then you had to circle it and get a clean-up crew going. Now you
have generated some rags which may have some alpha activity, so you
have to do something about those. It's never-ending; always the
awareness of the hazard. But I suppose, like working in a dynamite
factory, you always were vigilant but went about your business.
But it was an additional constraint to get things done.

Swent: Perhaps this is the time to mention what it didn't do to you.

Hazen: Well, here I am. My last birthday I was seventy-six, and I'm
looking forward to going mountain hiking on the weekend. Also,
people are so concerned about the relationship between smoking and
radiation. There probably is such, but certainly in my case I was
a heavy smoker from the time I was twenty-one until I was
forty-five or so. By heavy smoker, I mean a pack or more a day,
until I finally managed to quit, which was pretty tough to do.

Swent: But you were smoking at the time that you were also exposed to
plutonium?

Hazen: Yes, but I don't know that I was ever really exposed to plutonium.
It was there, but I'm not sure that I had any exposure. My
urinalysis never showed up with any plutonium in it. If there was
anything very much, you were immediately taken out of that
activity.

There was lots of awareness. Of course, at Los Alamos there
were lots of things handled at the time besides plutonium. There

was uranium 235 and all the radioactive isotopes one can think of.
It was a wonderful research center.

The job that I had was to be concerned with the recovery
activities so that no plutonium got out and there was no waste of
any kind- -that it could be recovered from whatever kind of mixture
it was in--and then to design and build something which would be a
production facility for taking the plutonium nitrate from Hanford
and--. I guess this would be a point to describe that a little
more technically.

Production of Plutonium

Hazen: The plutonium nitrate came in stainless steel bottles, very thick.
The process chemically was to take this material and purify it. At
Los Alamos this material, the syrup, was taken out of the container
it was in and put into a container where it could be diluted and
precipitated as—well, plutonium has a number of insoluble
compounds, but the one I recall that was used most often was
oxalate; plutonium was precipitated as an oxalate.

Then this plutonium oxalate was filtered and was then
converted by hydrogen fluoride gas to plutonium tetrafluoride.
Then the plutonium tetrafluoride was mixed with calcium metal and
iodine and placed in an induction furnace, brought up to the point
where it ignited; it was placed in a crucible which was in the
furnace. Of course, you had to have all of that pretty carefully
sealed so that it didn't get out any place. After the reduction in
this crucible, the reaction was between the plutonium tetrafluoride
and the calcium to form calcium fluoride and plutonium metal.
After things cooled off, this crucible was removed from the furnace
and spread out on a kind of a round table where you could paw
through the remnants and separate out the plutonium button. This
plutonium button was then cleaned up and went into another
operation where it was put in a vacuum, melted, and poured into a
hemispherical shape, which was one-half of the center a plutonium
ball.

Swent: I think you mentioned that there was a platinum--

Hazen: That was one of the interesting things about the atmosphere at Los
Alamos which made it so different from doing research any place
else. That is that you were helped any way anybody could think of,
to help the people who were trying to get things done. I remember
one incident when I went into a warehouse, into the stores
department, you might say, and checked 'out a kilogram of powdered

platinum for use in the unit we were building. I don't know very
many places where you can go and ask the keeper of the warehouse
for a kilogram of powdered platinum without having some questions
asked.

In any event, this is the chemistry of what needed to be
gotten into some kind of form so that it could be repeated and
every batch could be treated the same. It needed to have a
production plant built, and that was one of my assignments.

Swent: This platinum was used as a filter?

Hazen: Yes. If we talk about this unit, the production machine that was

actually built as part of my job--. I think that what was of great
importance was trying to figure out how to build a device so that
one could, day after day, carry out this sequence of chemical
operations. One choice would be to have big boxes and have people
in glove boxes doing the operations. That was the way it had
always been done, and it was decided that they didn't want to do
that any more. The next thing is that one could contemplate having
big boxes, the plutonium would be in it, and you would have robotic
arms and claws and things like that. Well, the science of robotics
wasn't all that far advanced at that time, added to which it's
pretty awkward; it's pretty difficult to do. Even then, it
requires somebody there, doing it.

The Production Units

Hazen: What we decided to do was to build the units; actually, there were
two of them built. It ultimately wound up being a great box about
twenty- five feet long, four feet high, and two feet wide, the sides
of which were made of thick plastic so that you could see through
it. Inside it, it had various devices for handling plutonium, and
these devices could be actuated by air cylinders, hydraulic
cylinders, electrical magnetic systems, and so on. It had chains
and conveyors inside this box.

The philosophy, then, was that there was a great big room, and
this production unit was in that room and had its own air system,
which was kept at a lower pressure inside the box than was in the
room. So if there was a leak, the air would flow in to where the
plutonium was instead of out. Also in the room was a control room,
which had separate access to the outdoors. Therefore that room was
at ambient air pressure, and the barn that housed this unit was at
a lower pressure; so again, if there was a leak in the control

room, the air would flow toward the plutonium and away from the
operator.

There was one pane of glass the operator was looking through
in his control room. He could see the unit, which was only a few
feet away, and he could look through the plastic of the unit
itself, so he could watch the operation that was going on. He had
sets of buttons and switches to do that.

An interesting thing about that, there were certain radiation
levels which were permissible for people to be in, and the
difficulty we had was cleaning up New Mexico air to a level that
was low enough so that it could meet the standards required for air
to an operator in the plant. [laughs] New Mexico in a windstorm
has lots of radioactivity floating around. Because of the concern
there was about all of this, the standards were pretty tight. We
used to laugh about the fact of having to put so many filters on
the intake air.

Swent :
Hazen:

This was the philosophy of the system that was finally decided
upon, and I spent perhaps two years designing and building that
system. All that work has been declassified, and these photographs
and so on of that unit are available. You could probably have a
copy of the report, because it has all been declassified.

Frank Pittman left, and his place was taken .by R. D. Baker,
who was then my boss for many, many years. Interestingly enough,
in the sixties long after I had left Los Alamos I received a call
from Dick Baker, and I hadn't talked with him for a long time. He
said that they were decommissioning the production facility, which
had been my responsibility for getting underway there and which had
been their production facility, day after day, for twenty years.
When they decided that they were going to take it apart, for
whatever reason, they were talking about it, and thought it would
be nice if somebody called Wayne Hazen and told him that his baby
has grown up now.

It functioned well for twenty years?

Yes. I was very fortunate by that time because I had had so many
experiences of things that I tried that didn't work. I really
finally understood that things don't fail ever in the office when
you're thinking about how wonderful it ought to be; it's only out
in the working area that you have the troubles. Harking back to my
experiences in the early days with manganese and these other
things, it was always, "Yes, that's neat, but what is going to go
wrong that will make it not turn out this way?" Of course, a lot
of mining activity is always concerned with that- -not only the
known risk but the unknown things.

In any event, this was a rewarding time. That was where I
made the acquaintance of Gus Henrickson. The reason for making a
particular point about Gus is that he and I became partners in
circumstances which I can relate in a moment. He and I left Los
Alamos together and went to work for a company. He and I stayed
together, and he was one of the original members of Hazen Research
and was the first vice-president of Hazen Research. He only
retired a few years ago from Hazen Research, so from 1950 to 1990,
forty years, we made a good team. As he always said, "I get all
the work done, and you sell it." [laughter] It was a good
combination.

Swent: Would you mention your experience with Enrico Fermi and some of the
other famous people?

Hazen: I was privileged to go to staff meetings, so I got to know, by

seeing them at staff meetings, the people who we think of as being
Los Alamos oldtimers. Norris Bradbury was the director of the
laboratory at that time. Robert Oppenheimer had just left. I got
to see people like Nils Bohr, who came as a visiting lecturer
occasionally. This was pretty heady stuff for a youngster; I
thought of myself as a youngster.

Swent: You have made some uncomplimentary remarks about some of these
people .

Hazen: [laughs] The person I remember being most impressed by was Enrico
Fermi. He was there on a visit one time, and as a part of the tour
he was being given he came out to DP West. I was assigned as the
guide to show him around what we were doing. I was impressed
because he seemed like such a regular guy, a person you would
describe as a pretty neat person. We went on, and he was very
interested in the recovery and all the things related to it. It
happened that as we came to a glove box in which there was sitting
a hemisphere of plutonium that was one half of the component of a
fission weapon, I reached in one glove and picked up this
hemisphere inside the glove box. He reached in another glove, and
I handed him this plutonium. He just sat there and weighed it in
his hand and made a comment to the effect that this was the first
time that he had ever really seen any substantial amount of
plutonium. All of his work, of course, had been in solution and
with microgram quantities, and here was the vindication of all
that; actually, the transmutation has resulted in a substantial
quantity of material. I always remember that as being a nice
experience to have had.

Not all of those people from the early days were necessarily
humble. Some of them recognized that their brilliance was
resulting in something of substantial impact to the world, and some

of them felt pretty impressed with their performance. Most of them
were great people.

Hazen: I was lucky that the house was next door to Dr. William Oakes.

Bill and his wife, Josephine, were good neighbors for a long, long
time. He was really a first-class surgeon, and the Los Alamos
hospital was a first-class medical facility.

Security Regulations

Hazen: I might comment on security regulations. They were always on our
minds, but after a while many of them become kind of ridiculous.
After a while security regulations can become rote so that they
lose their validity. Nevertheless, you keep on doing them. We had
all the regular security regulations. You had to have the badge
with the right kinds of numbers on it to get into certain areas.
The only person who had a badge that permitted him to get into all
areas was the mail boy. He looked like the most important person,
and maybe he was! He could get in anyplace.

The security regulations were strict. There was a guard house
you went through to get inside the chain-link fence. In and out of
buildings, even before you could go into the areas where the
plutonium was handled, there was a check station where your badge
was checked again. You had to change your clothes, you had to put
on booties, caps, and so on; you had to wear gloves and
respirators. Always the principle was that you would go from an
area of higher pressure into areas of lower pressure.

My comment about security sometimes becoming silly is
illustrated by an incident in which I was writing a report after
this production facility had been completed; or parts of it had
been completed, and I was preparing drawings and reports and so on
about it. I stayed late one night, checking out some drawings by
comparing them with what had been built. So here I was, looking at
blueprints and drawings on top of a piece of equipment and checking
the equipment against the drawings. I got tired, and I went home.

The following morning I was asked to go to security because I
had a security violation. I had left a confidential document out
without being inside a file. I thought, "This is carrying things
pretty far, when having the equipment out is okay, but you can't
leave the drawing of the equipment out." Their answer was that
somebody could steal the drawing, but they couldn't steal the

equipment. I said, "They could take a picture of the equipment, if
you want to guess how people might do things." But I was not very
convinced.

But we were eternally careful, or tried to be, seeing that
files were locked. At the end of the day there was always a file
check; security officers would go through to see that all the files
had been locked. Have you ever read Richard Feynman's book, Surely
Fou're Joking, Mr. Feynmanl

Swent: No, I haven't.

Hazen: It's a marvelous book. Dick Feynman was one of those people who
was very, very unusual, very brilliant, and very regular in the
sense that he was very social minded. He learned to play bongo
drums. At a party, he was always a guy who had lots of good
nature. It describes in his book that he just took delight in
finding ways to cause security people problems.

If you have a secure office, and you have a file with a
tumbler lock on it, you have three numbers that you have to learn
to undo it. If you go into somebody's office where the drawer is
open, it's going to be stuck on something so that you can tell what
the last number was. So when he wandered into other people's
offices, if they were open he would make a mental note and put down
the last number. Then he discovered that very frequently people
who have to remember combinations make a little notation. He found
that the lower right-hand corner of somebody's desk blotter was
very apt. After while he began to learn enough combinations so
that he played a little joke. Sometimes people would get locked
out of their files for one reason or another. Somebody else would
come who thought he had the combination but didn't, so Feynman
would make great fuss about bringing a stethoscope and pretending
he was a safe cracker while he opened the safe for people. He got
quite a reputation and was a terrible, terrible trial to those
people who were bureaucratic believers in the sanctity of
procedures .

Swent: He was working at Los Alamos when you were there?

Hazen: Yes.

Problems of Unaccounted-For Loss

Swent: You might tell about your problems with the--

Hazen: Yes, with security. It illustrates differences and the way people
look at life. After Manhattan District was converted into the
Atomic Energy Commission, lots of the procedures became much more
rigid. People who were trying to do things managed by getting
together, talking about things, deciding what needed to be done,
and doing it. But after this mission had been accomplished and you
got into what might be considered to be more pedestrian activities
like production and so forth, and some of the major problems of
theoretical interest had been resolved and the great people who had
been assembled had gone back to their laboratories, and you were
taken over more by administrators, some problems would arise that
were difficult. One in particular had to do with me and keeping
track of plutonium.

If you were bringing plutonium in on a daily basis and were
putting it into a piece of equipment, then performing various
chemical operations, out of the other end would come a plutonium
button. But in addition to the plutonium button there would be a
residue, the slag. I indicated that the plutonium was converted in
an operation from plutonium fluoride, so there was this slag, which
would contain a small amount of plutonium. Then when the Hanford
nitrate was taken into a vessel and purified, it was a solution.
It was filtered through the platinum disk, which was what I needed
the sintered platinum for. It was filtered through a cup which was
about six inches in diameter, lined with platinum metal, and had
this sealed-in, sintered platinum disk, because it was a very
corrosive solution that was being handled. That solution would
contain a little bit of plutonium.

Every place you turned, there was some little place where
there was some plutonium. What you had to do was make a material
balance. You would weigh and analyze the plutonium coming in, you
would weigh and analyze all of these wastes that went someplace,
and you would weigh and get an analysis of the plutonium button.
With these weights and analyses you added up all of the ways that
the plutonium had been converted since the plutonium nitrate came,
you subtracted the sum of all of these residues from your feed, and
they had to balance. If they didn't balance, then you would wonder
why and would want some reasonable explanation.

Obviously there are errors in analysis, there are unavoidable
errors in weighing. I don't mean mistakes; I mean that every
measurement has some limit of accuracy. In this addition of all of
the ways that the plutonium had been separated and the components
had been separated into, over a period of a considerable period of
time there was a discrepancy. The summation of all of these
products did not add up to the summation of all that had been put
in by a hundred grams. We had to file reports all the time as to
what was in and what was out, and with the new kind of philosophy

of watching things, somebody checked through this, and there was
this unaccounted-for loss of a hundred grams of plutonium.

Well, the unaccounted-for loss got into the hands of the FBI,
or maybe it was the security people. In any event, there began an
investigation: where is the missing hundred grams? As if somehow
or another a hundred grams had been taken away. If you attempt to
talk to people who basically have an accounting point of view of
the world and who are accustomed to having an audit, and if there
is a hundred dollars missing it means there is a mistake--. The
idea that there would be a limitation on the accuracy with which
you can count coins—there really isn't; you've either got the
hundred coins, or you don't have a hundred coins. But the fact
that you divide things into parts, you analyze and weigh them, and
the fact that these may not all balance out, we recognize by saying
"unaccounted-for loss."

But the use of that term "loss" got into the hands of the FBI,
and they made quite a thing about this. We had lie detectors and
everything else, hunting for the missing hundred grams. There was
no way, in conversation that I had with the security people, that I
could ever get over that gap, that there wasn't a hundred grams
missing, because they would say, "Then where is it?"

I'd say, "Well, it isn't anywhere."
"But you had it when it came in."
I said, "No, we had a measurement."
"Ah, so the measurement's in error."

"No, there are limitations to the ability to analyze things."
There was not any way to bridge that gap. Finally it got into one
of those things where I just said, "I don't know what to do."

They said, "Well, how do you account for it?"

I said, "I can't, and that's why it's called 'unaccounted
for'. If I could answer the question you are asking, it would not
be in the 'unaccounted-for'; it would have been called 'known
loss'. But the 'unaccounted-for' is this error of closure."

One of them actually said, "You know a lot about the workings
of this. Do you think somebody could have stolen it?"

I said, "No. Stolen what?"

"Well, the hundred grams." Here again is a picture of a
button weighing a hundred grams that somebody took away. Then they
said, "If you did want to steal some plutonium, what would you do?"

I thought about it for a while, and I said, "There is a place
in the processing where you wind up with a chunk of plutonium
metal, the button from the fusion. I guess if I wanted to and were
appropriately dressed, and if I were a part of the clean-up or
janitorial service or monitoring and could get into the inner
areas, I would probably try and reach in through some glove box and
take that thing, wrap it up and take it out of the glove box, open
the door to the outside, and throw it over the chain link fence."
This caused a certain amount of confusion, and they finally wound
up with the conclusion that I must have been thinking about how to
steal plutonium, because that was something they hadn't thought of
as a pretty easy way to do it.

Swent: Were you a little nervous that they were really after you?

Hazen: No, because it was pretty clear and I felt pretty comfortable that
I knew what was going on. Not only that, I had the faith that lie
detector tests probably are usable, and since I didn't have
anything I was concealing, it didn't make me nervous. Annoyed is a
better word for it.

We were always conscious of the need for security, and we put
up with the procedures. We devised the best procedures we could;
we helped out in every way we could to keep track of things,
because none of us wanted to- -well, for one thing, you don't want
to think there's some plutonium loose someplace. Therefore the
contamination hazard and the security were things that made that
job quite different.

Swent: You also mentioned the ingenuity of the people who were there.

Hazen: I described briefly the philosophy behind the machine that we

constructed. When we were building it and it came time to put in
the electrical circuits, we built the box and the various actuators
were there. We had been careful to have all the actuators and
everything purchased—hydraulic cylinders, conveyers, motors — such
that it all could be set in motion with six volt, low voltage
current. Inside the control room there were panels, and on the
panels were bunches of knobs that you could turn. The knobs were
inscribed so that you could turn to an operation you wanted, such
as addition of acid to the purification circuit or lowering the
sintered platinum filter into a furnace. All of these motions were
actuated by six volts.

When it came time to put that in, I asked a young man named
Dick Thomas, who was a very ingenious kind of a guy, and he
actually did most of the wiring. Since it was six-volt, it was
pretty easy. We were talking about what to use for a power source,
and I had in mind that we ought to locate some good kind of
constant voltage. He said, "I've already got it installed, and it
works fine. I went to a hardware store and bought a six-volt
doorbell transformer."

So as far as I know, that entire production operation was a
six-volt doorbell transformer. One could say, "Gee, that's a
pretty weak reed to lean the operation on," but it's not very
difficult to get at and to change.

Swent: Practical.

Hazen: Pretty practical, pretty easy.

Swent: Appropriate technology. [laughter]

Hazen: I think that's the word for it. The report is available to you.
Along with that nice telephone conversation saying that they were
decommissioning the 501 line (I think it was called), I received a
copy of the report which I had written on the activity which had
been declassified and is now available.

Swent: You weren't allowed to have it before?

Hazen: Oh, no, I should say not. That was pretty classified.

Swent: You have said it was the "land of the lotus eaters."

Hazen: Yes. There wasn't very much that you couldn't do. There were not
any impediments to your getting on with your work. It was a
wonderful example of what can be done. But of course I was there
during a period where the development of the hydrogen weapons was
very much on everybody's mind, but the main thrust, with all that
excitement, was on whether it was possible to make that reaction
go. The development of the physics and the mathematics and all of
that early years stuff was done, and this was a transition. You
might almost say it was like an entrepreneurial company where there
was all the excitement, and everybody did anything because you all
had a common purpose, and you got together and talked about it. It
begins a transition into an orderly, managed operation.

Most of the greats of physics had gone back to their schools.
We were, as I was, engaged in taking all of this knowledge and
converting it into something that could be sustained as a
production operation, but there was still lots of novelty. When we

got into hydrogen weapons, thermonuclear devices, there was a great
deal of wonderful metallurgy that had to be accomplished so that
you could change the shape of plutonium weapons to give them new
ways to use plutonium and different kinds of devices. Then there
were lots of strange things that one used. I'm not sure how much
of this has been declassified, but we got into lots of the kinds of
things where physicists would sit around and say, "I wonder if you
had a sphere eighteen inches in diameter and two millimeters thick,
made out of some exotic thing, what that would do to the physics of
the reaction?" Then they would say, "Why don't we get the guys at
DP site to make one so we can try it?" That was fun.

Swent: You were doing that kind of thing?

Hazen: Yes, I got into a good deal of that sort of thing, and with other
compounds than plutonium, too.

I kind of had a feeling that, "Gee, the major big purpose of
this wonderful organization has now been achieved, and the spirit
has accomplished what it set out to do. This center is now being
disbanded and will probably grow, get bigger, but it no longer has
the kind of purpose that it had when I first was here." After a
while, I guess I got restless.

Also, during that period of time—you raised the question of
health and any relation to smoking—we participated as much as we
could with various kinds of medical studies that were going on. I
think I am an example of the fact that you can smoke and be exposed
to plutonium and still live. It may be that I am still too young
for these things to have their effect.

Norma and I went backpacking in Nepal when I was sixty. We
went up to the base camp of Everest, and I began to run out of
steam. There's a little place called Kala Patar, and it's the base
camp for Mt. Everest. The sirdar, a young Nepalese boy (he might
have been twenty), was the one who was our leader. Norma and I
were alone; we weren't part of a group. When we got to the base
camp, Norma developed mountain sickness, edema. She was getting
real sick. It was late in the day when we got there.

We got the tent pitched, and I walked up to the young Nepalese
and he said, "Would you like to go up to the top of Kala Patar?"
which was another couple of thousand feet.

I said, "Sure." He practically ran. I could hardly believe
it; he just trotted right up. A long, long time later I finally
struggled up to the top, and there he was, lying on his back,
smoking. He was a heavy smoker, as many of them are. Of course,
tuberculosis is endemic in that part of the country.

Swent :
Hazen:

When I got back down, Norma was getting really sick. In the
middle of the night she said, "I have to go; I have to get out of
here." It was just beginning dawn when she got up, put on her
boots, and said, "Come when you can," and she headed downhill. By
the time she got down—it probably took her four or five hours to
drop two or three thousand feet in elevation—her headache began to
diminish, and she got better. But it was pretty scary.

Back to Los Alamos. At that time, of course, we had contact
with other people and other laboratories. Argonne Lab, Oak Ridge.
Lots of the chemistry --the chemistry of uranium and so on— had been
worked out by the people at Oak Ridge. There were many kinds of
processes in use, and I got comfortable with all of them.
Processes like ion exchange, solvent extraction, and differential
precipitation became like second nature when you were trying to
separate these trans-uranics. Then you have to use differential
procedure, differential precipitation, selective f locculation, in
your separation when you had to pull a little bit of plutonium out
of a big mixture of nickel and copper. Somebody had an alloy that
came to us because it had plutonium in it, and we had to get the
plutonium back out of it.

So I was very aware of new ways of doing things, basically
separation procedures. These were all regular separation
procedures: how do you separate this from that?

Using exotic materials, though.

Except using methods which were not customarily used, and certainly
not in the mining industry. I've forgotten the sequence of events,
but for part of this time Dad was at Standard Cyaniding Company,
outside of Lovelock.

The old Standard Mine?

Yes. He wrote an article on that and published it: "How do you
make money on $2.40 ore?"

Was Stuart Rawlings there then? Did you know him?

Yes, I met him. I guess he was the guy who found that mine. A guy
by the name of Bradley- -not the mining Bradley family, but Henry
Bradley— was the geologist that Dad worked with a lot.

Phil Bradley does have a brother named Henry.

Yes, but this was not he. In any event, Dad was in gold mining,
but he had to give up gold mining with the order L-208 that made it

not possible during the war. Gold mines could keep operating as
long as they didn't use any material or manpower. [laughter]

Swent :

Hazen:

And didn't produce any gold,
else, they could continue.

If they produced arsenic or something

Yes. We think of Getchell as being the famous example of people
who luck out because they could no longer mine gold but happily
came upon a big tungsten deposit, so they got through the war. But
there's a lot of arsenic in the Getchell, too. As a matter of
fact, that was one of Dorr-Oliver's early efforts at fluid bed
roasting—the roasting of the Getchell ore to get rid of the
arsenic.

VI TRANSFERRING TECHNOLOGY TO MINING

The Uranium Boom on the Colorado Plateau

Hazen: Dad then, because he could no longer continue on being a gold

producer, got into the uranium activities. He was a consultant
with the AEC in Grand Junction during the time of the uranium boom.

Swent: Did he start with vanadium?

Hazen: Oh, yes. That whole history of the Colorado plateau and the

development, and particularly what seems to me unbelievable wisdom
on the part of the government to start the whole buying program--
you know, the USGS [US Geological Survey] had done a lot of
prospecting for uranium in the vanadium areas and had arrived at a
conclusion that probably there weren't going to be any commercial
finds of uranium in the United States. So the government issued
the Circular 5 buying program. Dad was part of that group at Grand
Junction.

Swent: This inspired the little guys.

Hazen: Oh, yes. The wisdom behind that was just wonderful. They said,

"Well, okay, this organized effort of all us geologists isn't doing
anything. What we can do is make it possible for people; if they
find uranium, we'll buy it from them." So they set a price and a
grade and things like that. Obviously, everybody and his brother
could go buy a geiger counter and run around over the mountains.
That produced such a flood of uranium and so many finds that they
finally had to stop the program, because they were going to run out
of money. That basic thing made it possible for small people to
get into uranium. The whole story of the Plateau uranium venture
is a fascinating one. You ought to get that put together.

Swent: There are several people who would like to. Just this very point
that you mention is one that I'm interested in. What you read
frequently in the literature is that that the buying program was

rigged for the big guy. It's my recollection, as you were just
saying, that it was anything but that. It freed the little guy and
was biased in their favor if anything.

Hazen: Absolutely. It was done to stimulate the production of uranium,

and it did because small prospectors really began getting out there
in small activities. We think of Charlie Steen, at Atlas, at
Moab--

Swent: And Vernon Pick.

Hazen: Oh, yes, all of these people. The Thornbergs, and you could go on
naming indefinitely small people who came upon uranium deposits
because they got out there with a geiger counter and a pickaxe and
began exploring the Colorado Plateau.

Swent: And did very well.

Hazen: Yes. Frequently they were then bought out by the majors, which is
a reasonable thing to do. But the development was entirely so that
small people would be encouraged.

Swent: But that's getting lost in the record, I think.

Hazen: That's too bad. What was going on in the Colorado Plateau and in
uranium at the time I was at Los Alamos was a wonderful story also
of development.

Hazen: At that time vanadium was the ore that was being treated

commercially. Union Carbide is a name that comes to mind, and

Vanadium Corporation of America, and there were plants for the
production of vanadium. Uranium was a nuisance. You had a real

problem, because you had to get rid of the uranium so that you

could get vanadium. The article of commerce was so-called red
cake, which was vanadium pentoxide.

Swent: Were you aware of this through your father?

Hazen: Yes. These activities I knew about because of conversations with
Dad. Unhappily, security restrictions were such that I couldn't
talk to him about any particulars of what I was doing, but I was
very aware of what he was doing.

Swent: He was living in Grand Junction?

Hazen: Yes, he and Mother were in Grand Junction at that time. The AEC
had a very active metallurgical research and development activity

in Grand Junction. Charlie MacArthur is one of the people I
remember from that, and there were other people. Charlie MacArthur
then went on to Utah.

Swent: Had your father started his own research?

Hazen: He served as a consultant to them, so he therefore had a small--

Swent: But he had not established Hazen Research?

Hazen: Oh, no, because that didn't come until 1961. He served as a

consultant on uranium activities. At that time, if people wanted
to recover uranium they had a black-cake process, which resulted in
the precipitation of uranium as a uranium phosphate. The recovery
was low, it was a very difficult procedure, and on and on. There
were lots of difficulties.

But there were other beginning changes taking place in
metallurgy. I'm not sure how all of these times came together, but
I know that Dad was in touch with a man named Buffalo Kennedy.
Buffalo Kennedy was a rough-and-ready type, very extroverted, who
was working for Kerr McGee. He was involved with various small
uranium activities, and they were trying to negotiate buying
arrangements with the AEC. That's where Dad made contact with him.
Buffalo Kennedy was saying, "You know, there ought to be lots of
new processes coming out."

One way or another, Buffalo Kennedy, through Dad, asked to
have dinner with me in Santa Fe, which he did. I began saying,
"There are just so many wonderful new things going on, and I'm
learning so much wonderful chemistry. I have all of this
background in mining and so forth, and I just think there ought to
be some way that this chemistry—the chemistry that is actually
used is becoming textbook chemistry, but nobody in the mining
industry knows about this. I would think there ought to be some
way that one could transfer this knowledge appropriately, because
these basic processes--."

He asked, "Like what?"

I said, "There are new things like ion exchange, which you use
for water softening. Has anyone ever thought of using an ion
exchange in the vanadium business? Solvent extraction has been by
the oil industry forever, and it was known that solvent extraction
had a role to play. Of course, it is a separation procedure, an
ancient procedure which was constantly used where I was because the
circumstances were such that you had to do the research, and you
were always trying to do something new, so you called upon any kind
of a process that anybody could think of and used these old-time

things. But they had never been applied in mining, at least to my
knowledge . "

He said, "I work for a company called Kerr McGee, and they are
making a significant move into mining activities, getting out of so
much total dependence on oil and gas. Dean McGee is the guy you
ought to talk to."

I asked, "Why should I talk with him?"

He said, "Are you going to stay here in the land of the lotus
eaters forever?"

I said, "No, I'm not," and by that time the war was long over
and things were settling down.

Swent: This was '54?

Hazen: Yes, I think that's right. I was getting restless.

Swent: Los Alamos was quite an isolated place, too, wasn't it?

Hazen: But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that I wondered what
I was doing. What was I doing this for? You have all the atomic
weapons you want, you have facilities that can produce them, you
have all the success in chemistry. Now you're trying to make them
so that they're more deliverable, and they will be in different
kinds of guns. You've got a hydrogen weapon which can have any
magnitude you want until you blow up the earth. So what's new?
Not only that—and this sounds strange—but it was so easy. The
life was so wonderful and so easy, that after while you began to
say, "Well, I wonder if I really want to go to work today?" Some
of the excitement was gone.

And in part of this transition I was finding more

administrative things, and I wasn't getting my hands dirty as much.
So there was this kind of under-the-surface uneasiness.

Swent: Was your wife happy there?

Hazen: Yes, she liked it. We had two children born there; Barbara Zoe and
Jonathan were born in Los Alamos. Why would anybody want to do
anything other than live in a place like that? Well, I don't know,
but I didn't. I was kind of thinking that what would be neat would
be to take this kind of knowledge, which has been pretty broad and
pretty detailed—it covered lots of different kinds of things and
different kinds of techniques and technology—and transfer it to
the mining industry. I thought that would be fun.

Through Buffalo Kennedy I made a contact with Dean McGee.
Everybody has to have a hero, .and Dean McGee turned out to be my
hero.

Swent : He was an awfully nice man, wasn't he?

Hazen: You knew him?

Swent: I didn't know him, but I've heard so many nice things about him.

Hazen: He was. I guess from the standpoint of respect, my father and Dean
McGee were the two people I've always held in the greatest esteem.

Totavi Development Company

Hazen: Through Buffalo Kennedy I got an invitation to come to Oklahoma

City. Well, there's a little more to the story than that. I had
been getting restless, and I had been thinking that it would be
interesting to try ion exchange for the recovery of gold, and why
couldn't one use ion exchange for the recovery of vanadium? I
said, "What I want to do is some experimental work," but you can't
do experimental work in a plutonium laboratory on the ion exchange
of gold, added to which it was not in my charter of
responsibilities that I was supposed to be doing.

But I had this itch to try it, so Gus and I rented an
abandoned warehouse in Los Alamos, inside the fence. Every so
often the supply people would have a clearance sale, where they
would sell all the stuff that was no longer of any use or broken
up. We bought pipettes, glassware, and stuff like that, and we
established a nice little laboratory where we worked on weekends.
Gus would spend a lot more time than I did, but we would go there
and say, "I wonder what would happen if you took resin IRA-AOO and
tried it with a vanadate solution." So we would do experimental
work.

I told Dick Baker what I was doing, and finally it began to
get kind of worrisome to people that here I was, off doing
something different. So Gus and I bought an old trailer and parked
it right outside the gates at Los Alamos, on a piece of land that
we rented from the guy who owned it, and we established a little
laboratory there, right outside the gates, and began doing things
with gold and so forth.

It began to need more laboratory capability, so I got in touch
with my friend Lefty Thompson of Battelle days, who was now at

Socorro as a professor. I talked with him and reminded him of the
work that I had done on flotation under his guidance when I was at
Battelle. I asked, "What do you think the chances are that I could
come on down, we could try a couple of ideas, and you and I could
spend a Saturday or a Sunday and try some things? Because I think
ion exchange would be a nifty way to recover gold from cyanide
solutions."

He said, "Great. Come on down."

So for a period of a couple of years, every once in a while I
would take a weekend off and drive to Socorro and stay with Lefty
and Betty. Lefty and I would go down to the laboratory and fiddle
around, and we found some things that I thought were very, very
interesting. The problem with using ion exchange resins for gold
is that the gold binds so tightly to the resin that you can't get
it off, but you can load some kinds of resins up to 40 percent by
weight gold from gold cyanide solutions. I thought, "Gee, resin-
in-pulp can be used for recovering uranium. Why can't it be used
for recovering gold?"

We did enough work to show that it indeed was interesting, and
I decided, "This would be a great thing, and Dad would like to know
about this; but wouldn't it be great to patent something like this
new technology?"

Then I went to Baker, my boss, and talked with him about this.
He said, "Let's go call Smith," who was the legal counsel.

I visited with him, and I said, "I have done something which
has resulted in patentable material, and I'd like to have the
ownership of that patent. I'm working for the University of
California, and I've signed an agreement that says that anything
that arises during the course of my work, and which is in the field
that the University of California has a contract to do, belongs to
the University. I understand that, but let's look at the
circumstances. Number one, I've not used government equipment in
any way for this." I had all the records; I had gone to Socorro.

"Secondly, this is no part of my assignment, and I did it on
weekends. Most importantly, the contract between the University of
California and (whatever the government agency was) calls for
basically weapons development. The recovery of gold from cyanide
solution with resins can't be construed as being a part of the
University of California's responsibility to the government and
therefore doesn't pass on through to me, that that's what I was
doing for the University. So how about it?"

He said, "That sounds reasonable." I got a letter which
permitted me to pursue a patent on my own. I went up to Denver,
and I came across a little patent firm, Sheridan and Ross, and
filed for a patent and eventually got it.

Swent: That was your first patent?

Hazen: No, that was my second. The first one came from Battelle
Institute, where I had used ion exchange resins to improve
flotation. The flotation of the iron ore was vastly improved by my
putting a teabag-full of ion exchange resin in to absorb all the
extraneous ions so that you just had a clean surface for the
reagent to get to. But I thought, "How strange; things have a
habit of working."

My gosh, that was quite a digression, wasn't it? In any
event, the little trailer that Gus and I had outside the fence at
Los Alamos was called the Totavi Development Company, because it
was at the little town of Totavi. The Totavi Development Company
was really the forerunner of Hazen Research. Isn't that fun? I
have a picture of that trailer.

Swent: When you went to talk to Dean McGee, you were representing Totavi
Development Company, right?

Hazen: [laughs] Right. Gus and I went together. Gus and I had developed
the kind of partnership that we used all the time. Whenever we
were going to go talk to somebody at Los Alamos, where we were
trying to say, "This is what we want to do," or something like
that, we would carry out the mock conversation. We would imagine
what the questioner was going to ask, and we'd try to figure out
our responses. We drove to Oklahoma City to see Mr. McGee, and on
the way there we carried out this conversation. We got stuck on
one question that he might ask. Senator Kerr was actively in the
senate at that time.

Swent: And very powerful.

Hazen: A very powerful guy. We got stuck on one question, but we thought
he probably wouldn't ask it anyway. The question was--aft.er we had
made all our presentation, told him all about the marvels that
could be achieved by transferring technology which had been
developed in one area, and which was declassified, to the mining
industry—and he at that time was trying to get his company into
the mining industry through uranium and vanadium and so forth—the
one question he might ask was, "What do you guys want?" That was
the question he finally got to ask. At the end of our interview,
he said, "What do you guys want?"

[break for lunch]

Jim Lake

Swent: We realize that we need to pick up on Jim Lake, whom we haven't

mentioned. I believe that you mentioned his father, Mac Lake, Sr.,
who worked with you at the Three Kids project.

Hazen: This was the time at Pan American Engineering Company when there

was a project for the development of a process to recover manganese
as part of the war effort. This was being done by the M. A. Hanna
Company, and ultimately the government supplied the money for the
plant that was built. Back in Berkeley, at the Pan American
Engineering Company, during the time when Plato Malozemoff, Dee
Vedensky, Bob Ramsey, Les Bechaud, and other people were working,
one young man who was hired in the pilot plant was Mac Lake, Jr.
Mac Lake, Jr., was high-school age and was employed as a pilot
plant operator. Through him I got to know his brother, Jim Lake.
The reason for mentioning this, and the importance of this, is that
Jim Lake went on in a very successful career and grew up in Union
Carbide until he was in charge of all of Union Carbide's western
operations, operating out of New York.

In later years, when Dad and I were forming Hazen Research, we
knew that it would be necessary to have some very good people.
After we had been in business for a few years, and about the time
that Dad became incapacitated—so I guess this would be 1965 or
something like that—in one of my trips to New York, hunting for
clients, I had lunch with Jim Lake. He at that time, from the
standpoint of being a successful executive in a successful company,
nevertheless was feeling that there were other things to life and
had a sense of adventure. He said it sounded pretty neat to him to
have an organization where you could kind of run things as you felt
they ought to be run. He had lots of ideas; he had a very fertile
imagination.

I said, "We'd love to have you join us, but the problem is
that we can't do very much about matching the perquisites and
things like that which you had as an executive at Union Carbide
with three thousand people reporting to you."

He said, "Maybe I could own some of the stock." The upshot of
it all was that Jim Lake did accept an offer we made, he did come
to work at Hazen Research, and he purchased as an option what
amounted to ultimately 35 percent or so of the company. He worked
as a vice president at Hazen Research. Dad died early in 1966, and

Jim was on board at that time. He was there for eight years before
he left, and he was a very powerful partner and a very important
part of the growth of Hazen Research. He had good ideas, he knew
how to run things, and he was also full of imagination and
creativity. He was a very great guy who is now retired and living
in Tucson. Every once in a while we'll be in contact and talk
about the old days.

Swent: Did he have an engineering background?

Hazen: I guess I don't know exactly the details, but certainly a technical
background. He was a very competent metallurgist and had all the
requirements. I thought we had a very good partnership. As a
matter of fact, when he left Hazen Research he became the director
of technical activities for the M. A. Hanna Company back in
Cleveland, Ohio.

Swent: So he ended up with Hanna, where his father had been?

Hazen: Yes. Mac Lake, Sr., was a very famous guy because he was the one
who, while he was on some kind of a leave from Hanna (or maybe he
had quit them), discovered Cerro Bolivar in Venezuela, or whatever
the name is of that giant iron ore mountain. You didn't have to do
anything. You didn't have to do flotation, gravity concentration,
or grind. You just got a steam shovel in there, dug it up, put it
in the cars, and shipped it to a steel smelter. It was one of the
world's great finds.

It's kind of interesting how these things work out.
Swent: People's paths cross.

Hazen: Yes, indeed. It's another illustration of the fact that those who
were involved with mining really are a small fraternity. Getting
smaller, too, but even at that time you kept running into the same
people.

Openness in the Mining Fraternity

Swent: This might be a good time for you to mention something that you
spoke to me about yesterday, about the difference in proprietary
information and competitiveness in mining.

Hazen: This is probably going to get into business philosophy. It has

seemed to me, from the standpoint of observing for some number of
years, that in the mining fraternity they were always much more

open with each other about technical activities—what they were
doing in the mill and sharing of processes. If you get into the
chemical industry, you don't find that openness at all. I used to
ponder on this and think that probably the reason for that is that
every company has to be concerned with the renewal and the addition
of its activities. If you're in the paint business, you must be
developing new products; you have to have new factories, and things
have to change. In the mining industry, the problem facing
management is that mines eventually become depleted, so you have to
keep on finding new ones.

So the exploration arm of a mining company is somewhat akin to
the research and development activity of a chemical company. No
chemical company is eager to share its new paints and things in the
laboratory with its competitors. Mining exploration people are not
very eager—they kind of guard their new areas pretty carefully.
Therefore there was never any feeling of competitiveness in the
technical aspects of the treatment of ores after they were mined,
because the mining company's capital is the mine that it has.
Nobody else can invade that mine once it's developed. There is no
competition for the product; the mining companies don't compete
with each other for the sale of gold to the mint. Since there's no
competition on the product, there's no particular secrecy about the
manner in which the product is produced, because nobody gets an
edge on somebody else by having a better process. If he has a
better process, he lowers his own costs and improves his profit.

I felt that was an explanation, and it was so clear during the
days of the uranium boom on the Plateau. Uranium companies'
technical people would even get together in little informal
meetings. They would all gather at someplace like Grand Junction
and have a little ad hoc kind of session where they all talked
about their technical processes and even sometimes their costs,
because the costs incurred by one uranium miner for his product
bore no relation to the costs somebody else might have. The
knowledge of somebody else's costs didn't matter, because whatever
he did had no influence on you if you had your own deposit. So the
key in the competition comes in the deposits, whereas in most other
manufacturing industries you would like to have a product which is
distinguishable, which you can sell in competition with other
people.

When I observed this kind of openness that there was, and is,
with mining people about processing—and later on with Hazen
Research it became kind of important to understand that whenever
you were dealing with anything having to do with the origin of a
sample, you had to be exceedingly cautious about confidentiality,
but you could usually get permission from clients to be more open

about processing as long as there weren't proprietary implications
and patents and things like that.

Swent: That's a very interesting analysis.
Hazen: It was helpful.

Dean McGee

Swent: Shall we get back now to Dean McGee?

Hazen: Back to where we were in Los Alamos. Gus and I were on our way to
Oklahoma City, where we met with Dean McGee. We described to him
the basic thoughts as to the potential there was for one to improve
profitability in mining activities by the adoption of technologies
which were good basic chemistry that had never been applied. We
knew that they had been applied in atomic energy activities, and
therefore we knew that it was possible to do these things. But
very seldom had they ever been done on a large scale and had not
been done for mining purposes.

He would say things like, "Well, like what?" We would talk
about ion exchange.

He knew that ion exchange had been used in South Africa for
the extraction of uranium, and we said, "Yes, but has anybody ever
thought about using ion exchange resins for the extraction of
vanadium? Why not? Why not use ion exchange for copper, zinc,
lead, and so forth?" Most of these ideas were no good, but for
that purpose we could say, "And has anybody thought about using
solvent extraction for--it has been used, but nobody that we know
about in the copper industry thinks of using solvent extraction for
copper. "

He was intrigued by this, and then he asked that question,
"What do you guys want?"

Swent: How did you answer?

Hazen: Gus and I had thought of an answer. What we said was, "We would
like to have you look upon us as you might an exploration, a
drilling program for hunting for oil. We would like to have you
put up enough money so that we can feed our families, for two years
have you fund a laboratory, tell us about some of your thoughts as
to where you are going and various activities, and then leave us

alone. We will be employees, and then we would like to have some
way in which to share in that which is developed."

He said, "That's an interesting thought. I'll think about
it."

Swent: Did you suggest a place where you would do this, because you were
not in Oklahoma City?

Hazen: No.
fl

Hazen: He said, "We have a good research center here, so you could move
here to Oklahoma City."

Swent: What was your family situation?
Hazen: I had a wife and four children.

Swent: One child was born just after you moved to Los Alamos, and two born
while you were there?

Hazen: Yes, and one born before that, Jeffrey Lewis.
Swent: Henrickson had a family as well?
Hazen: Gus had three children.

Swent: So you did have family considerations- -housing, schooling, and all
those things?

Hazen: As regards the conversation with Mr. McGee, we said, "We know that
one of the problems — and we know this from having seen it--is what
happens to all of those important parts of creativity when
individuals begin to be managed. If we come and be a part of an
organization which is already established, it is almost certain
that we will be then managed by somebody else. Added to which, it
would be a very difficult thing for us to be a part of your
research organization if we are going to get a piece of the action.
This would raise problems for the rest of your people."

He said, "Where do you want to 'be?"
We said, "We don't know."

He laughed and said, "Let's kind of think about it and let it
jell for a while, and you can think about what you want to do. I'm
kind of intrigued by the idea."

We went home and back to work. One thing led to another, and
there were further contacts with Mr. McGee. Gus and I talked about
places like Reno, San Francisco, and finally decided that Boulder,
Colorado, would be a good place, where we wanted to be, and by that
point we had made an arrangement through McGee. He asked what kind
of money we wanted, and we told him what we thought would be
adequate. Now, there's a time span I can clue in on, because I
remember that I asked for $12,000 a year and $10,000 a year for
Gus.

Swent: That was a time when you thought you could support a family of six
comfortably on $12,000?

Hazen: I don't know about comfortably. [laughs] I probably was paid more
than that at Los Alamos, but not much more.

In any event, we chose Boulder, and with a handshake deal with
Dean McGee we quit Los Alamos and went to Boulder and looked
around.

Swent: Had either of you lived in Boulder before?

Hazen: No. There must have been some reasons why we chose it, but I can't
think of them. When we got there we found a place to live and then
we had to find a place to establish a laboratory. We found a part
of a little glass-blowing establishment right near the Arapahoe
Chemical Company. The Arapahoe Chemical Company had been founded
and developed by the two Waugh brothers. They were later bought by
Syntex and have gone on to great things .

On their property was this glass-blowing establishment which
was run by a young man named Hans Landay, who was something of a
magician and who used to amuse us by riding around in his
glass-blowing establishment in a unicycle. He was quite a
character.

Gus Henrickson

Hazen: We placed orders for the equipment that we needed. I guess I ought
to say a little bit about Gus. Gus was a very unusual guy. He was
calm, quiet, but remarkably talented with his hands; he could build
anything. He was a wonderful glass blower himself, and now, since
he is retired, he does things like make violins and things like
that. He was also an artist, a painter. If you had an idea of
something you'd like to try, Gus very promptly would be able to
subject it to experimental verification. He was creative; he was

an artist in laboratory activities as well as being a good, solid
chemist.

Swent: You were the leader of the team, though?

Hazen: Yes, but I think that came because he was quiet. [laughter] I was
a little more pushy.

Swent: This was a clear division of responsibility?

Hazen: Oh, yes, it was clear. The laboratory we established, then, and we
began working. The first thing that we chose to work on was to try
to apply solvent extraction technology to the recovery of vanadium.
The reason was that Kerr McGee had built a plant for vanadium and
uranium recovery at Shiprock, New Mexico. I don't believe that it
had started at the time that we came with Kerr McGee, but it used
the so-called acid-bake method for the recovery of uranium and
vanadium. It was pretty complex.

Swent: This was in 1954?

Hazen: I wouldn't be surprised. We began doing experimental work, trying
to think of how one would use solvent extraction.

Swent: You were trying to get uranium from vanadium?

Hazen: No, we were trying to recover vanadium from solutions.

Swent: Uranium was out of the picture?

Hazen: At that point, yes; uranium wasn't a part of it at that point.

Swent: And they were selling vanadium to--?

Hazen: It was an article of commerce.

Swent: You didn't have to have AEC contract for that?

Hazen: I think they did have an AEC contract, because it was also a

uranium mill. Uranium is a vanadium byproduct. The ore came from
the Lukachukai Mountains close by Shiprock where the mines were.
Those mountains had uranium, and it was an AEC contract, but the
vanadium part of it never worked. We began doing experimental work
on the extraction of the vanadium, because that part of the plant
had been inoperative.

Swent: So you were taking ore from Shiprock up to Boulder and working on
it up there?

Hazen: As a matter of fact, we began our experimental work with laboratory
chemicals, bottles off the shelf, to see if we could work out some
basic chemistry. Interestingly enough, this issue of what part of
what we developed could be considered our piece of the action—Mr.
McGee had said, "How much do you guys want of that?" I admitted to
being ignorant. I felt it was an unusual situation, and I asked
him. He said, "Let me think about it." A year later I got a
letter from him, very official, which gave us a half interest in
anything we found. So here was a guy who- -it was kind of like
grubstaking; that's about what it was. Like a drilling rig--you
drill a hole, and if you get something, that's great; if you don't,
well, it's all expense. So he gave us a half interest in anything
we could discover, and we had a two-year time interval. I thought
that was pretty decent for him to do. But, as I say, he was
accustomed to doing exploration, and this was exploration in a
little different direction.

It's a very peculiar kind of a story as to how it came about,
and I'm not sure I remember all of the things we were doing, except
we were following a theory which effectively, from a chemist's
standpoint, was saying that there must be some kinds of compounds
which will behave as ion exchange resins do. Of course, by that
time in our Totavi Development Company and so forth we had that
history of extracting vanadium on resins and then the extraction of
gold cyanide on a resin which resulted in a patent, and on and on.
So the idea of resins was in our minds, and the idea of exchange
mechanisms.

Separating Vanadium with DEPA

Hazen: In a manner which I'm not sure I remember exactly, we came upon a
reagent which was used in flotation called P28, which turns out to
be di-2-ethyl hexel phosphoric acid--DEPA. DEPA is a chemical
which is not soluble to any particular extent in water, and if you
put it in kerosene it will act as an ion exchange agent if you
shake it up with water/acid solution containing vanadium, but the
vanadium has to be in just the right valance state. I can remember
still the excitement that Gus and I felt when in the separatory
funnel we prepared a vanadium plus-four solution, the blue vanadium
compound, a bright blue solution. We shook it up with kerosene
which contained some of this DEPA reagent—about 10 percent, as I
recall--. We shook it up with water, and then we let them
separate. When we let them separate, all the blue color was gone
from the water, and we realized that the vanadium had now
transferred into the kerosene, where it was held because of the
presence of the DEPA.

Swent: You arrived at this first just by theory?

Hazen: Yes.

Swent: Pretty exciting.

Hazen: I'll say. That was really great. That was an exciting day for us.
It's a long way from a beaker like that to something that could be
useful, but we did our homework, and then we communicated this to
the appropriate people in Oklahoma City. They thought it was
pretty good. They didn't know exactly what they were going to do
about it, but we felt that what was required was a pilot plant.
Now we're getting back into the area where I was feeling
comfortable. The transition from a laboratory process into a pilot
plant which could gather the information necessary for the design
of a larger plant was an area that I've always felt comfortable in.

Swent: You were working just in a room at this point?

Hazen: Yes, I guess it was a room probably thirty feet long and twenty

feet wide. We arrived in Boulder and arranged to lease a building
for a year, and we began placing orders for equipment. We bought
some lab benches, a Beckman spectrophotometer, and some pretty
expensive stuff, and we sent the bills to Oklahoma City, where they
hit the accounting department, who simply came unglued: "What is
going on that you have some people up in Boulder, Colorado, where
we have no activity, who are sending us all these bills? What is
this all about?" But it turned out that we had a protector.

Swent: In a high place.

Hazen: In a place where it counted, so that all got straightened out.

A Pilot Plant at Colorado School of Mines Research Foundation

Hazen: We felt that a pilot plant was needed, and the Colorado School of
Mines Research Foundation, as it was called at that time, was in
the business of doing contract research for people who needed it.
We made the appropriate arrangements, and we built a small
mixture-settler, counter-current solvent extraction system for the
extraction of vanadium from acid leach liquors of the type that you
would get if you did an acid leach of a uranium/vanadium ore.

Swent: I don't understand how CSM--

Hazen: They were a contract research organization who had the capabilities
of building and running a pilot plant, because they had people for
around the clock. We're a couple of itinerant research people in
Boulder, so Kerr McGee Company gave us the money to go to CSM to
build and run the pilot plant to prove this vanadium process.

Swent: They built this where?

Hazen: In Golden, at their facilities there; at the school.

Swent: How big was this?

Hazen: The settlers were five-gallon, the mixers were probably five

hundred cubic centimeters. It was pretty small, but it had all the
aspects of everything you needed.

Swent: So you were scaling up from a beaker to--

Hazen: A continuous operation. The trick here was going from a batch

operation into a continuous one because there are recycles. A big
problem that needed to be resolved was how much of this expensive
reagent gets lost in the process. Again, you've got measurements
problems like the ones we talked about with plutonium.

Swent: The reagent you could buy off the shelf somewhere?

Hazen: Yes. It was called P28, and it was produced I believe by Union
Carbide. It has been used in flotation work in ways that I've
forgotten. Yes, it was a reagent that you could just go buy, and
you mixed it in kerosene. Then I got all the problems like: Is
the kerosene important? What happens if you begin to get
emulsions? What is the compatibility? You can extract the
vanadium into the DEPA, but now you have to get it out again so
that you can recycle the DEPA. What we were really doing is--if
you acid leach an ore such as a uranium ore, you dissolve the
uranium and the vanadium in solution. You've also got a lot of
other junk that comes along with it; sodium, magnesium, and other
things may be present, particularly iron. Iron was the miserable
interfering element, but other than that you could adjust the
valance of the vanadium and so on so that you could make a- nice,
clean separation. That way you could extract the vanadium, leaving
all the rest of the junk behind.

Now you've got the vanadium in the DEPA where, because it's
kerosene, you can let it settle. Syphon off this kerosene, which
now contains your vanadium, and take it to another vessel, where
you mix it up with very strong sulfuric acid, much stronger than
the leach liquor. When you do that, the reaction reverses, and the
vanadium leaves the DEPA and enters the clean acid solution in very

Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

Swent :

Hazen:

concentrated form. So what you have done is to take an organic

material, use it to extract that which you want, and transfer it to

a nice, clean, concentrated solution. You have purified and
concentrated the vanadium.

The economic trick is that you have to have the solvent clean
enough so that you can take it back and do it again. It's quite
expensive, and you couldn't do it if you weren't able to
recirculate this. Therefore the loss of that ingredient was an
essential component, which you discover by running a small pilot
plant around and around and around, day and night.

You said it was a counter-current process?

Yes. Counter current means that you have a series of--

Going forwards and backwards at the same time?

Let's look at it this way: Supposing that we take a vessel and
pour into it some of this acid solution, and we pour on top of it
some of this magic extractant. We shake it up, and then we stop
and let it settle. The oil and the water separate, the oil on top.
You take the oil off the top, and you take it to another vessel,
where it contacts another bit of this acid liquor. The acid
liquor, after it has been semi-depleted, moves in the other
direction to a third vessel. If viewed from the side, one could
see that through the system of three or four of these vessels, the
organic is transferring from vessel one to two to three to four,
whereas the leach liquors go from vessel four to three to two to
one, counter current extraction.

So it's not exactly the same as recycling?
from the counter current?

The recycling is apart

Right. Then you do this same sort of thing on a stripping circuit,
and then you recycle them, this cleaned solvent, back to start
again. Well, it has lots of complications, amongst them things
that were real surprises. If titanium is in solution it will get
onto that solvent, and you can't get it off. After while, your
solvent's power to extract has been all used up by the titanium,
which sits there and doesn't come off; so you have effectively
wrecked the solvent.

These were the kinds of technical problems we encountered.
Aluminum has some of that. It was a learning time.

Swent: There were traces of things like titanium and aluminum in your--?

Hazen: Very apt to be, yes. This was being done at the Colorado School of
Mines Research Institute, which was run at that time by a man named
Vernon Mattson, commonly called Bill, a very fine, very wonderful
guy, a fine gentleman. In thinking of Bill, he was a very gentle
man, always courteous. His name was Vernon, and I asked, "Bill,
how did you get from Vernon to Bill?"

He said, "When I was a small boy, I used to ride on the
handlebars of my dad's bicycle. We'd pretend we were a locomotive,
and I was engineer Bill." He was the director of the institute at
that time.

The project manager for this work that was being done for us
was a young guy named Bob Merritt. He was very interested in this.
Of course, this was all brand-new stuff; nobody had ever done
anything like this that they were particularly aware of. Bob
Merritt, by the way, was the guy who wrote probably one of the best
books on uranium milling practice, in which he lists all of the
uranium mills and what their flow sheets are, how they work out,
and so forth. It is kind of a basic text on uranium recovery.
Uranium Milling, I think it's called. Again, that was an
association that we enjoyed for several years. I don't know where
Bob is now.

Engineering Reality at Shiprock, New Mexico

Hazen: There we were at that time, with what to us was a pretty exciting
kind of development. I'm trying to think of the timing of how
things were done. We had this process, and it was exciting. Now
came the question of how to translate something from one-gallon-a-
minute activity in a little continuous pilot plant run by
scientists to an operation enterprise to be run by Navajo Indians.
This was a very exciting time.

Swent: This would be at Shiprock?

Hazen: Yes, because they had their mill at Shiprock. The conditions at

that mill were such that they had abandoned the part of the process
where they were to recover the vanadium. They were focusing on
getting the uranium, and it was running as a uranium mill. The
name of the manager of the mill was Clyde Osborn. The mill
superintendent was Dick Shreve.

Swent: Was Buck Keil there?

Hazen: No, Buck Keil was not there at that time,
that came a little bit later.

That's another story

The sequence may not be exactly right, but Bill Mattson was so
intrigued with what was going on, and he felt that this had such
wonderful possibilities, that he said to me at one time, "You know,
I'd like to find some way to get closer involved with this kind of
thing, because I think the idea of doing stuff like this for mining
is just great."

I said, "Isn't that interesting?" I called Mr. McGee and
suggested that Bill Mattson might be interested in some way joining
forces. Lo and behold, a deal was made so that Bill Mattson turned
out to be my boss. He was hired by Kerr McGee to help build this
mining technology activity. He lived in Golden and eventually
moved to Oklahoma City, but for quite some period of time he was
the boss of Gus and me.

In the meantime, this activity had grown, and we were
occasionally going to Shiprock to see what could be done to put
something in there. At a meeting between Bill Mattson and the vice
president of Kerr McGee--! think it was either Tom Seale or George
Cobb--they asked, "What are you going to do about getting it into
Shiprock?"

Bill said, "I think Gus and Wayne ought to go down to Shiprock
and install it." So we wound up down at Shiprock, trying to do it
on a large scale. Again, that transfer from small scale to pilot
plant to an engineering reality. As I look back on it and as we
put all of these things together, I think that had been a recurrent
theme of my professional life--how you separate things from the way
that you learn and basically understand the chemistry and what is
going on, and then make the transfer to something which operates in
a way that you can work out all the questions. You might call it a
demonstration phase. You have the development and then the
demonstration, from which you get the information you need to make
it an engineering reality.

We wound up down at Shiprock, then, putting in a unit. We had
several of them and various successes and failures. Ultimately the
extraction of vanadium became an operating reality on a large
scale. They made vanadium, and they made money from that. During
that time, in the midst of all that about vanadium, we knew that
under the right circumstances uranium also could be extracted.

Ion Exchange and Solvent Extraction

Swent: I'm a little confused. Ion exchange and solvent extraction are not
interchangeable. Are they used in conjunction with each other?

Hazen: Let me describe it technically. From a technical standpoint, if

you have some kind of a chemical which can add to it something you
want—and we've talked about vanadium. A resin is a chemical which
has active sites that can attract and hold vanadium. Because it's
a resin, a plastic, it is a solid. You call it an ion exchange
because it has exchanged the ion that was on the resin for an ion
that is in the solution. Since it's a solid, you can just screen
it out or whatever you want to do. The same chemistry will apply,
even though it is not a solid and not a resin but instead is a
liquid; so you have a liquid ion exchange. As a matter of fact,
General Mills calls it their lix reagent — liquid ion exchange.

From a technical standpoint, you can have the same chemistry,
but it can either be embodied in the form of little granular beads,
or it can be embodied as a liquid in a non-water miscible
material, which permits you to separate. So in one case you'd use
the ion exchange characteristics to extract what you wish away from
all the junk, and then with a screen you take it away from the
solution. Now you've got a solid material with what you want on
it, in a concentrated form.

Or you can use the same chemistry, except that you can put it
in kerosene and extract what you want. It is now in the kerosene,
the oily phase, and then you let them separate, because oil and
water don't mix. Then you take the kerosene away, and now you have
what you want in a concentrated form. Both of them have done the
same thing. One is called an ion exchange resin, and the other one
is the same chemistry except that it's called a solvent, and since
you've extracted things with a solvent, they call it solvent
extraction. But the chemistry is the same; they're doing the same
thing .

Swent: You were able to go from one to the other?

Hazen: Oh, yes. We had started out with solid ion exchange resins to
extract vanadium, and then we had worked into--

Hazen: So that's the chemistry that's involved here. First we had done
this in the laboratory, then we had that pilot plant at the
Colorado School of Mines, and then came its application at
Shiprock. There were just wonderful problems that had to be

resolved. Some of the kinds of things that I remember which were
great experiences--

Swent: You had to train your workers.

Hazen: Of course there was always that problem. I was happy to be out,
though, away from the constant concern about contamination from
radioactivity, and also security things were not around. These
were exciting times, because you learned so much, and Gus and I
were good partners and worked well together. We went down to
Shiprock together and put in a plant.

Reducing Iron and Vanadium; Technical Challenges

Hazen: One of the things you had to be very careful of was that you had to
reduce any iron in the solution to the ferrous condition, because
ferric iron would extract as well as would vanadium. You also had
to reduce the vanadium so that it was in a reduced form; I think it
was vanadium four. They have all different colors, and I know
vanadium two is purple. I think vanadium three is green, but I've
kind of forgotten that chemistry.

One of the problems was that if you are agitating all these
vessels and things out in the air, the air will entrain in these
liquids and result in oxidation of the material. If you got it in
the wrong oxidation state, the process bombed out. We finally
covered all of our agitators and vessels. We bought a gasoline
engine and took the exhaust from the engine and ran it under the
covers so that the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide would
displace any air that was in there, so no air could get to the
solution. There were lots of these kinds of things that you had to
do to make it work.

Swent: Invent it on the spot?

Hazen: Right. And always, of course, the operating crew had their own

problems trying to keep the uranium plant running. We were just a
real pain in the neck to these guys. They didn't want to have
anything to do with us, because we were always causing trouble. We
were nothing but trouble to the operators when people wanted to do
things .

Swent: You were in the same facility?

Hazen: Oh, yes, because this was an operating mill producing uranium, and
we were trying to build something in the middle of everything and

to take their main streams and dig the vanadium out of it to make
vanadium.

In any event, there were all the interesting little anecdotes,
the kinds of things you had to put up with. For example, Gus and I
were real worried, because we'd had some unhappy experiences with
this reduction. The one thing that happened was that we had some
young Navajos who were helping us. One time during the day we had
said to one of our Navajos, "Put a hundred pounds of iron into the
tank." We went away, thinking nothing about it, but in the reactor
nothing took place.

We asked the young man if he put in the hundred pounds of
iron, and he said, "Sure." Nothing happened and nothing happened.
Finally, on quizzing him we found that he had thrown in the hundred
pounds of iron in the bag; he hadn't opened the bag to get the iron
out. [laughter]

At about that same time, there was one of the young Navajos
who was a very bright and intelligent guy, but he was just there as
far as we were concerned as day labor for the summer. At night I
happened to be doing the test for the presence of ferric iron,
because iron in its highest oxidation state, or at least in the
plus three valence oxidation state, will extract with the reagent
we were using and cause trouble. The test for this is to add a
little bit of thiocyanate reagent, and if there is any oxidized
iron it will turn bright red. So I had a test that was a liquor
holding up to the light, and with an eyedropper I put in a couple
of drops of potassium thiocyanate, and there was this brilliant red
color that developed in it.

A voice behind me said, "Is that the iron thiocyanate
complex?" I turned around, and here was this young Navajo lad, who
as far as we knew was a graduate of the local high school or
something. His name was Taylor Mackenzie; that name has stuck with
me.

I said, "How do you know about the iron thiocyanate complex?"

He said, "Well, I'm a chemistry graduate from Baylor, -and I'm
in med. school at Rice." So here was a young Navajo moving off the
reservation.

In any event, those were times when we were trying to go back
and forth between pilot plant activities, laboratories in Boulder,
having the organization developed with Bill Mattson kind of as the
boss of it, and the efforts at Shiprock to get that going. It was
a pretty exciting time, a pretty active time.

Transferring Extraction Technology from Vanadium to Uranium

Hazen: Then comes the question that if you can do it with vanadium, why
can't you do it with uranium? With uranium the old black-cake
process was a pretty common way, and then there were ion exchange
resins for uranium recovery. The South Africans had pioneered the
development of the use of solid ion exchange for the recovery of
uranium, and that was in use in Shiprock; lots of places were using
ion exchange in recovery of uranium. Very early the chemistry was
the precipitation of a uranium phosphate. I don't think we need to
recount the chemistry except to say that it was very messy, very
difficult, and had lots of problems.

So ion exchange looked like a pretty nifty kind of way to do
it, added to which a second way of producing vanadium was to
dissolve the uranium in a sort of carbonate solution, an alkaline
reagent.

Swent: Is that what they call carbonate leach?

Hazen: Yes. They used Pachuca tanks, and it dissolved the uranium with

sodium carbonate solution. So there were these two processes, one
the acid and one the carbonate. Of course, if you had an ore that
contained a great deal of limestone, then if you tried to use an
acid process, all your acid was consumed by the limestone.
Therefore there were lots of technical reasons why you would use
one process or another. But the recovery of the uranium from
solution, that was being done by ion exchange, was an exciting
time, because people were trying to develop different ways of using
ion exchange or ion exchange resins.

Anaconda's Carbonate Leach Plant at Bluewater, New Mexico

Hazen: I guess one of the very early ones, if not the earliest, was

Anaconda's operation at Bluewater. They started out there with a
carbonate leach plant, and then they shifted to ion exchange
resins, but they put the ion exchange resins in big, wire mesh
baskets and jigged it up and down like a teabag in a pot, in which
the acid had dissolved the uranium that was still mixed with the
ore. These bags just majestically rose up and down in this
solution, and the uranium then came close to the resin and was
attached to it, and the solution flowed on by. Then you had to
elute the uranium off and so on. That was one way.

Another way to separate the uranium was to use thickeners to
separate the liquids and solids, and then if you had a clean
uranium solution you could use column ion exchange, in which your
resin was just put in a column. I was trying to think, about that
first carbonate leach at Bluewater: it was in 1953 that Anaconda
had the Bluewater carbonate plant. Then they built the acid plant;
the name of the metallurgist was Dale Matthews. Did you know Dale?

Swent: I did, yes.

Hazen: He was the metallurgist there, and there was a guy named Roy
Hollis. Did you ever run into him?

Swent: I remember the name, but it doesn't bring a face to mind.

Hazen: Technically he was very much involved. Here we were, down at

Shiprock with all this excitement about getting vanadium out, and
the management said, "Can you do anything to increase—can you use
this magic solvent stuff to extract uranium?"

We said, "Well, yes." So what we did was batch extractions in
50,000-gallon tanks, whereas in an ordinary laboratory you put
things in a beaker and shake them up and down. We were in a hurry
to get things done, so we did the experimental work on a size such
that it would be significant in its uranium production while we
were doing experimental work. It got to be large sized and got to
be a very interesting problem in how to conduct experimental work
on that scale, in a batch, and have it be meaningful with regards
to the transfer. And we used that same reagent DEPA (di-2-ethyl
hexyl phosphoric acid) .

The experimental work we did on uranium was in a batch; we did
batch operations. It was significant; it added the equivalent of a
hundred tons a day to the plant capacity, so we felt like we were
being successful in the company, not only from process development
but also we were helping them out. The management felt much more
friendly toward us, because we added to their production.

Again, it was kind of exciting times, running back and forth,
always thinking, "I wonder what's going to happen next that's going
to make things go to pieces?" Of course, uranium in uranium mills
doesn't pose the radiation problem or any of the kind of
contamination problems that I had been accustomed to at Los Alamos.

Here, then, we were in a position where, from our original
contract in this little back room that we had, Mr. McGee said, "You
know, I think what's being done here is really very interesting,
and we want to do more of it." Bill Mattson was now head of the
division, and I've forgotten whether he had moved to Oklahoma city

at that time. Mr. McGee was a very dynamic kind of a guy who
wanted to keep things moving, and he suggested that we get out of
this site at Boulder. Bill Mattson found an appropriate building
out near the airport in Denver, near Stapleton Field. I was kind
of upset about this, because it meant a long commute from my home
in Boulder. Ultimately the company built a laboratory outside of
Golden on Mclntyre Road. They built a beautiful laboratory where
we expanded the staff and had about eighteen or twenty people
there, one of whom was John Hermann, who I had been acquainted with
in Los Alamos. That was a wonderful staff. We just had lots of
fun.

Swent: So by the end of the two years you had all--

Hazen: Yes, by the end of the two years we were all done with that little
lab and were moving and in the expanding mode. I don't remember
all the details of the years when these things were going on; it's
kind of a kaleidoscope in my memory.

Swent: I think you had seven years in all with--

Hazen: Yes, so by that time we had had probably three or four years, we
had the Shiprock vanadium in operation, and they built a uranium
solvent extraction plant using countercurrent principles.

As you know, the mining industry doesn't rush to embrace new
technology, but they all keep each other informed, so what was
going on was fairly well known.

Swent: The mills that they built at Ambrosia Lake1 near Grants [New
Mexico] must have incorporated your research.

Hazen: Oh, yes, that was all based on our research. We can get to that,
because that even used a different reagent; by that time we were
running something new.

Swent: Where does General Mills come in?

Hazen: A little bit later, after we built the laboratory in Golden on
Mclntyre Road. I think in the period of time at the other
laboratory out near Stapleton, we were beginning to work on the ore
that was coming from Ambrosia Lake, trying to figure out what was
the best thing to do. That was supposed to have been a carbonate
leach plant, because I think Anaconda had been built with a
carbonate leach plant, I think Phillips Petroleum had a mill there,
and Kerr-McGee had negotiated a contract with AEC to build a
carbonate leach plant at Ambrosia Lake.

'For more on Ambrosia Lake, see Langan W. Swent, oral history in

Introducing Solvent Extraction at the Climax Mill at Grand Junction

Hazen: I lost the thread on another thought having to do with the people
who were involved. I was commenting on the fact that people were
fairly open. The Climax people had a uranium mill in the middle of
Grand Junction. It was an old sugar mill that they had taken over
and converted. Woody Knott was the mill superintendent, and he
called me one time and said, "Hey, I understand you guys are doing
solvent extraction down at Shiprock. Does it work?"

I said, "Yes, it works pretty good."

He said, "I've been telling our management that we ought to do
something, and they said 'How come it isn't being done, if it's so
good, Woody?'" He said, "So I'm so glad that somebody has done it.
Can I come down and see it?"

He came on down, and I showed him what we were doing. He
said, "Now I'm going to go talk to them and tell them it's being
done, and we'd better do it." So he did it; he put in a uranium
solvent extraction plant. It kind of horrified me, because it was
an old, old mill. He built the solvent extraction unit up high in
the building, and down in the bottom were the vanadium furnaces
which were operating at red heat. I thought that if he ever had a
leak of his kerosene, and the solvent ran down through the building
and hit the furnace, it would be an interesting fire to try to
stop.

So word began to get around. At this new facility on Mclntyre
Road we were doing the basic metallurgy for the Ambrosia Lake ore.
Here was my first acquaintance with Maxie Anderson, because the
relation between the Anderson Brothers Pipeline company and the
ranching family, who owned interests in Ambrosia Lake, had made
arrangements with Kerr-McGee, so Kerr-McGee took over the holdings
in the Ambrosia Lake district and sent the ore up to the laboratory
to work on. We were working on the carbonate leach, and Gus and I
and some others became convinced that carbonate leach was a poor
way to treat that ore. It was more expensive and should not be the
process of choice. We said, "How about solvent extraction? After
all, all this pioneering work has been down at Shiprock. It would
be a great way to go, to try to do solvent extraction."

Joe House of General Mills; New Uses for Amines

Hazen: Along about that time, Joe House of General Mills was in a division
and in charge of an activity for the development of new uses for
the chemical amines that they produced. Amines were used for all
kinds of things in chemistry. He had the responsibility of trying
to find some new uses. Oh, this is a long, involved story, but by

that time also the knowledge was out that Keith Brown of Oak Ridge
National Laboratory was very interested in solvent extraction and
uranium, and he had done all kinds of pioneering work. His people
had found that if you used certain kinds of amines, especially
tertiary amines, you could use them as the solvent instead of the
DEPA. It got to be pretty involved chemistry, but the fact was
that one should consider the chemistry involved with the use of
amines solvents for uranium, again kind of an ion exchange reaction
but a different kind of a solvent.

Swent: What was the advantage of amines over DEPA?

Hazen: Selectivity, for one thing, and insolubility. DEPA had a lack of

selectivity. I mentioned the iron as one problem, and the titanium
and the aluminum were others. For uranium, the selectivity wasn't
real great, but it was good; it would make a good process.

At that laboratory on Mclntyre Road, we built a pilot plant
which was dedicated to working with the Ambrosia Lake ores. All
the ores were sent up there, tested in the laboratory, and worked
on. At that time we were saying, "We don't think carbonate's the
way to go," and finally the people who were responsible for funding
said, "What do you recommend?" We said, "What you really ought to
be doing is using solvent extraction." So we built a solvent
extraction pilot plant there, and we ran it for a year, around the
clock, on all the different ores.

At that time Joe House came and visited us, because he knew of
the work at Oak Ridge in the extraction of uranium with amines. He
came in and visited with me and said, "You know, we have a tri-
fatty amine which looks to us like it would be pretty good. It
would be neat if you guys would consider using it in the pilot
plant."

We said, "Gee, if you have something new, let's grapple with
it." He sent some material, and it was just terrible. It had
emulsifying problems and everything else. But he had a very, very
good chemist, and a very good backup, a young man named Ronald
Swanson, who was very skilled in organic chemistry. They kept
fiddling with things until finally they had prepared something that
really worked great in the pilot plant. It was a tertiary amine
whose name escapes me at the moment which is of historical
interest—something like alamine 336.

Kerr-McGee's Ambrosia Lake Plant; the First Major Use of Solvent
Extraction

Hazen:

Swent :

Hazen:

Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

Swent :
Hazen:

We put that in the pilot plant, and we ran it. Then it got to be a
big battle, because, after all, it was expected that it was going
to be a carbonate leach plant. The company was going to need a
great big mill, and the company had never built a great big mill.
Kerr-McGee at that time was about a $45,000,000 company. It wasn't
one of the giants, and here they were, biting off a great, big
chunk of capital expense. Then here along comes the metallurgical
department, saying, "That's not the right process." It was a very
exciting time. Many people felt it was just terrible to think that
you would try a brand new process with a brand new reagent. Who
had ever done it before? We cited all the examples there were
around .

But this was a great big plant, and it was going to be the
first one to make use of solvent extraction on a major scale. I
mean, the whole works was there. By that time there were some new
reagents so that you could use thickeners, you could have a clear
solution to put in your solvent extractor, and so forth. So they
decided to build that.

Did you have to defend it yourself?
presentations?

Did you have to make

Oh, yes, you bet. There were lots of things. It was a long, tough
battle. It was very carefully argued out. By the time we got
done, I think the appeal to the management of Kerr-McGee was that
if it failed, it would be pretty tough. If it succeeded, the
rewards were great. It was the sort of thing that would appeal to
oil--.

Risk takers?

Yes.

Who were you convincing? Staff people or directors?

Staff people, outside people. I remember that Ed Crabtree, a very
well known and highly respected guy, was the head at that time of
CSMRI, Bill Mattson's place in the Colorado School of Mines. He
was running that activity and was also a consultant with Kerr-
McGee. We had Elmer Isern.

I remember him. He lived in Grants. He was the manager in Grants.
Sure. Right. He came from--

Swent: Eagle Picher.

Hazen: Yes. He just didn't think there was any point in a new process;

why not just go the carbonate route? But, as we pointed out, "Over
the life of the deposit, you're going to pay a terrible penalty in
recovery and cost." It was thoroughly hashed out and thoroughly
talked about.

Swent: They had not actually built the carbonate plant?

Hazen: No. They were mostly getting the mines into production.

Swent: So you were coming in before there was a building change, at any
rate.

Hazen: That's right. But carbonate leach was preferred. It was based

largely on the fact that the ores were computed to contain a lot of
calcium carbonate, not a lot of lime. Well, if they do contain a
lot of lime, then you can't use very effectively an acid leach. We
were looking at all the drill cores, and we were doing work on all
of the samples that came from Section Thirty-two and on and on. We
saw all the various sections. We saw that as you took them from
the southern end up to the northern end, there wasn't very much
limestone. In some areas it was high, but not to amount to
anything. Whereas the other ores, such as those which Anaconda had
started out with, had a lot of limestone in them, carbonate. Added
to which, Anaconda had switched to an acid leach ion exchange — the
basket ion exchange, because resin and pulp had not taken over as
the ion exchange method; it was still the basket resin- in-pulp, or
basket RIP. No, they just called it the basket ion exchange.

Roy Hollis was the founder of that. He did a great job. It
was a wonderful development, but it was an interim development
toward better ways.

Working with Stearns Roger on Engineering Design

Swent: You were successful in convincing them?

Hazen: It worked out that the evidence was on our side. So they did it.

It was a pretty agonizing time, getting it designed. Stearns Roger
built the mill, and I spent a lot of time with the people at
Stearns, worrying about the design of the solvent extraction. It
had some things that are old hat now, but they were pretty
troublesome then. If you have a light oil material floating on top
of water, and you have to have the solvent flow in one way and the

aqueous flow another way, the hydraulics get to be very
troublesome. If you have oil. and water on top of each other,
there's an interface. You want to siphon off the organic, but you
don't want to have the aqueous tangled up in it, so you have to
have some way to move up and down, whatever it is that you have at
that interface. You have to keep on being able to have things so
that interfaces can change, and of course they change as the
specific gravities change, as temperatures change, and so forth.
You have to provide a means of pumping one thing one way and one
thing the other way. An obvious thing is to try and have it stair-
stepped so that you have the organic, for instance, in the top
tank. You keep on feeding it, and it overflows and goes into the
next tank. Then you use pumps to pump the aqueous uphill.

What happens if that bottom pump quits? There's nothing to
stop the organic, and the organic keeps on flowing downhill until
it has all overflowed the bottom tank and is all over the yard.
This was interesting. The whole engineering was very interesting.

It was a wonderful time. We developed some things that--

Buck Keil Develops a Fluid Bed Reactor

Swent: Who did you work with?

Hazen: I have forgotten the name of the young guy that I worked with so
closely. He was a designer. By that time Buck Keil--oh, that's

something I want to pick up. We'll get back to Stearns Roger in a

moment .

When we were doing the pilot plant work for the Ambrosia Lake
plant and were using the tertiary amine, Dean McGee said, "If you
know somebody that you think might be the plant superintendent at
this plant when it gets done, get him on board early so he can be
part of the whole scheme of things, so he has the whole background
and doesn't have to come in from the outside." We thought about it
awhile, and I think it was Bill Mattson who suggested that- he knew
a guy named Buck Keil who was at Canyon City, Colorado, running the
Carlton Mill.

Bill and I went down to Canyon City to the Carlton Mill and
met with Buck and talked with him. I think he was a graduate of
the Colorado School of Mines, just a great guy. He was running the
mill, which was a cyanide mill for the recovery of gold. He had
done things that were so advanced metallurgically that my eyes
bugged out. What year would this have been?

Swent: I think the Keils were in Grants in the late 1950s, when I went
there.

Hazen: It was probably the early sixties. What Buck was doing at the

Carlton mill was to run a flotation plant to float the pyrite out,
and then he roasted the pyrite in fluid bed reactor. Well, I had
never heard of a fluid bed reactor, let alone seen one, and here's
this guy, all by himself, with no R & D facilities, no laboratory,
no nothing except an assay office, and just ordinary operators to
work with. And he had developed a roaster for roasting pyrite in a
fluid bed. He roasted it, and he took the calcine and then
cyanided the calcine. By destroying the pyrite, he released the
gold to cyanidation. Then he ran a charcoal- in-pulp recovery of
gold from the pulp. Of course, this is the new process which has
swept all of Nevada recently. Gold recovery CIP or CIL systems
have been "the new metallurgy," and here was old Buck Keil using
the process thirty years ago.

Swent: Doing it years ago.

Hazen: As an interesting kind of background for that, the first place that
I had ever run into that really was when I was working with Lefty
Thompson down at Socorro, when I was living in Los Alamos and was
working on the recovery of gold from solutions. Lefty said, "Of
course, what you can use is Chapman's charcoal process."

I said, "What's that?"

He said, "You can soak up gold cyanide solution out of a pulp
if you put charcoal in it." This would have been in about 1949.

So here I ran into it in the laboratory and had never heard of
it before; now I run into it again with Buck Keil, all by himself
in this mill out of Canyon City, and he installed it. He didn't
bother with pilot plants or anything else; he went out and put it
in the mill, and then he lived there and made it work. He had
enough, background and enough savvy. He was just a marvelous mill
man. He knew how to make things work and to make them practical.
He had installed a system for regenerating the charcoal and how to
get the gold off. Here he was, running a fluid bed and roasting
the pyrite and charcoal-in-pulp activity in 1960. He had been
doing these things for years, so in the mid fifties he had been
doing these very, very advanced metallurgical things, and nobody
knew about it .

We talked with Buck, one thing led to another, and he left
there and came with us. He then was placed in charge of seeing

that that plant--once again, he and I became very good friends and
worked together very closely. He practically lived at Stearns
Roger, and I lived in the laboratory. I would go to Stearns Roger,
and Buck and I would meet with the engineers and go over drawings .
He, of course, had the concern about the grinding circuits, the
leaching circuits, the classifiers, the great big counter-current
thickener system, and so on. My interests were confined to solvent
extraction: precipitation, stripping the solvent, and the
precipitation of the final product. So Buck and I became very good
friends. As a matter of fact, in the saga of uranium milling, I
think Buck Keil has never been appropriately recognized. I think
he is still living. He retired. Did you know Buck at Ambrosia
Lake, as well as Elmer Isern?

Swent: Oh, yes, I knew Buck quite well.

Hazen: He was a great guy.

Swent: I was thinking that he had died, but maybe not.

Hazen: I think so, too. I think I did hear that he died. But he was so
quiet and unassuming. He just never pushed himself at all, never.
He made a real contribution to the uranium business. When that
mill got started--! remember I was down there for the startup, when
they first put the solvent in the tanks. Gus and I were there
together, and we went down to Grants and had dinner. We knew that
the solvent was going to get in the tanks, and the big, critical
issue was emulsions. If you mix up the kerosene on the water and
they won't separate, because they form mayonnaise, then you're
cooked. My nightmares were always of seeing these enormous tanks
filled with mayonnaise, the whole thing shut down. That's another
one of the days I will always remember, walking in the plant and
wondering what I was going to see, and the immense sense of relief
when I saw this calm surface of kerosene with no islands of
floating globules.

Swent: How big was the plant?

Hazen: The Ambrosia Lake plant was the largest at that time. Maybe
Anaconda was bigger.

Swent: It was a very big plant, then.

Hazen: Yes. I was going to say 3,000 tons a day or something like that.
I know it was one of the great big plants.

Swent: And it worked right from the start?

Hazen: Yes, they were in the black the first month. Speaking, as we have,
of people who have good sense, Gus Henrickson has this sense of how
you do things in the laboratory, so that the experimental work that
you do is precise and yields the information you want to get. Buck
had that sense about a mill; he knew how to fix things, how to
design things so that when you put them in they worked, you could
maintain them, the flows would be right, the elevations would be
okay. He just had that kind of a feeling about all those things.

Swent: People worked well with him, too.
Hazen: Yes. We worked well together.

Here we are with Ambrosia Lake being fairly successful.
Mr. McGee had said, "You and Gus have this right to a part of what
you developed, and you guys have developed some good things. It's
a little difficult situation to maintain, when there are so many
other people in the organization, too, to have you guys off here
doing your own thing. You have successfully fended off all of our
efforts to have you come to Oklahoma City and join the gang, so I'd
like to suggest that we change, that we get rid of your right to a
piece of the action in exchange for stock options." So that was
done, and from a financial point of view it was very good.

Then Gus and I converted to being simple employees of the
company, and we now had this laboratory on Mclntyre where Bill
Mattson was the boss.

Swent: But that was Kerr-McGee's laboratory?

Hazen: Yes. Nevertheless, it was not in Oklahoma City. As an interesting
sidelight, jumping ahead a little bit, this was a very productive
bunch of guys. In some ways it was reminiscent of the experience
at Los Alamos, too. Johnny Hermann I mentioned, and Mayer Goren
was another one who was a brilliant guy who joined us. We had lots
of people on the staff; as I said, there were about eighteen or
twenty. There was a sense of vitality and motion and doing things.
We were involved with a vanadium plant in Soda Springs, with
Carlsbad Potash, and all the kinds of things that Kerr-McGee was
doing in its move into the mining industry as diversification.

Then Gus and I left for Hazen Research. That was in '61.
Then the company decided, "Okay, now we'll move that bunch down to
Oklahoma City." So they made an offer to all the people there, and
out of that entire band of eighteen people, only one stayed with
the company long term. There was a feeling, certainly, at that
time and with those people, that the independence was pretty
important, added to which most people would rather live in Golden
than in Oklahoma City.

Swent: It depends on the job, though.
Hazen: Of course.

Father, H. L. Hazen, Inc. and Edgemont Mining Company

Hazen: In any event, while I was doing these things having to do with

uranium, Dad and I talked frequently. He had been a consultant for
the AEC for many years, and then he moved to Denver as an
independent consultant, H. L. Hazen, Inc. He and Mother lived in
Denver, and he was a consultant, and after a few years he
particularly established a relation with a company called Edgemont
Mining Company, which was headed by a young man named Alan Gray
and had a fine group of people working for them. They built the
Edgemont Mill in South Dakota, the Riverton Mill in Wyoming; they
were mill builders. There was also a mill in Texas. Dad was the
guy who kind of designed the mills and saw that they were built.
He effectively served the role that Buck Keil served, to see that
the mill got built right. Dad was absolutely marvelous as a
designer of mills. When he built them, he knew how to run them, so
he built them and ran them in the same way.

They had kind of an engineering group, too, headed by John
White. It was a very successful young company. They did a lot of
very unusual things, too. That was the group that in North Dakota
had lignite fields.

Swent: Yes, I think it was near Bowman.

Hazen: They mined lignite, spread it out on the ground in rows, lit a fire
to it, and burned it. In this way they got rid of all the organic
content and all the fuel value. They had ashes left, and the ashes
were highest grade in uranium, because lignite does contain uranium
as well as other kinds of minerals. The ashes contained enough
uranium to make it worthwhile to haul it all the way down to New
Mexico to a treatment plant. [laughter] Can you imagine nowadays
putting lignite out on the ground and setting fire to it?

Swent: No.

Hazen: I wonder what kind of permits they needed? They may not have had
anything. Maybe all you had to do was own the land and the mine,
pile the stuff out, and set it on fire.

Swent: That's probably all. When was this?

100

Hazen: I have here that Edgemont was in 1956, Riverton was the fall of

1958, so it was along in there, in the early sixties. Riverton was
built as a combined—it was a custom mill; they took ore in. So it
was a dual mill; it had both a carbonate circuit and an acid leach
solvent extraction circuit. They could take any kind of ore; they
could take alkaline ores for alkaline treatment or anything else.

Swent : Just run them through separately?

Hazen: It was like two separate plants, because the processes are very
different. You can't intermingle them very well.

Swent: They were just under one roof.
Hazen: Yes.

Swent: It's interesting that your and your father's careers were coming
even closer together then.

Hazen: Yes, that's right. I was then in a position with Kerr-McGee where
we had some very interesting kinds of things going on, and I was
very happy. It was a very nice kind of an existence. There was
again that vital ingredient of being out having the freedom to do
the things in the way that would permit you to be effective. I
don't know how to express that any better. We very clearly were
given assignments such as Soda Springs: "Soda Springs is going to
be a vanadium plant, and the company has a plan. What are we going
to do for processing?" Then we'd work on that.

Or the Carlsbad Potash; we had a big activity there. So it
was pretty nice, and it had been very effective. It was a team of
people that a company management could look at and say, "Because we
did this, we now have these activities. We might have had the
activities, but at least this group has been influential in the
success of those activities."

Dad and I often talked about the philosophy of doing the test
work and so on. As I said, he was then the major consultant and
the mill builder for the Edgemont Group, which then was taken over
by Susquehanna. Do you remember in Chicago what used to be the old
Susquehanna Railroad?

Swent: Yes, there was a railroad.

Hazen: I think that's what the company was. In the meantime, there was
lots going on on the Colorado Plateau with Blair Burwell with
Minerals Engineering. They had developed a continuous pressure
filter, the Burwell Filter. The Vitro people had put solvent
extraction in with Norman Schiff as the metallurgist and Jim Moore

101

as plant superintendent; or maybe Bob Coleman was the plant
superintendent. It was a custom mill.

Swent: Where was Vitro?

Hazen: In Salt Lake City. So there was all this kind of ferment and

excitement and lots of wonderful things doing. At that time Alan
Gray, who was a vigorous, energetic, talented financial guy as well
as an engineer--! think he may have been a graduate of the Colorado
School of Mines, too—was in charge of all these uranium activities
for Susquehanna. He and Dad talked about the desirability of
having powerful technical backup for a company that was
aggressively seeking expansion and new opportunities. Dad and Alan
agreed that it would be a useful thing if there was a laboratory,
but the Susquehanna people didn't want to take on the burden of a
staff, which was the commitment that goes along with having
technical people.

An Arrangement with Susquehanna

Hazen: So Alan and Dad made a deal that Susquehanna was willing to make an
investment in real estate and laboratory, and they would lease it
to Dad. Then it was up to Dad to find a staff and run it, the idea
being that the Susquehanna people would have projects coming into
that laboratory on a project basis rather than a continuing need
for salaries. Dad was to start a company which would then attempt
to make use of the laboratory and would have work from Susquehanna
but was free to do work for other people, too.

Dad, with his background of interest in cyanidation, gold, and
now uranium, and with the contact that he and I had, he suggested
that it might be an opportunity for me. All my life I had worked
for somebody else.

Swent: But you had worked out this arrangement with Kerr-McGee that was a
little similar, but you probably figured out some of the pitfalls.

Hazen: It was pretty neat. There's something else, though. It was

basically an oil company. They could do lots of mining and lots of
chemicals and those things, but basically they were and still are,
I think, pretty heavily influenced by oil, gas, refineries, and
stuff like that. So I wasn't ever going to be the top man, and I
think I always wanted to have my name on the door.

That was how Dad got started. He made a deal with Alan Gray
about the laboratory and the financing which would give us a couple

102

of years to start. He asked me if I would leave Kerr-McGee to join
him, which was not an easy decision. My family had broken up at
that time, and there was a lot of temptation to stay where it was
comfortable.

Swent: For the security.

Hazen: Oh, boy, yes.

Swent: You were living in Boulder with two children?

Hazen: No, I had moved to Denver by that time. The situation was

difficult all the way around, and the security—it's nice to have a
good job, and it's nice to have a fairly comfortably assured future
and so on. On the other hand, I liked my father, number one.
Number two, there's always been this kind of appeal of
independence.

Leaving Kerr-McGee to be Independent; 1961

Swent: The rewards are greater if it goes well.

Hazen: Not only that, there's something else about the independence that
is important—more important to some people than it is to others,
and I found out that it was important to me. So I left Kerr-McGee
and joined Dad in 1961; I think it was in October.

While I was at Kerr-McGee 1 had hired a young man named Enzo
Coltrinari, a very bright young Canadian metallurgist, and there
was Gus, with whom I'd been partners for a long time. When I left
Kerr-McGee, Gus said he'd be glad to join me, so we left Kerr-McGee
together. Then Kerr-McGee promptly said, "We're going to close up
this laboratory and offer all you people nice jobs at the tech
center in Oklahoma City. Johnny Herman I think was the only one
who moved to Oklahoma City from that place in Golden. I always
thought that was kind of an interesting thing. It turns out that
it is important to some kinds of people that they feel they have a
certain amount of independence and that they live in places of
their choosing.

Swent: Did Enzo move with you also?

Hazen: Yes, and Enzo is still with us. I work with him every day.

Melones Cyaniding Company, Melones, California, circa 1925.

Delamar, Nevada, beginning of operations, 1896.

Delamar, Nevada, 1935. Above, looking east. Below, view toward west showing
tailings from old cyanide plant; new plant to re-treat tailings at left.

103

VII HAZEN RESEARCH, INCORPORATED

Building the Organization

Swent: So that was a big, big decision.

Hazen: Yes. Dad was an independent consultant and a mill builder, so he

continued on. His role in the new company was to try to find work,
[laughs] And he had his own consulting business; he had to keep
that, too. I was supposed to run the laboratory. That was how his
research got started.

Swent: You had Susquehanna, though, as a client?

Hazen: Yes, and part of the deal was that Susquehanna had projects ahead,
so we knew for a year or two that we had a buffer. As I look back,
that again was trying to get something new started and all the
troubles. That was in '61, and in '62 I think we just did
Susquehanna work. In '63 we began having an increasing amount of
work from Climax Molybdenum. Then I took a trip down through the
Colorado- -the copper country in Arizona and New Mexico, visited my
old friend Lefty Thompson in Socorro, and then went on and made the
tour of the copper activities. Mining people in general are a
pretty friendly lot. I was thinking that I had made an appointment
to see the metallurgist at Morenci, a young man named Bill
Griffith. Did you know Bill by chance?

Swent: He was the one who went up to Hecla later? Yes.

Hazen: Norma and I had married by that time; we're in '64. We made a trip
down through the copper country and stopped in at Morenci. I had a
morning visit with Bill Griffith, and he said, "Why don't you and
your wife come for lunch?"

So we went to lunch, and Bill and I went back and talked some
more. It was the first time I had ever seen a copper reverbatory

104

furnace up close. He was very nice and talked about the problems
we had and the problems they had. He gave me names and
introductions to other people whom I then visited down at Bluebell
and some of the mines just outside Tucson.

That was the way I began trying to generate work. Dad had a
stroke in 1964 as the result of some surgery. One day he was
there, and the next day he wasn't. This was pretty tough. But Dad
recovered from that, he was a great fighter, and a year later he
was able to drive a car again and occasionally came out to work.
But then he developed cancer and died from that in February of '66.

The early people we had, who started out, were Gus and me and
Dad and Dad's secretary, Mary Piddock, who was a very influential
and important member of the establishment. She became a corporate
officer. I had lunch with her the day before yesterday. She's
retired now. Then Enzo Coltrinari came after three or four months,
and a man named Frank Haas was the analyst. That was the group
that got things moving. Dad had a young man as an assistant to him
named Jerry Richards. I think he is at Blanding still. He helped
out in the early days.

The question always was, "How are you going to pay the bills?"
There were some kinds of principles established very early in the
game that came out of Dad's character and mine and our experiences
in dealing with people and dealing with clients. A very, very
fortunate association was that with Climax Molybdenum Company. Bob
Cuthbertson was the metallurgist and Dick Ronzio was a
metallurgist. Dick's still living in Golden. The manager was Bob
Henderson. Of course, the Henderson Mine is an enormous molybdenum
mine at Jones Pass and is named after Bob Henderson.

They had at Climax a part of the ore body that contained
molybdenum oxide as separate from the sulfide, which constituted
the majority of the mineral value.

Swent: You were just starting to tell about the molybdenum ore at Climax.

Hazen: That molybdenum ore contained a portion in the ore body in which

some of the molybdenum was present as molybdenum oxide, whereas the
majority of the mineralization is molybdenum sulfide, and the
flotation plant is built on the basis of recovery of molybdenum
sulfide and does not recover the oxide fraction. So Climax used a
consultant named Al Ross.

105

Al Ross, Ken Coyne

Swent: Oh, from Toronto?

Hazen: Yes. Did you know Al?

Swent: Yes.

Hazen: How did you happen to know Al?

Swent: Well, he did consulting for Homestake. He used to come through

Grants, and he was working in South America for a long time, too.
Nice fellow.

Hazen: Yes, indeed. A very dedicated guy.

Swent: I felt awfully sad about his death.

Hazen: Yes. Well, he probably went doing what he liked most.

Swent: Running for a plane.

Hazen: I had run into Al Ross. I shouldn't say run into; Al Ross was one
of those consultants in the days of trying to decide what the
uranium plant should be at Grants at Ambrosia Lake for Kerr-McGee.
Al had been hired as a consultant by Mr. McGee to help unravel this
problem and to see that things went well. His group of people at
Toronto, including Archie Lamont, whom I remember particularly, and
Ken Coyne- -have you met Ken?

Swent: Oh, yes. Ken has worked with us on this series because of the
local A1ME section, and then MMSA.

Hazen: I just think Ken Coyne is one of the world's great people. Al Ross
was very interested in new technology and what was going on, and he
was always oriented toward being very, very safe about everything.
If you couldn't really point to a place where it was already done,
you had to be pretty convincing to get him to go along with it. In
this kind of discussion about acid leaching versus carbonate
leaching and so on, Al had been somewhat ambiguous, excepting that
he became interested in the pilot plan work. He had Archie Lamont
on his team, who came down and spent a lot of time. I think that
through the detailed knowledge of Archie Lamont, Al became
convinced that the acid leach solvent extraction, this new
technology, would be okay.

So I had had a long association with Al. Since he was a
consultant with Climax, and this moly-oxide problem had arisen, he

106

discussed with me undertaking for Climax, kind of under his
direction, experimental work. This gets to be kind of touchy in a
way, because Climax had laboratories and metallurgists and so
forth, and this was kind of a little bit aside. It was relatively
easy for there to have been some hurt feelings; but there didn't
turn out to be, and we did begin doing more and more work for
Climax because of Al Ross. In the early years Climax played an
exceedingly important role in keeping our company alive. Getting
started in anything is always tough.

Maxie Anderson; the Bluebird Mine, Arizona

Hazen: During the Ambrosia Lake period, I had run into young Maxie
Anderson. Did you know Maxie well?

Swent: Not really well, but I knew him and saw him a number of times.

Hazen: He had a pretty adventurous part. He was a flyer and had his own
plane at a very early age. I think his mother lied about his age
so that he could get his pilot's license at some very early age.
Because of all the ranching, the pipelines, the Ambrosia Lake, and
so on, there was enough money so that he could afford to have
things. He was kind of out on his own, too, and .he took over the
Bluebird deposit of ore. I can't at this moment resurrect just
where that is in relation to Inspiration.

Swent: This is in Arizona?

Hazen: Yes. Because of the previous association, I had known him, and he
called once. He didn't have a laboratory, and he needed to have a
place as he got into doing technical trying to build enterprises
and things. He called and asked if we could undertake the
percolation leach test work for the mine that he was considering.
I've forgotten the circumstances under which he acquired that mine,
but he was thinking about doing it and had to have a laboratory
association.

Swent: This was copper mining?

Hazen: Yes. So here was another client, arid we now had Ranchers
Exploration and Climax Molybdenum.

Swent: Maxie Anderson's company was Ranchers Exploration and Development
Company?

Hazen: Yes.

107

Swent: They were headquartered in Albuquerque, weren't they?

Hazen: Yes.

Swent: So you were now in molybdenum, copper, and all sorts of things.

Hazen: Ranchers was bought by Hecla eventually, and Ranchers eventually

had Johnny Motica as their ore finder. You know, geologists either
become the people who write papers on geology or the people who
find mines. Johnny Motica was the kind of guy who went out to find
mines; he was able to go and find mines. I think he's in Grand
Junction.

Swent: Was Lee Erdahl with Ranchers at that time?

Hazen: I don't know that he was at that time, but he was eventually.
We're talking about 1965, 1966.

Swent: So Maxie was just getting started?

Hazen: Right; he was just getting started. He used Al Ross as a

consultant. I've forgotten whether it was at that time or later,
but I think so. Here we were with two very good clients. It's
getting a little bit ahead of the story, but it's worthwhile
telling as a separate entity: Following the work, the trail of our
association with Maxie Anderson and the Ranchers Exploration
Company, in the scheme of things we did the test work upon which he
based the installation of the percolation leaching facility. They
took the liquor, and they precipitated the copper by cementation;
so they made cement copper. Cement copper is okay if you've got a
market, but in times when the market is down and you wind up having
to sell it to anybody who wants offgrade copper instead of cathodes
copper, you might have a problem staying in business if you are at
the mercy of the price.

Maxie said one time, "Looking ahead, I wish there was some way
we could make cathode copper."

He asked me about it, and I said, "I don't know, maybe we
could try solvent extraction."1

"Well, solvent extraction—how does that work?" One thing led
to another, and we went to work, again kind of from a theoretical
standpoint, and came upon a chemical which would do as a
counterpart of the uranium solvent extraction and all of that. It
was dinonyl napthlalene sulfonic acid. Have you ever heard of a
name like that?

'For more on solvent extraction of copper, see Robert Haldeman,
Managing Copper Mines in Chile: Braden. CODELCO. Minerec. Pudahuel;
Developing Controlled Bacterial Leaching of Copper from Sulfide Ores; 1941-
1993. Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley.

108

Swent: No. [laughter]

Hazen: Terrible name. We found that it had characteristics that would

permit the extraction of copper from an acid liquor, that it could
be stripped, and one could have a concentrated copper sulfate
solution. If you then took that concentrated copper sulfate
solution and used it as a feed to electrolysis in a pure enough
solution, you would wind up with cathode copper. So here was a way
that he could take that liquor of copper sulfate and through
electrolysis get into the market that he wanted to get into.

Getting a little ahead of the story, Jim Lake was with us at
that time, and he installed a little pilot plant at Bluebird to use
dinonyl naphthalene sulfonic acid. We discovered that it had a
terrible drawback; it extracted calcium as well as it did copper.
It would extract all kinds of--it didn't have the selectivity that
was needed.

We were kind of struggling along with a sort of make-do thing,
and who should come along but Joe House of General Mills, with whom
I had had such a happy association in the uranium days, where he
and I had worked together. He said, "We have a nifty reagent which
will extract copper. Do you think that would be of any interest to
you?"

I said, "Let's talk about it," and we talked about it. It's
an oxime, which is in the right part of the chemistry, and it
seemed like it ought to be good. We tried it, and it seemed to be
pretty good, so then we began the same kind of thing of working
with Joe on the development of that reagent. Then we built a
little pilot plant at Hazen Research and used that reagent and got
ore from Maxie Anderson. We ran an integrated pilot plant where we
checked everything out for the extraction of copper and the
preparation of cathodes. Again, you go through the dreary litany
of things that you have to do.

I'm thinking that this has been a consistent theme of my life.
I don't think until now that I've really seen that that is what
I've been doing. Because here again, it's the same picture: you
start out puzzling about some kind of a problem which has
commercial significance, means something other than just
interesting knowledge, then you do some experimental work to see
how it works out, then you do some further work that you might call
demonstration activity, then you try and take it through an
engineering company, and then you see that it becomes an operating
entity. That's interesting.

109

Archer-Daniels-Midland

Hazen: In any event, at that same time Archer-Daniels-Midland came into
the act. They were interested in solvent extraction. They make
amines; they were trying to make an amine to compete with General
Mills, and other people, chemical companies, were getting into the
same market, saying, "What is all this stuff about solvent
extraction?"

The representative brought us the agent called Kelex. So
there we were, all of a sudden, with lots of work. We had Archer-
Daniels-Midland, who was paying us to try to develop their reagent
for copper solvent extraction; we had Maxie, who was paying us to
develop the Bluebird thing; and Joe House acting as a consultant to
supply us with chemicals to try out to work things out. We worked
very diligently on the solvent extraction of copper and finally
said, "Maxie, it's okay."

I think Al Ross then got into the act and began looking at
things. Art Miller was the manager of the copper activities for
Bluebird at that time. Art was very interesting. I think he was
an economist, and he had been a CIA agent. He'd had kind of an
exciting life and wound up with Maxie, which would have been
exciting also. Maxie was a pretty energetic character.

Swent : Things weren't quiet around him.

Hazen: They hired Bechtel to do the engineering. I went to San Francisco
to spend some time with the Bechtel people. Again, it's the same
thing. You have these same kinds of problems that aren't
immediately obvious. It's old hat now, but it was not at that
time. The flow of solutions, the mixing, how you got things so
that they would separate, how you placed the pipes, and all of this
practical hydraulic jazz—nobody knew about these.

Swent: You could never just duplicate what you had done in one place,
could you?

Hazen: No, but you learn. You learn what things work and what things

don't work. Bechtel had never built a plant like that, but they
felt they were great hydraulic engineers, which they are. On the
other hand, there were some practical parts of it that they had not
run into, so I was helpful to Art Miller in the engineering part of
it. Then Bechtel built it and installed it, and it became the
world's first copper solvent extraction plant.

I've often thought of Maxie Anderson—again, the character of
the people was so dreadfully important. Here is somebody like Dean

110

Swent :
Hazen:

McGee ultimately making decisions: "Okay, we're going to go with
this new stuff because it's the brass ring." And here's Maxie
Anderson saying, "I've got a real problem, and maybe I can muscle
it through by some old way; but I really would rather take a gamble
and try and do it big. If we're going to fail, let's fail while
we're doing something that is to us worth doing."

We talked about the scale of things—here is a five-gallon-a-
minute pilot plant scaled up to five thousand gallons a minute—the
design of the vessels, the scaling up of agitation devices, and so
on. It was quite successful and made the Bluebird mine a whole lot
of money. We were then back in contact with Joe House and were
therefore part of the development of those things. Art Miller
wrote a paper on that.

The first paper on the solvent extraction of uranium was given
at an AIME convention; it was one describing Shiprock, the Shiprock
uranium solvent extraction plant.1

This is the one that you wrote?

Yes. The next major development in solvent extraction was a paper
that Art Miller wrote on the Bluebird mine of Ranchers Exploration,
which was really the first one on copper SX.2 And it worked, which
is the important part. That plant was run by Ken Powers, a good
operator. So Ranchers was a good client.

Introduction to Banking Philosophy

Hazen: We got a little ahead, but those early years were pretty tough and
were particularly tough after Dad died, because my history had not
been concerned so much with the financial end of it. Dad had taken
care of all these things, and all of a sudden there's a payroll to
meet. It was my first introduction to banking philosophy, because
we had borrowed some of the money for operating. We needed money
to meet the payroll, so I went down to the bank that Dad had been
banking with. He had borrowed money on occasion, and I said I
wanted to borrow some more. They said, "Send us down the financial
statement of your company."

'W. C. Hazen and A. V. Henrickson. "Solvent Extraction of Uranium at
Shiprock, N.M." Mining Engineering, September 1957. See appendix.

2Arthur Miller, "Process for the recovery of copper from oxide copper
bearing ores by leach, liquid ion exchange and electrowinning at Ranchers
Bluebird Mine, Miami, Arizona." The Design of Producing Process, 1969.

Ill

So I sent down the company financial statement, and the man
called me from the bank and said, "I'm sorry, but we're not going
to be able to make that loan to you."

I said, "Gee, that's too bad. How come?"

He said, "Because you have to have it." I've often thought
about that. The bank was perfectly willing to make loans if we
wanted it in order to increase our operation or buy new equipment
that would increase our profit. But if you had to have it to keep
from going bankrupt, then the risk is obviously one that they would
not take. Our financial condition was that way.

First National Bank of Golden. Colorado

Hazen: So I went to the bank in Golden, Colorado, and ran into a man named
John Fortune, who was the president of the First National Bank of
Golden. I visited with John, and we talked about things. I was a
new enterprise, and he wanted to know what we were doing and all
about it. We spent a couple of hours talking about things. The
amount of money was $15,000. He said, "You know, I think a bank
has a duty, a civic duty, to take sometimes extra risk to help
businesses get started, because it's to our long-term advantage to
do it. So I'll be glad to loan you the $15,000. Of course, you'll
have to sign your house," etc. He didn't lose sight of any
collateral that was available.

Right there was a lesson I've never forgotten.
Swent: And they've had a good customer ever since, I'm sure.

Hazen: Yes, up until we got to a place where they were taken over by

Interstate Bank. They had a franchise agreement with that bank.
As a matter of fact, I was a director of that bank for many, many
years. We wanted to borrow a million and a half dollars. We
thought it was perfectly appropriate, and ultimately we did. But
the First Interstate people, the bank that we had been banking with
forever- -twenty- five years—had new. regulations, and according to
new regulations we didn't qualify in some way. So that was the end
of that banking relation. We found another bank that was able to
do it. That was too bad. John Fortune by that time had left.

Swent: Talking about scale up, from $15,000 to $1,500,000 is a nice scale
up, too.

112

Hazen: There's another scale up, too. [laughter] This is the last year
of payments on that $1,500,000. We've paid off the loan. As a
matter of fact, in between we had other borrowings of a million
dollars or so from the bank of Golden and had a very happy relation
with them until they were taken over by somebody else who had new
regulations. From a regulatory viewpoint, they were weren't as
concerned with the character of the relation or the character of
the people; it was, "What do the numbers say?"

[Interview 3: October 13, 1993] ##
Ethics and Conflict of Interest

Swent: We're getting together again after several months of intermission,
so we may repeat a little bit. When we ended, you had just gotten
started in your business with your father. Your father had asked
you to join him in this company. He was doing the development
work, and you were in charge of the laboratory.

But first I have a question, which takes us back a bit. When
you were working on your own, General Mills was selling reagents to
you, and you were also doing research for ADM to find new reagents.
Why couldn't you just take General Mills reagents and hand them
over to ADM? Was there some sort of inherent conflict of interest
there in dealing with two similar companies?

Hazen: I think, Lee, that you have raised a really important point, which
has to do with ethics as regards General Mills and ADM. In the
first place, General Mills hired us to check out the reagents that
they were interested in as solvents for copper and what is now
known as copper SXEW [solvent extraction electro-winning] circuits.
Then another client came in, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) , and they
had a series of reagents known as Kelex reagents, which were quite
different from General Mills' reagents. They also asked us whether
we could test their reagents to see whether they would be
applicable to copper solvent extraction.

So here were two clients who were headed for the same market.
At first glance, one says, "How is it possible to work for two
companies who are both trying to do the same thing?" But if one
converts it to flotation, and you were to say that Dow Chemical
Company came and gave us some reagents and asked how they would
work for flotation of copper, and we tested them, we would have no
inherent conflict against taking a sample of material that DuPont
was producing and seeing how it would work. Because for each

113

client we operate in a total relation with them in trying to keep
things so strict that there isn't any way that the information gets
transferred back and forth from one client to another. Ultimately
it has to be based on the trust the clients have that we are going
to be honorable.

Lawyers have conflicts of interest all the time. Life in the
business world is always full of potential conflicts of interest.
We always say that for each client, the client owns the information
we develop for him, and we have exactly the same kind of relation
as though we were giving him legal advice. Therefore there are
some kinds of conflicts that we recognize early enough so that we
just don't take clients who have directly conflicting interests.

In this case of development of reagents, we don't see that

there is any particular conflict, because the reagents are totally

different. The reagents are proprietary and patented, and what we

are doing is trying to see whether they are applicable to what the
client wants to do.

Conflict of interest has really been troublesome when clients
will send us a sample of something without necessarily identifying
where it's from. For example, it might be silver ore. If it's a
difficult one, we're working very diligently for Company A, trying
to recover the silver, and we might find that a chloridizing roast
is required. Then Company B sends us a sample and says, "This is
a silver ore. We wonder whether you can work out a way to recover
the silver, because we don't know how to do it." With horror, we
recognize from the mineralogy that these are samples from the same
deposit and that these two companies are both examining a
prospective ore body to see whether they want to take an option or
should be interested or what have you. All of a sudden we discover
that we have developed a way for Company A to recover its silver.
Now we are barred from doing that same thing with Company B at such
time that we recognize it's the same deposit.

If one is from a deposit in Idaho, and the other one is from a
deposit in Alaska, then the information is proprietary. It belongs
to the client, and he may have the patent and the ownership of the
patent. Then we are barred from using that technology on anybody
else without first telling the second client that there ±s already
technology available.

The conflict of interest problems always arise, and we are
always very careful. Ultimately you just have to conduct your
business in such a way that clients will accept the fact that you
are going to be highly ethical. That's why we have to be so
careful to be totally objective. I'm happy to say that over the
years—we have been in business now for almost thirty-two years—we

114

have never been involved in any kind of conflict of interest
problem with a client yet.

Swent: It seems to me, though, that what you learn on one test you should
be allowed to apply in subsequent laboratory work. If you learn
something on Company A's ores that you can then apply to Company B,
isn't that legitimate?

Hazen: Not if in truth it can be proprietary for Company A, and they can
obtain the ownership of the idea under the patent laws . We have
developed many patents for many companies.

Swent: They then have the patent, even though you developed it?

Hazen: Yes, they have the rights to it, because they paid for it. They

look upon us as an extension of their own laboratory, in which they
would surely have the rights to it. All of our contracts call for
ownership by the client of these rights if it's proprietary.

So what do you do if another client comes in, and you are the
possessor of knowledge which will solve his problem? It isn't
easy. It doesn't happen as often as you might think, particularly
in the mining industry, because mining people obtain their income
from the development of an ore body, not the ownership of a patent.
So ordinarily their interest in patents is that which will give
them protection to use the process so that nobody else can later
claim it and then ask for a royalty from them. Many companies in
general don't try to collect royalties on processes they have
developed.

Ultimately, either clients will trust you, or they won't use
you. They won't bring you secrets if they don't trust you; they
will just use you as a testing laboratory. We've always tried to
have a relation with clients where we have a professional input.
The clients come and discuss a problem rather than saying, "Here's
a test program we want you to carry out." It's in these cases that
we can be most effective. If you consider the experience we have
in our history—we have now done 8,300 projects for 2,500
companies—we have had ample opportunity to have had crossed wires
if we weren't pretty careful and hadn't developed procedures so
that the question doesn't arise.

Of course, that partly stems from my dad's founding
philosophy. When the company was founded, he felt that our
objectives were to try and achieve and maintain leadership in what
we are doing, to be a place where employees can have gratifying
employment and good lives, and where we can make a profit. If you
take things in that order, you recognize that in order to achieve

115

and maintain leadership, you have to be beyond suspicion in matters
of ethics.

Swent: It's interesting that you said this is actually a written policy

that your company has. I don't recall ever knowing of a technical
company that had such a policy in writing.

Hazen: Oh, the buzzword these days is mission statements and things like
that.

Swent: But thirty years ago this was not common for a company to have such
a written statement, was it?

Hazen: I don't know. I came to it not being basically business oriented.

Swent: I'm not sure that many companies even put the priorities in that
order.

Hazen: No, they don't.

Swent: Usually that third one would be number one.

Hazen: If you look at American industry now and the kind of disarray that
it has found itself to be in for the past twenty years, I think
part of it can be laid at the door of the short-termness of the
objectives, the controlling factor being the money.

Since we are a service company, what we really have is the
knowledge and the ability of people. Well, you have to have
unifying philosophies. You can't really ask people to be inventive
if their guiding philosophy is how to make a buck. They are not as
apt to have the same input into the work as they would if they had
other objectives in life.

Working with Maxie Anderson

Swent: This might be a good place for you to tell on tape the anecdote

about Maxie Anderson and Johnny Motica. You mentioned working for
them in copper, but you haven't mentioned gold.

Hazen: We might talk about some of the early clients we had, the earliest
being the Edgemont Corporation or, as it became, Susquehanna.
Maxie Anderson and the Ranchers Exploration Development Company was
a very early client.

Swent: You have discussed your work at Bluebird.

116

Hazen: We worked for Maxie and did most of his metallurgical work up until
the sale of his company to Hecla and even past then. In this
particular incident, we were doing the analytical work, the gold
assaying, on a new property that Johnny Motica was having drilled
out. We were taking the drill cores, preparing them, and doing the
assaying. The head of our analytical department came--

Swent: Do you want to mention his name?

Hazen: I'm trying to think who it was at that time. It doesn't come to me
at the moment. In any event, he told me in dismay that the assays
were off by a factor of two, and we had been reporting gold assays
which were twice as high as they should have been. We did a lot of
things as swiftly as we could, like re-assaying, sending samples
out to other places for confirmation, and we even hired a man from
Cripple Creek who was an old-time fire assayer, in case there was
some art involved in fire-assaying that we were not knowledgeable
about .

When things got a little bit cleared up in about half a day, I
called Maxie and told him. He was very quiet while he received
this news of our mistake. All he said at that time was, "Well,
keep me informed." We bustled around and did all of these things
until we finally found where our mistakes were, and then we went
back and did the things that needed to be done. After a matter of
a few weeks I made my report to Motica and to Maxie, feeling that I
didn't know if this was going to be the end of a nice relationship
or not.

Maxie very shortly called and said that they had a new
project, and they wanted us to do the metallurgical work. I said
to him at that time, referring to this other mistake, that I was
glad he had decided he would still come to us for metallurgical
work. He said, "Everybody can make a mistake, but not everybody
will tell me about it. I would much rather deal with people who
make mistakes and own up to them than with people who try to hide
their mistakes, no matter how clever they may be."

This was kind of an early example of the old adage in this
business: If you cannot have the trust of your clients, you very
soon aren't going to have clients. That almost leads, then, to
saying that the profit motive cannot be number one, because there
are times, as this with Maxie Anderson, when it cost us a lot of
money to recover the mistakes that we made.

117

Climax Molybdenum as a Client

Hazen: In any event, in those early days we had Maxie Anderson and

Ranchers, and we had a lot of work from Climax Molybdenum. Climax
Molybdenum was a particularly good and wonderful client to us.

Swent: You had mentioned Al Ross.

Hazen: Al Ross, of A. H. Ross of Canada, was a consultant.

Swent: You worked with him for Climax, too?

Hazen: Yes. They were particularly fine because they were very

understanding of a struggling young company. We had some major
work for them, and they even paid their bills in advance to help us
out with our cash flow.

Swent: Who were you talking to at Climax?

Hazen: Bob Henderson. Of course, we also knew Frank Windolph and the

others very well during the development of the Henderson Mine. We
knew all of those people and did a lot of work [for them on that].
But the important thing for us has always been the repeat work.
Eight-five percent of our work on a steady basis comes from repeat
clients. We have averaged one new project from Kerr McGee every
four months for thirty years. Now, that's an average. So what
makes it important for the stability of a relation is the trust
that has developed, and you attempt to merit this all the time.

We started out talking about conflict of interest and by
finally winding up with the understanding that you can always find
some way where almost anything you do can conflict with something
else, but if you are aware of it, you talk about it and keep it out
on the table. Complete disclosure is the way to ward off conflict.
We sometimes say to a client that we are sorry that we can't take
this on at this time because of other work that we are doing.

Since most of the mining industry is concerned with a deposit,
the conflict issue doesn't happen so often. I don't know what's
going to happen now that so much work is done in remediation,
because there will be lots of proprietary technologies developed.
I think the possibilities for conflict are going to be much
greater. But the whole world is changing so, and the way
information flows.

I might digress for just a moment to say that with the advent
of computers, fax machines, and other ways of getting information
very quickly, it is very hard for Hazen Research to be sure that we

118

keep control of the flow of information. Let me give you an
illustration. I've been meeting with a client, and we have not
only the professionals, but if there is going to be substantial
pilot plant work, we also have the hourly people join the
discussions. You agree on what you are going to do. Clients are
always very eager; when they have a project, they want it right
now. They don't come in with something that they may be interested
in in a year or six months; they come and are ready to have the
work done, and of course they would like to have it all done
immediately.

In their eagerness to learn, they call regularly and say,
"Well, have you finished those leach tests? How did the cyanide
test work out on this refractory ore we got?" You try to tell
them, and then they say, "Why don't you just fax us the data
sheets?" You try to respond to that, because you recognize that
they are in a hurry. Then they have been in contact with a
technician, and the next thing you know, you go out to check on the
work, and you find that the guy at the bench has been talking on
the telephone with a client, and the client would like the guy to
change the pH of the next set of readings and fax him the results.
What has happened then is that you have bypassed any of the
administrative safeguards that you have.

Anybody can make mistakes. But, for example, if there is no
check between what we transmit to the client, for which we have a
responsibility as a corporation—if the work is done and
transmitted immediately to the client, you have bypassed all of our
safeguards such as technical review of reports and things like
that. So this immediate transfer of information has presented us
with a very serious problem. One can think of administrative
procedures as saying, "No employee can give information until it
has been checked by somebody, and finally some vice president has
signed it off." What you have then is a lot of angry clients, who
say, "I'm paying for this work, and I want it because--" et cetera.

This we still have to untangle. It isn't clear how that is
going to turn out, except that I think it's going to become ever
more difficult to handle the procedures. If you begin to put these
kinds of safeguards in, they slow things up so that you become
bureaucratic.

Financing Research

Hazen: One of the things I would like to talk about rather early in any
talk about Hazen Research is the financial side of it. It turns

119

out—after I had my nose rubbed in it enough times—that when you
talk with a client who is accustomed to the costs of his own
laboratory, where he has a budget and hires people full time, he
never runs into the problem of what the people should be doing,
because he has a budget, and he has a project, and he matches them
up. He works on the project at the rate that his budget will allow
with the people he has and if the people are pretty steady.

If he comes to us, he would like us to employ all of our best
people for three weeks, get the information, thank us very much,
and pay his bill. But then the professionals have to have another
client to work for, or else, since they require payment on their
fixed schedule, they are an overhead. Then the question arises as
to what can one do with very talented people who don't have a
client and a client's problem? What we do is pick out problems of
our own, and these problems keep the people at the bench, who are
people of curiosity and intelligence. They go try things because
they are technically skilled, and it appeals to them that, "Gee,
maybe there's something one can do," such as converting pyrite to
ferric sulfate or ferrous sulfate or something like that, in order
to change the metallurgy. But he doesn't have a client.

What we have done with these people is to ask them to do some
experimental work. Then, when you have some experiments, you can
go to a client and say, "Look, here's something that might be of
interest to you. How would you like to sponsor a project pursuing
this farther?" If you know enough clients and you know enough
problems, this becomes the basis for a very effective selling
campaign.

Swent: So you are actually one step ahead of them?

Hazen: We try to be. As a matter of fact, right at the present moment I'm
preparing a proposal for a company that might be very interested in
some work we've been doing that we funded ourselves. If it turns
out, then they will own it.

Associations with Gifted People; Paul Kruesi

Hazen: An example of this is that we have always felt that we can prosper
by finding ways to be associated with very gifted people in some
way. One of our clients was the Molycorp Corporation of America.
Their technical guy was Paul Kruesi. I knew Paul because he was a
client, and we got acquainted over the years. One time I went to
New York, and I was talking with him about the kinds of things that
we do. He said, "You know, that sounds wonderful. I've always

120

kind of wanted to be an inventor. Here I am in New York, helping
to run a large company. We're doing lots of work in solvent
extraction and ion exchange, and we've got this new rare earth—the
Mountain Pass deposit—and all of those things. But I've got all
kinds of ideas that I think would be great, and it wouldn't be in
Molycorp's interest to pursue them particularly. I've always
thought it would be neat to live in Denver."

I said, "Well, why don't we make a deal? If you want to be a
backyard inventor or a garage inventor, Hazen Research will supply
you with a garage--a laboratory- -and some technical help. If you
want to, we can form a partnership, where we will supply these
things, and yoxi supply the ideas and do the work. Then we will
split fifty-fifty anything which comes from your work."

So we did that.
Swent: He left Molycorp and came with you?

Hazen: He left Molycorp, but he didn't join Hazen Research. He set up a
little company of his own, which had a partnership agreement with
Hazen Research.

Swent: What did he call his company?

Hazen: Cato Research. I think that's the name. I know that Paul has Cato
Research, and I think it was formed at that time, although there
may have been some other name involved.

Anyway, he left Molycorp, and I've often thought what a great
deal of courage it took to leave a very fine position as a vice
president of technology at Molycorp and move to Denver with his
wife and kids, for a meager salary to begin with, a great deal less
than he had been accustomed to.

Swent: Did you pay him a salary?

Hazen: We paid him what I might say was enough money for the kids' shoes,
but we carried the expense of the laboratory and a young
professional to work with him.

He was a very creative guy and still is; he still has his
laboratory. He developed a method of electrolytically decomposing
chalcopyrite concentrates. This was at a time when chalcopyrite
concentrate in smelting was a dif f icult--there were
hydrometallurgical things getting started for handling chalcopyrite
concentrates and various kinds of leaching methods being developed.
So he developed this electrolytic oxidation of chalcopyrite.

121

Developing the Cymet Process for Cyprus

Hazen: About that time, Gene Allen of Cyprus Mines — and Cyprus was a

client of ours--said, "What we'd like to do sometime, Wayne, is to
do some work on the electrolytic dissolution of chalcopyrite,
because we think that has promise."

I said, "Gene, we can't do that, because we are already doing
some work in that area."

He said, "Well, we really want to have some work done." Jim
Lake was in charge of this at that time for us, and I think I've
talked about Jim Lake, haven't I?

Swent : You mentioned him, yes.

Hazen: Jim said, "Why don't we figure out if there isn't some way that
your interest can be recognized, and the interests of the people
doing this can be recognized." One thing led to another, and what
happened was that Cyprus took over the development of this
electrolytic chalcopyrite dissolution which Paul Kruesi had
invented and which therefore would be owned fifty-fifty by Hazen
Research and Paul. It was a very difficult problem for us, because
unknowingly we had gotten into a position where we had ownership
rights in something that was going to be developed by Cyprus. The
question of ethics that we were talking about before arises
immediately: How does Cyprus feel? Of course, when this business
arrangement got started, there was complete disclosure of all this.
Cyprus said, "It's okay with us. We'll fund the work, but you
people continue on as you are, except that we want to accelerate
the pace of it."

So they began to put more money into it. Eventually there was
a pilot plant built, and the famous Cymet process got started. The
pilot plant was built in Tucson and started up as an electrolytic
dissolution in a diaphragm cell, with the slurry on one side and
the anode for the oxidation of the copper minerals, and on the
other side of the diaphragm, the cathode side, the copper would be
deposited or you could have other chemical reactions.

About that time, in about '73, all of a sudden the price of
energy changed drastically, because they changed the price of oil.
All of a sudden that which was founded upon electricity looked like
it would have pretty poor economics. There had been other
processes under consideration, so the Cymet process was switched at
that time to ferric chloride leaching of the chalcopyrite,
resulting in a solution of cuprous chloride. Cuprous chloride was
then crystalized to make cuprous chloride crystals, and the cuprous

122

chloride crystals were then directly reduced with hydrogen in a
fluid bed reactor.

Swent: This used much less electricity?

Hazen: Much less energy, yes, and it got around some other difficulties.
The diaphragms and the electrodes and so on were being pretty
troublesome in the original Cymet process. So this is the story of
how the Cymet process gradually- -

Swent: Why was the pilot plant built in Tucson?
Hazen: It had to do--

Hazen: Cyprus had a copper operation there in Tucson, so they were

familiar with it. Also it made it easier, because if you're going
to develop a pretty large pilot plant — and they did; they wanted to
have a pretty good-sized pilot plant, many tons of chalcopyrite
concentrate—it ' s pretty hard to do in the middle of a residential
area. So the plant was built there, and as a matter of fact we
built much of the plant, particularly the fluid bed reactors and so
on.

What happened ultimately was that when Cyprus was purchased by
Standard Oil, the Standard Oil people really didn't want to have
this partial ownership by Kruesi and Hazen and these people, and
they bought out our interest and Paul Kruesi 's interest.

The way we got started talking about this was the question of
what the other opportunities are for people, because we never want
to be just a testing laboratory. We've never wanted to be just an
assay office. We've always wanted to have a professional input
into the client's problems, and we really work very much better
when we do that rather than somebody coming in and saying, "Here
are ten cyanide leaches we want you to do," or five percolation
leaches or something. We've been built upon that, trying to seek
and bring the best and most effective technology that there is to a
client's problem. I think it's been an important part of our
growth that we've been able to take the lead. Part of our
marketing activity is to do the things and then go show the things.

Probably one of the great examples of this is going on right
now with the iron carbide thing. Have we talked about that?

Swent: No, we haven't.

123

Hazen:

Swent :

Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

What we've been talking about is Hazen Research and the basic idea
of what you do with the very high overhead cost of people who are
not chargeable to clients. One thing they do is write proposals,
[laughter] Then, of course, you have the overhead items of
accounting activities, groundskeeping, and things like that.

How many employees have you had?
eighteen in the early days.

At one point you mentioned

We started out with four people.

When you first went into business with your father?

Yes, in 1961.

Four people who had left Kerr-McGee to go with you?

No. Mary Piddock was one, but she was Dad's secretary. Gus
Henrickson and I were two who came from Kerr-McGee, and then there
was Frank Haas, who was hired by Dad. After about six months Enzo
Coltrinari joined us, and that was the early gang.

The maximum size was probably in about 1980, when we had about
230 employees. We're about 125 right now.

This is a scale-up problem all its own, isn't it?

Oh, yes, it is.

And you can't do a pilot on that. [laughs]

It's very difficult, and the management of it is extraordinarily
difficult when you consider the complexity of the client who comes
in and needs to be matched up with somebody who is competent to
discuss the problem with him technically. Then you have to have
the work being done and the facilities, jointly used by many
people. At any one time we will have thirty to fifty active
projects, and it's a beehive of activity.

Development of Iron Carbide

Hazen: The use of otherwise unbillable time on the part of professionals

for developing new knowledge as a basis for sales is probably shown
best by the iron carbide process, which is now undergoing
commercial development. Frank Stephens, who joined the company
from being a vice president of Parsons Jurden, the engineering firm

124

in New York, had an idea of how to take iron ore in a fluidized bed
reactor using natural gas. He could convert it to iron carbide,
Fe3C. Iron carbide is a solid material produced directly by a
one-step process from iron ore at the mine; you have something
which is almost like pig iron, and you can bypass blast furnaces
and all that capital expense, and you make a product which can go
directly to an electric furnace.

Frank had an idea that this could be done, and over the years,
as he had time, and other people in the company had time, he worked
on this. Then we attempted to get sponsorship of it. We had a
great deal of interest and, as a matter of fact, some funding from
LKAB in Sweden and some funding in the United States. Each of
these things would add to some developments, and then people would
have a partial interest and then drop their interest in it.

We kept on until finally, after Frank retired from Hazen
Research three or four years ago, he found a group who would back
the idea. The experimental work then continued- -the engineering
and the development. A plant was built in Australia as a
demonstration plant. There were hundreds of tons of iron carbide
made and sent to steel industries all over the world. At the
present time a full-sized commercial plant to make iron carbide is
being built by Nucor on the island of Trinidad, because it worked
out as being the best place from the point of view of availability
of iron ore and natural gas by ship. That plant is supposed to
start in July 1994, so there will be another example--

Swent: How many years has this been in development?

Hazen: Twenty or twenty-five years.

Swent: That's a long time. Somebody had to pay for all that.

Hazen: Of course, it wasn't steady. It was just that when Frank had time,
he'd work on it. Then he'd have somebody who was interested in
putting some money in, so he would do experimental work for them.
Then there would be a long period when not much could be done.
Frank was the epitome of the bulldog who just never let go, and now
it looks as though his company will be able to profit from that.
He took an option on the process from Hazen Research and paid for
the option, and now he is in a position to be in fact the father of
a great big new beautiful process. Again, taking something from an
idea, through the development stage, and helping it into commercial
development. I think Frank has done a wonderful job and that the
world is going to be very pleased with having cheaper steel.

Swent: You should be pleased, too, for your part in it.

125

Hazen: Oh, you bet. We take pride in—well, we said that one of the early
objectives was to be an effective force in bringing new technology
to mining activities. The copper and this iron carbide are
examples of that.

One of the ways — and perhaps a very, very important way—we
have used to be able to stay in business is to have a lot of ideas
that people have done some exploratory work on because they didn't
have other work, and you had to keep paying them. So you have to
have enough cash to go through these times, because the mining
industry does have its ups and downs.

Swent: Who are some of your competitors?

Hazen: When we started out, the biggest one was the Colorado School of
Mines Research Institute, right on our doorstep.

Swent: They don't even exist any more, do they?

Hazen: No. I heard just the other day that somebody has bought the
remaining entity and is going to start it up again.

Swent: Why did you thrive and they go down the drain?

Hazen: I don't know that there's any one thing that you can point to,

except that over the years clients have been happy to come back. I
think that if there is one single reason, it's the one we've been
talking about— that is, the idea that we are going to be the
leaders in the aspect of trying to have new technology. When we
don't have a client who wants to sponsor that, then we sponsor it
internally as a basis for proposals.

Swent: But you would think that a university could do that as well as or
better than you.

Hazen: But they can't, because they are not profit oriented. With our
saying that we want to be the leaders, and we want to bring new
technology, we recognize that if we don't have clients who are
happy, we aren't going to stay in business, no matter what. We
aren't going to get a chance to practice the principles if we don't
have the money to make it go around. The analogy that I 'use that
has been effective in trying to explain this relation and the
question of why government laboratories and universities are not
that much competition is that we look upon profit as being a little
bit like oxygen. If I don't have oxygen, I'm not going to live,
but the purpose of my life is not to consume oxygen; if we don't
have a profit, we don't survive, but the purpose of our business is
not to profit. So I look upon profit as being one of the costs of

126

staying in business. We can get into this when we talk about
employees.

With the university, that driving force of having to keep a
client really happy, or else you don't have a future, is not as
strong. Added to which, they have other functions—obviously the
educational function and other mandates that they have—and they
get their money from different sources and so forth. Since they
have different purposes and different ways of doing it, I feel that
they have not usually been as much in tune with the economic
problems of running a business.

We have a very good association with the Colorado School of
Mines, I think, particularly with Dr. John Hager, who has been a
tower of strength for Hazen Research. Our association with him has
been particularly fruitful. He has the right kind of blend between
the academic view and the responsibility he has for teaching with
the industrial viewpoint that permits him to see how these ideas
can be put into practice. We work very effectively with him.

Swent: I presume you hire a lot of graduates from CSM, don't you?

Hazen: Only students. This is rather a sensitive subject. As a

generality, fresh young graduates are not useful to us. This has
to be phrased just right, and I think I said it awkwardly. They
have not had the kind of experience which lets them feel the
commercial viewpoint. They have an academic viewpoint, as they
should; that's been their history. But it's much more useful for
us to have people who have industrial experience of five to ten
years and who decide that rather than manufacturing, industrial, or
management, the research and development activities are where their
hearts lie. Then when they come to us they bring the knowledge of,
"Well, let's see; if I want to have a 50 percent solid slurry, I
wonder if that's a practical thing to use or whether it should be
25 percent solids?" These are things that they learn by being
associated with operating plants and do not learn in school.
Therefore they are more palatable to our clients, who have in mind
running a mill or running a plant or developing a manufacturing
enterprise or doing something.

Our entire focus is on the development of knowledge that
people can use for industrial purposes. That knowledge is gained
by the application of academic knowledge with the appropriate
backup of facilities to a problem of industrial dimensions. That's
a viewpoint, and I would say that viewpoint, plus this other of
having a marketing program based upon what we have done on our own,
is probably the reason that we're still here. There's always this
recurrent theme of having ideas, taking them through the

127

laboratory, and bringing them to fruition—again, headed toward
industrial application.

Problems with Research Reports

Swent: I asked one person who had sent you a good deal of work through the
years why he liked you so well, and he said that your work was just
a lot better. I pressed him to be a little more specific about
that, and he said that at one time he gave a job to the research
bureau at the Colorado School of Mines, and he never even got a
report from them. When he sent something to you, you got results
back to him.

Hazen: This is a very difficult problem. Reports are a terribly sensitive
subject .

Swent: He did say that you didn't like writing reports- -that he got
reports from you, but he had trouble getting them on paper.

Hazen: Under duress. For thirty years it's been a real problem. It's
understandable, but the resolution of it still eludes us. The
problem is this--

Swent: You're researchers and not writers?

Hazen: Well, there are other aspects of it, too. The man who is

interested in the project and is doing it as a professional for a
client is interested in getting the problem solved. He also is
operating on a budget, so he spends all of his money and time
accomplishing that objective. When he's done, he says, "Okay, now
I have to write a report." But in the meantime he's got another
client saying, "When are you going to get started on what I'm
doing?" So the report kind of gets pushed back a little bit,
particularly if nobody's complaining about it. He says to himself,
"The client already has the information; they already know what
I've done, so there's no hurry about this." One thing leads to
another until after a while you can have a very unhappy client.

Reports are troublesome, and they are also very expensive. It
is a surprise to many clients to discover how expensive reports
are, because in their own laboratories they never see the expense
of writing a report. They have a staff, the staff is there on a
budget, they're on salary, they've done the work, they take time
off from the work to write a report, and it never appears as a
separate item. Therefore it is an absolute shock to discover how
much money it takes to write a report.

128

Swent: Have things like faxes and the whole technology of information
processing helped?

Hazen: No, it's made it much worse. In the process of faxes going back
and forth, you will have information that goes out which is, you
might say, in mid- flight on experimental work. Then new
information comes in which will alter the tentative conclusion that
you drew from the first one. So you have a lot of information
which is in transit and in the circuit. Now you are done with the
project, or maybe it's time to write a preliminary report of some
sort, and you have to review all of that which has already been
sent out. Now you discover that you not only have to worry about
saying that which turns out to be the right thing, but you also
have to pay your respects to the fact that there were a lot of
wrong things done that now have to be changed.

It becomes much more difficult, and unfortunately it happens
that clients, being human beings, will take the data when it first
comes in and is hot news, and they pass it up the chain. Then two
weeks later it turns out that, oh-oh, that was pretty good on that
test, but it looked like we were headed toward a very high
recovery, because we had gone from 70 to 80 percent; so everybody
is expecting 90 and 95 percent, and the next experiments turn out
to be 70 percent, and you had already reached a peak. In the
pipeline of information, the people who have received it have
reported to their superiors how great things are. Now everybody is
in the soup , and now we have to write a report .

In the first place, the budget is all gone, because you tried
to find out why it was only 70 percent instead of 80 percent; so
you've used up all the money. Now things don't look as good as
they were, so you hesitate to go back to the client and say, "Now
we'd like to be paid for writing a report." It is a very tangled,
difficult thing. We have not solved it satisfactorily. The only
thing I can say is that we've tried very hard to adhere to a
quality report and not let these pressures push us into being
sloppy. Because reports are enduring.

I have had the experience of being in Algeria and talking to
the minister of mines one time and finding that our reports were on
his desk. I recognized the reports, but I didn't see the titles.
These things get around, and they frequently wind up in banks. We
may say that a client already knows this, so you don't have to tell
everything in the report, because they already know that. Maybe
your contact for the client knows that, but you don't have to get
very far up or down the ladder to find that those people don't know
it. The guy you are in contact with, who has the budget, says,
"Don't spend all that time writing all that jazz; I already know
that." If you listen to him, put out a report that is half-baked,

129

and five years later it winds up at a bank, where they say, "Gee,
what kind of sloppy work is this?"

So we tried very, very hard to keep technical reviews going
and to keep the quality up, not only the quality of the writing but
pictures and photographs which present what it is, using graphs
where possible—all of the things you do so that you can prepare
something which will be enduring, because it is enduring, even if
the client doesn't think it's going to be.

Swent: Do you keep a separate staff for your report writing?

Hazen: No.

Swent: The technician or the engineer has to do the report?

Hazen: That's right. Isn't it terrible?

Swent: Whether or not there is much talent there for it?

Hazen: Unfortunately you are dead on. But, you see, there is another
basic philosophy that we use. When a project manager makes a
contact with a client, he frequently is the guy who also wrote the
proposal. He now has the responsibility to that individual to
carry out that which is in the proposal, to watch the budget, and
to direct the work technically. He retains the responsibility all
the way through, even if he has other groups working for him. He
doesn't shift the responsibility to another group leader; he keeps
the responsibility, even if he is having other people in the
company do the work. Therefore if, at the last moment, somebody
else comes in and tries to write the report, it would be almost
impossible, because they have to wonder what all this stuff is
about and go through all the notebooks and so forth.

Swent: So there is one person who knows it all?

Hazen: One person who is responsible. He has the responsibility for using
the facilities of Hazen Research for the client's benefit. If we
are not equipped to do that which is needed, he is required to go
and find some other way to get it done. We send lots of analytical
work out, away from our own laboratory. We are a big client of
other analytical laboratories. If the schedule is not such that
this engineer can get his client's work done on time, he goes
outside to some other laboratory to get it done. We have a machine
shop, but if he can't get things done in our shop, then he's
required to go get an outside shop.

This dedication to the idea I think has been a characteristic
always. But the report is a terrible problem often.

130

Mary Piddock

Swent: But to have the same person do the proposal and the report makes
good sense, doesn't it?

Hazen: It makes good sense, but it's hard to have it make a good report,
[laughter] I think we have Mary Piddock to thank for that. Mary
was a major player in Hazen Research until her retirement just a
few years ago. She was with us for close to thirty years. She was
the one who set the tone for the appearance of the reports and for
the binding. She also read and edited. After somebody has put
down the technical information and has it organized in some kind of
way, there is a place where you can get the kind of help that will
make a good report—by doing things about the expressions that are
used, word order, grammar, organization, tables, and headings.
Mary set the tone for all of this; she established all of these
procedures that we adhere to.

Swent: Has she been replaced by someone?

Hazen: I don't think people like Mary are ever really replaced. What

happens is that their functions get distributed. We have somebody
now, Suzanne Meyer, who does that very effectively but in a
different way; she has her own style of doing things.

Swent: We might mention women here. Mary was the only woman that was in
your original organization, but your mother, you said, was on the
board.

Hazen: Yes, Dad and Mother were effectively a partnership. They were very
close, and Mother was an integral part of all this and was an early
director. I have a couple of daughters, and though they are not
involved in the business, but they know a lot about it; I keep them
informed. We have some very nice, talented young engineers now who
are with us. Almost all of our office staff and the people who do
worry about reports and things like that are all ladies.

Swent: Some of your engineers are now women?

131

Hazen: Oh, yes. We have three young lady engineers. We were talking
before about the desirability of people having some industrial
experience before they come. Well, one of our engineers is Amy
James, who spent a good deal of time at the Mclaughlin operation
that we were talking about earlier. It was one of the earliest, if
not the earliest, of the big autoclave leaches.

Swent: I think they claim to be the earliest for gold.

Hazen: She brings with her a great deal of knowledge of practical

application of these processes, and it makes for very much better
research and development if you have a clear idea of how something
might eventually be used- -what kind of equipment, what kind of
process variables are important, and so forth. She brings that
directly from operations very effectively.

Swent: Who did she work for?

Hazen: Directly for Homestake. She was in the operations.

You asked a provocative question about how come we're still
alive when many of our competitors are not. I puzzled about this,
and I think some of the variables are important. We have talked
about our very strong marketing program based upon our use of
unbilled time, and our insistence that in general people bring with
them some industrial experience. We have some people who have come
directly from school, and they are very talented and very good.
But in general we are better off with people who have had
industrial experience. Then there is the problem of basic approach
to responsibility toward a client. We feel that after people have
worked to establish a good relation with a client they are much
more protective of the client's interests than they are of Hazen
Research's interests. [laughter]

Swent: Do you have to watch for that, too?

Hazen: I find that if they are going to overrun their budget, the next

thing I know their maintenance and the other ways they have to put
time on overhead suddenly balloons, because they don't want to go
back to the client and say, "I'm sorry, but I misjudged what the
cost was going to be." Some of these things happen.

132

VIII OUTSIDE VENTURES

Hazen: There's another thing, too, that we touched on for a moment. That
was other outside kinds of ventures. I told you about the
beginning of the Cymet process. Jim Lake came with the company in
1965, and Jim was a very powerful and effective partner. Under the
arrangement he owned a substantial part of the stock of the
company, which he had obtained on an option. He had as a view that
it would be a very desirable for a company like ours to have
available otherwise unused time which could be used to develop good
metallurgical process for ore bodies which were not being exploited
because there was not technology for them. So if you had a group
of people who were leaders in technology, and if you acquired
ownership of an ore body that was not being exploited because there
was no technology, then we could develop technology and thereby
develop effectively a kind of a mining activity.

The Apex Germanium Mine

Hazen: We actually did that. We purchased the only germanium property in
the United States, the Apex Mine in St. George, Utah.

Swent: So you went out and actually bought a mine. This was the first
time you had done that?

Hazen: Yes, and the last. [laughter] I think the concept was just great,
and I think had it worked out we could then have had an offshoot
company. The dream would be that instead of having a mining
company which started because it had a great big mine, and then it
developed a laboratory staff, you could have it be
technology-driven and hunt for opportunities. For example, one
could have dreamed that there might be refractory gold ores which

133

simply couldn't be treated, as there are refractory silver ores.
There are manganese silver ores that still cannot be effectively
treated.

Jim had this as a sort of a dream. I think it was a goal, a
model, that for our time was a dream situation that he was very
intent on pursuing, and he was effectively beginning to do so. We
had many other sorts of ventures going on, too. We've always been
searching for other kinds of opportunities.

Geoco

Hazen: One I might mention is that a young man came to us who was an

inventor who felt that you could use neutron activation analysis in
a portable instrument that would be able to analyze for nickel by
just sitting the rock on the instrument. Hanna Nickel and M. A.
Hanna Company and other people were good clients of ours, and they
had nickel deposits, for instance at Riddle in Oregon; Hanna had
that deposit. It would be a very useful instrument to have for
people operating a pit, because they could just go up to the face
with this instrument, put it up against the ore body, and read the
percent nickel. Having that kind of immediate analytical
capability, the people operating the pit could better govern the
grade of their mining activities as well as on-line instrumentation
of other sorts based upon that. Of course, Outokumpu [Company]
were leaders in this business of on-line instrumentation for
analysis, as I think they still are.

This was one particular one, so we backed this young man and
provided money. He built some instruments, and they did work. We
set up a little separate company called Geoco, which he was a large
owner in. Dick Blake was the man's name. But the development of
an instrument company was beyond our capability. It was too big a
bite for us to undertake, and eventually Dick left the enterprise.
We sold it then to one of our employees, Dr. Dave Christopher, who
asked if he could buy the company. He is an Englishman and is
still in England, but he came over here and worked for us for a
while.

Swent: Has he succeeded with it?

Hazen: No. That then got into the hands of Maxine Stewart, who was one of
our valuable and treasured employees. There's an example of the
female side of this activity. She still is very active in mining
activities. She acquired this business from Dave Christopher and
carried it on for a while.

134

Barnes Engineering Company

Hazen: We had another arrangement with a man named Bill Barnes, who had
been head of engineering activities for Union Carbide on the
Plateau in their mill building and things like that. Bill wanted
to get in business and start an engineering company of his own. We
had some property that was unused, and he asked whether we would
provide some financing and help him get started. We said, "It
really isn't our cup of tea, but we do want to offer to clients an
additional service; that in addition to the laboratory and
technical process development, we will help them with preliminary
design, because it's appropriate that the people in development can
carry over their metallurgical knowledge into the engineering
side."

Swent: This is what your father had offered originally, isn't it?

Hazen: Yes, by all means. So here was Bill Barnes, and he wanted to start
a business of his own. We didn't have any particular money, but we
said that what we would do was guarantee him a few years of work
for a few people, because we had that amount of work. Added to
which he could use our credit rating, and we would co-sign a note
for him if he wanted to build a building. He did, and he started
Barnes Engineering Company.

Swent: Right next to you in Golden?

Hazen: Right across the street from where we were. He built the business
up to be a very successful enterprise. Then I think Bill moved to
Midland, Texas, and he sold his business to an engineering company
and became the president of that company.

As our pay for this, we had a part interest in his company.
Then I ran into the problem of conflict of interest, which we were
talking about earlier. People were saying, "You are recommending
to us Barnes Engineering for this work, but you own an interest in
it; so it isn't so clear to us that your judgment won't be affected
by your ownership interests." So we were happy when that was
resolved.

We have done many, many of these spawning of some kind of
another enterprise. We've mentioned three or four of them, and I
think we had about twenty of them in our existence, the most
successful of which was Hazen-Quinn.

135

Hazen-Quinn

Swent: That's one I wanted to ask you about.
Hazen: It seems like I'm kind of rambling today.
Swent: I don't think so.

Hazen: Okay. Jim Quinn was the selling arm of the Denver Equipment

Company, which made ball mills, classifiers, and all kinds of mill
equipment. Under the ownership and leadership of A. C. Damon, the
Denver Equipment Company was built up to be a major force in
mining. Then it was sold out to Joy Manufacturing Company. Joy
Manufacturing Company brought to it management systems that were
not as well suited to a small company providing mining equipment,
with the result that after a while the people who had been
instrumental in Denver Equipment's growth and selling were hunting
for other places to work.

Swent: Mr. Damon died, too.

Hazen: Yes. It was taken over then by Bill Alborg and Art Damon.

Swent: There was nobody in the family who wanted to continue it?

Hazen: Well, Bill Alborg did; he was a son-in-law. He kept it for a
while.

As frequently happens when you have a new management from some
other background in some other industry- -Joy Manufacturing was a
very fine company, but they had their own ways of doing things.
The result of all of that was that Jim Quinn, who had been a big
force in the development and knew everybody in the mining industry
(he still does and is highly regarded by the entire mining
community) , came to us to be our vice president in charge of our
marketing activities.

Swent: You speak as if he just came; did you recruit him?

Hazen: I'd known Jim for ten years, and we were friends. It seemed like a
natural sort of thing. I knew he was unhappy, and one thing led to
another, as those things do.

One of the small businesses that we had had been started by
Gus Henrickson, who was one of our original group. Gus was a very
skilled individual at building the kinds of things that laboratory
experiment requires. If you needed to have a laboratory experiment
where you were continuously feeding a slurry of 30 percent solids

136

at 10 cubic centimeters a minute, it's a very difficult problem.
You can handle a thick slurry on a large scale very much more
easily than you can on a small scale, because you can't use little
tubes because they plug up.

So how do you do this? Well, Gus was enormously creative and
still is. He found very clever ways to do these sorts of things.
Of anecdotal interest, A. C. Damon, founder and owner of Denver
Equipment Company, was so intrigued through Jim Quinn, whom I had
known before with Kerr McGee, that Mr. Damon, Sr., came out to Gus'
research laboratory and looked at some of these novelty sorts of
things that Gus had created to solve particular problems in
experimental work in a laboratory in ore dressing laboratories. He
was fascinated, and he came to me and said, "This is just
wonderful. I like to see all of these new things." Of course, he
had in mind that eventually these things could turn out to be of
commercial significance to him.

So Mr. Damon made a deal with me, which was that we could buy
for our pilot plant use anything that was in the Denver Equipment
catalogue at list price, and we didn't have to pay for it except at
the rate of $1,000 a month. So we got multiple tens of thousands
of dollars worth of equipment that we needed and only paid $1,000 a
month with no interest. That was his way of backing it, and of
course it sold equipment, too. That was another individual, who by
his foresight and generosity was a help to us in the early years.

Swent: He was very much admired, wasn't he?

Hazen: I think admired and respected. He was a great guy, and he had a

lot of vision. Like everybody who develops and runs a business and
has to go through the difficulties that there are in dealing in a
commercial way with getting something started, he had a certain
kind of toughness about him, too.

My association with Jim Quinn had been for a long time, and
Gus Henrickson had been building up these things. Gus then said,
"Why don't we make a business of this?" We rented a small machine
shop a few blocks away, and Gus there made equipment and various
things. That then began to develop other kinds of things for
sale — small equipment. Gus was a gifted chemist as well,' so he
came back to the laboratory work, and other people began running
that.

In their desire to keep the payroll going while there were
downturns in the business, they said, "One of the things we can do
is installation work of things like oxygen systems and so on for
ambulances," in association with somebody who was in the business
in nursing homes. It seemed like an opportunity. So, believe it

137

or not, we began doing things with ambulances,
said, "Why don't we make an ambulance?"

Finally somebody

So in this kind of meandering way, over a period of years, we
found ourselves in the ambulance business. [laughter] I thought,
"For heaven's sakes, what are we doing in the ambulance business?
But it had been put in the hands of somebody who wanted to make a
business of his own.

711

Swent :
Hazen:

When Jim Quinn came to us, one of the things I asked him to do
was to please look at that, because I said it didn't seem quite
right. He came back and said, "Boy, you better get out of that as
fast as you can," so we did. "But," he said, "I think there's a
real opportunity to build small equipment. With solvent extraction
coming along, not very many people know how to build that; so why
don't I take over that as a division of the company, and we'll see
if we can build up a small equipment manufacturing business."

So Hazen Research owned that; it was a division. Ultimately
Jim wanted to expand it, and he was a marvelous salesman. He sold
equipment and built it, and so they leased a property not too far
from the stockyards and began to get into business as Hazen-Quinn
Equipment Company, although it was totally owned by Hazen Research.
He was enormously successful and was a significant contributor to
the income of Hazen Research.

There's another example of how Gus made use of his otherwise
unbilled time by building things in a little separate shop for
sale; so when he wasn't busy using his professional talents for a
client, he was building something which could be put in the
inventory. Instead of having his labor be an overhead charge, he
was building up an inventory which could be sold. Then that led,
through Jim Quinn, to a very successful small equipment business.

Jim bought that business from us only six months or a year
ago, so it's totally independent now and separate. It's Quinn
Equipment .

He got more heavily into the waste disposal business?

Not so much. That was one thing; they did build equipment for
that, but they built various pieces of equipment. And, you know,
if you build an agitator, it doesn't matter where the dirt comes
from, whether it's from a waste dump or a mine; it's still the same
piece of equipment.

Jim's son, Rick, is the president. Jim is kind of retired
now, and his son, Rick, is running the business.

138

Swent: That's another father- son company that is succeeding.
Hazen: Right.

Along the way, just kind of as an aside, there were many
companies --some were clients, for example- -who looked at us and
said, "Gee, this looks real interesting. Here is a going
laboratory which pays for itself. Why don't we just buy them?" I
can count up fifteen negotiations that were carried on, because I
always thought, "I don't see anything wrong, if you get a big
powerful backer, and if things are right--." But every one of them
turned out to have the same kind of basic flaw in my view at that
time. I'm putting all of those qualifications in, because the
times have a lot to do with how you look at things. One of the
things that seemed very clear is that we would become
institutionalized. Most of the companies who talked to us already
had good laboratories, so I used to say, "Why wouldn't they just
kind of stuff us in with the laboratory we've got, and therefore
that independent flavor would be lost?" I was very much afraid
that we could then become submerged. Gee, I was having a great
time and enjoying life, and we were growing, having fun, and making
good money. So why change?

Swent: You were obviously attractive to other people.

Hazen: Yes, but it wasn't always our decision. Many times they would look
very carefully at us and go away. They said the problem was that
this company is built around certain numbers of people; it's kind
of a people business. Therefore there's nothing that would
necessarily keep those people there. They recognized that they
would be better to use us as clients than to own us. It's not
inherently a big profit-making thing. There are times you can make
good money, and there are times when you just wonder--. We have
been as high as 220 people, and we are now 125, so obviously a
hundred people have left, not all of their own volition. But, as
you know, the mining business—was it around '83 when everything in
the mining business went to pieces? It was very difficult.

Swent: You said that you were aware that Jim Quinn was not very happy

where he was. I'd like to know how this sort of relationship came
about. Where did you meet people? Was there an engineer's' club,
AIME meetings, country clubs? Where were you socializing or
getting this sort of personal interaction with these other people?

Hazen: I think you probably know, with your background, that the mining

industry is a rather small fraternity. Therefore they kind of all
get acquainted with each other, not necessarily through conventions
and mining clubs, although that is a way, but because sooner or
later you meet everybody.

139

Jim Quinn is an example. When I was with Kerr McGee and we
were beginning to try to design some plants, one of the things that
I had to do was worry about what the cost of a plant might be as an
original estimate. The natural thing is to call up the
manufacturers of the equipment and ask them to give you what the
price would be on various kinds of ball mills or classifiers, so
you get to know the people. Jim Quinn was so very active and such
a dynamic player in the whole mining industry that I wasn't with
Kerr McGee more than a few years before I knew Jim Quinn pretty
well through that association. Over a period of time, if you are
dealing with companies, you get to know all the people.

Swent: And you hear gossip about other people?

Hazen: And you write papers, and the other ways that you are in contact.
We had a particularly easy time because of the constant flow of
people back and forth.

Swent: People who came to visit you?

Hazen: Yes. If you take a typical year in the late seventies, when the
mining industry was taken over probably by the oil industry. The
oil industry discovered it was very difficult to manage the mining
industry, that it required miners, but in the meantime they had
changed the managements. Then the oil companies came upon their
bad times, and so they backed away and divested themselves of the
mining activity. We see the changes that took place at Cyprus,
which is a good example of a major client. They were taken over by
Standard Oil, and then Standard Oil spun them off. You had all of
these changes going on. If we were dealing with, say, four hundred
companies a year, it was pretty natural that we would get to know a
lot of people.

The mining industry itself has undergone a very substantial
and major change. It's a profound change. You and I have talked
about this before, and you have been a participant in a lot of
that, too. There was a time when major mining companies had very
significant developments going on in the United States all the
time. There were always new projects coming on board, and
therefore they had to have their own laboratories. Witness
Anaconda, who had one of the giant laboratories in Tucson. Terry
McNulty, who was our president for five years, was director of the
Anaconda laboratories for many years.

Swent: And he came to you as president? I didn't know that.

Hazen: Yes. Do you know Terry?

Swent: I know of him; I interviewed Vincent Perry, and he spoke of him.

1AO

Hazen: The mining industry underwent this tremendous change. I don't know
whether there's any one word. The words that come to mind are
things like "divested themselves of their technical staff," or
"squeezed out technical--." The circumstances required that they
downsize, which is the current word. All of these
laboratories—Kennecott 's major activities in technology,
Anaconda" s--

Swent: Newmont?

Hazen: Oh, yes. All the major mining companies had significant technical
activities, and they were constantly bringing new technical
activities- -new plants on line, new kinds of things going on.
Well, with the change in the circumstances in the mining industry,
that was decimated; it was just killed. Just from a general
knowledge of things, we felt that at one time, a time when we were
well along, we probably had what I would say was 5 to 10 percent of
the total research and development activities by mining companies.
Certainly as regards the work that they foster that they pay for
with outside laboratories like ours, I think we have about
75 percent of the work that is done now. Almost all of their major
laboratories are now gone, and the people have found employment in
other industries.

Swent: Were you able to hire some of those people?
Hazen: No, because we didn't have any clients.
Swent: It didn't work to your benefit, then?

Hazen: No. It would have been lovely. There were some wonderful people

that it would have been just great for us to have, except we didn't
have any money, because we didn't have any clients, because
everybody had quit spending. The only things that went on were
those which would produce cash. It was a period of time when
major development of the things that I think were of such
interest—new technologies and things-- just came to a stop, just
halted.

From a technical standpoint I would say it's a semi-disaster
for the country. If your technology is going to be developed in
other countries, then you aren't going to have it here.

Swent: You mentioned Otokumpu, in Finland.

Hazen: Otokumpu is one company, a very strong company that now does
technology and so on. The Japanese have been very heavy in
technology development and research. While a lot of it has been
pointed toward electronics and automobiles, a lot of it has had to

141

do with the steel industry and others. They, of course, have had
their own comeuppance in the steel industry; their steel industry
has been very hard hit. After putting our steel industry out of
business, their steel industry is now having difficult times, too.

There has been such a profound readjustment in the mining
industry, and there just isn't very much going on in the United
States in the way of new things except in gold. We don't see the
big interest in things. Well, there's the big Blackbird mine, the
big cobalt property in Idaho, which I don't think will be
developed. It was a source—and still is a big ore body—of
cobalt. Nickel deposits— Riddle I think is shut down. Our iron
ore industry is now gone. There are still big taconite mines. But
you can just take one thing after another— the lead-zinc industry,
the big Midwest mining activities— and they are having a very tough
time. Prices have been low with the change in the world economics
and particularly with the change in the costs in the United States
because consideration has to be given to other concerns than just
getting the ore out of the ground and converting it. These added
costs have made it so that the work flows elsewhere.

I don't think having free trade is going to change it. It's
just cheaper to produce copper in Chile than it is in the United
States, and it will remain that way. It's not a question of
technology; in the case of copper, it's a question of where the ore
deposits are. I'd be very surprised to hear of any big porphyry
copper in the United States being started.

Swent: Kennecott has expanded Bingham Canyon in Utah.
Hazen: I'm not sure it would be a new enterprise.
Swent: No, that's hardly new.

Hazen: If that were a new, previously undiscovered deposit, I'm wondering
if it would be developed in the light of world economics now.

Swent: Maybe not.

Hazen: There are lots of changes, but that period in the early eighties
was devastating to the mining industry.

Swent: And to you?

Hazen: And us, yes. We then had to say, "Okay, if you have an

organization which is dedicated to the production of knowledge, and
that's the kind of knowledge which is gained by people of certain
disciplines like metallurgy and chemical engineering--

142

Swent : You mostly hire chemical engineers and metallurgists?
Hazen: Yes.

Where else is this knowledge required? There isn't very much
difference between taking lead out of a waste dump and lead out of
an ore. It uses the same kind of discipline, the same kind of
people, the same kind of technology. There is this tremendous
industry growing of the cleanup of metallic elements. Not only the
cleanup of that which had been done in the past but the changing of
the internal processes so that these wastes are not generated
any more.

I guess a case in point might be people who use copper as a
catalyst in various kinds of things. Since there's a catalyst,
when it was no longer useful and contaminated the solutions, they
disposed of them. Now they can't do that, so they have to recover
copper and put it back as a catalyst again. Who knows about
copper? Well, we do. So we have projects with people like that.

Then there is a great deal of work which is basically funded
by the government. The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency)
requirements mean that the Department of Defense has to clean up
something; so they hire a major company like Bechtel, and they have
to have subcontractors. Sooner or later, out of all that, with
government funding, we find ourselves in the position of providing
knowledge about these things that are our expertise to companies
that need it. So we're still in the same business, but we have
different clients. About half of our work now comes from this new
area.

Swent: The superfund sites that the miners are distressed about, you are
now profiting from?

Hazen: Yes. We're staying in business because of it. We feel a little

bit like survivors of an industry upheaval. You asked earlier why
we're still here and other people are not. It's because the
traditional business has dried up, and we've had to go find
business elsewhere.

Swent: You've been able to be flexible and change.

Hazen: We've had to go talk to new types of people, an example being the
manufacturer of chlorine. The chlorine caustic industry was based
upon a cell which used mercury—the mercury cell for chlorine
caustic manufacture—and inevitably over the years there had been
some mercury contamination around those facilities. We did a major

143

job and ran a pilot plant on devising a way to take the worst
industrial garbage you can think of and remove the mercury so that
it no longer contaminates the activity. This didn't require any
dif ferent--as far as we're concerned, we didn't have to learn
something new. We just applied the things we already know. We
know about mercury, because we worked for people on recovery of
mercury from cinnabar.

The transfer of knowledge from one industry to another
industry is what we're engaged in now. We haven't had to change
very much the kinds of laboratories we need, excepting that we now
have a whole bundle of regulations that we have to be very careful
about. If we are going to handle hazardous materials, we have to
have the appropriate kinds of paperwork to go with that, as it
should be.

This ability or necessity of finding work from other than the
mining industry—and we started to grow again. There was a long
period of time when we had a hard time weathering the storm.

We got started talking about some of our early people, and I
might mention that Floyd Haskell was one of the directors of Hazen
Research. Floyd Haskell, Jim Lake, and I were the three directors
on the board of directors of Hazen Research for many, many years,
until Floyd resigned in 1972.

Swent: You had only three directors?

Hazen: Only three directors, yes, for most of our life. In '72 Floyd

resigned because he then ran for senator from Colorado and was in
fact the United States Senator from Colorado for a term.

Swent: What had he done before he came with you?

Hazen: He is an attorney. He was an attorney in Denver who had helped us.
At that time Brad Wells, who had been a partner with Floyd Haskell,
came on the board.

Swent: Did it help you to have a senator connected?

Hazen: Only because Floyd's a great guy, but not because he was a senator.
I remember that at one time I went to Washington when the
Department of Energy was first getting underway, and I had an
opportunity through Floyd to have an introduction to some people,
thinking at that time that this would be a good place for us to
find work. But it was not. We've always almost entirely had to
stick pretty much to industrial clients. In my opinion and our
experience, it's very difficult for small companies to have direct
contracts with the government. Their procedures having to do with

144

accounting and so forth are pretty strict, and it adds a lot of
expense. So we've been more comfortable when we do have work,
although it may be ultimately funded by the government, to have our
direct bosses be people who are industrial.

Metcon

Hazen: We were talking about small other activities that we do, and I
don't think I said anything about our buying a small company in
Tucson called Metcon. We built a laboratory in Tucson based upon
that company, and for many years we had the division of our company
in Tucson. It was headed by Pete Thomas, who as one of our vice
presidents.

Swent: What did you do there?

Hazen: The same thing we do here, but the copper was pretty strong. It

had all kinds of big copper activities — Sierrita, Cyprus, Duval, et
cetera.

Swent: Sierrita was the Cyprus place, wasn't it?

Hazen: Cyprus now owns it; Cyprus bought it. I'm trying to think of the
great big one right outside--

Swent: San Manuel?

Hazen: Well, San Manuel, of course, which is now Magma. But there was all
that copper activity right there that we were trying to be close
enough to so that the problem of getting samples, making contacts,
and interfacing with people—since that was such a big activity, we
felt it would be desirable to benefit us to have a presence there.
We had good competition from Mountain States Engineering and many
other competitors. It was a time when there was a great deal of
interest in new technology and new things coming along.

Swent: When was this?

Hazen: We purchased that in '73.

Then we felt at one time that we could have a standards
division, where we would provide analytical standards. It's a
natural if you are an analytical laboratory that you have to have
standards that you compare things with. We thought, "Why don't we
just prepare, for instance, a copper ore? We'll take a few hundred
pounds of copper ore, grind it up, blend it, get it certified by

145

all different kinds of laboratories, and we'll package it and sell
it as a standard to--." Our idea was that we would sell it to
people who were in exploration, and particularly to people who were
doing drilling. Because they have lots and lots of samples, and we
felt that they would be well advised to put a standard of known
content in with all the samples they were sending to the local
analytical laboratory so that they could have some kind of a check
on the validity of what the laboratory was doing.

Swent: What an interesting idea.

Hazen: We thought it was going to be great, but it wasn't. Nobody was
really that interested. We prepared standards and did some
advertising, and we tried to do some selling. We sold a little
bit, but it never caught on really. It was one of those things
that you thought ought to be neat, that there ought to be lots of
need for that, but it turned out that there wasn't.

There was a lot of this that we were doing, searching for
ways--. The kind of dream, you might say, was to have a laboratory
which was the Mayo Clinic for any people having to do with mineral
natural resources. Or now it turns out that the same problems
arise in the hazardous waste business, the non-organic side of it.
The idea was that there would be this Mayo Clinic of highly
talented people who had lots of wonderful equipment, who were
industrially oriented, and who shared in our common values and
purposes. This center activity could spawn multiple offshoots
based upon, somehow or other, the technology which has emanated
from the center. Some people have called it the octopus theory of
building a company.

Our association with Paul Kruesi and Cato Enterprises; our
purchase of mining activity based upon presumed better technology
for germanium recovery; the establishment of Hazen-Quinn, which had
been based upon having laboratory equipment of special design that
could be marketed; and an effort to establish a standards
company- -there was always this effort to be a center which was
devoted to the highest technical competence, which then could be
used to spawn small companies which could be highly profitable.
Also Geoco, with Dick Blake and the manufacturing of the instrument
that- -we had about twenty of these things in our history, most of
them nonprof itable that we eventually discarded.

Swent: Lakefield was one?

Hazen: No, Lakefield is a major competitor in Canada. Lakefield Research
is the big laboratory in Canada, which is owned by Falconbridge
now.

146

Swent: I thought that was one of your partnerships.

Hazen: A. R. McPherson, which is a consulting company in grinding. Art
McPherson had been a leader in design and understanding of big
grinding circuits, and he had some special data and special skills.
He wanted to retire, and he had this consulting company. So
Lakefield, which has a big grinding pilot plant installation, and
Hazen, who has small laboratory activities regarding grinding and
the things that follow grinding, felt that if we joined forces we
could buy McPherson and therefore keep that going. Again, it's the
idea of something which has as its basis the very, very highest
technology and improvements in technology, but which will have
industrial expression in a separate company.

Swent: Again, you had to have the contact and the confidence of Lakefield
to go into that.

Hazen: Yes. We have many instances where we tried to do this. We felt at
one time that we were the possessors of probably the most detailed
knowledge of solvent extraction technology, so we actually bought,
in association with somebody else, a shutdown copper plant at Casa
Grande in Arizona. It may have been Capital Wire and Cable, but
some company had come in and put in a solvent extraction plant and
a place for recovering scrap copper. This was separate from
Hecla's Casa Grande operation, but it just happened to be at the
town of Casa Grande.

We actually bought that plant, and we were in association with
scrap dealers who felt that they could provide copper from the Los
Angeles scrap area and take it to this abandoned plant, which we
then refurbished and put back so that technically we would be able
to use new technology of copper solvent extraction to the recovery
of copper from scrap. So we were in association with a company
that was going to supply the scrap, and Hazen Research was going to
be the technical activity. Again, we didn't own the scrap, but we
were making the technical contribution, and we hoped that
eventually we would participate in that. We were going to have the
technical activity have its industrial expression in this.

Swent: And did that work?

Hazen: No. The price of copper all of a sudden abruptly collapsed, which
it does once in a while, and the people who were basically putting
up the money said, "We quit." It was one of the things that didn't
work. Some of these worked, and some of them didn't. I think it's
an interesting idea, and I like the metaphor that we would be the
Mayo Clinic, where people who have the tough problems would come to
Hazen Research for the solution.

147

Swent: A lot of what caused failure wasn't the technology but just outside
economics or politics.

Hazen: Yes.

In all of these things, the years were passing, and I arrived
at an age when it was time for me to consider stepping aside.

148

IX THE COMPANY ORGANIZATION

Forming the ESOP

Swent :

Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

We haven't really talked about the organization of your people. It
was you and your father, but then your father died. You had
Haskell and Henrickson--

Well, Floyd Haskell was on our board.

Then you had vice presidents.

Oh, yes.

You were president?

Yes, I was president from day one.

Then you brought in vice presidents?

Yes. There was Jim Lake, whom we talked about, and there was Ralph
Light, who was very well known in the industry and had come from
Canada. He was a vice president. Pete Thomas came from the
engineering profession, and after a while he became a vice
president. We had acquired very competent engineers and a really
first-class staff, and things were doing very well.

Did you enlarge your board?

Not for a long time.

Someone told me your mother was on the board.

Yes, Mother was on the board for a while, but she resigned after
Dad died. So there were just the three of us, and I'm trying to
think how it went from there. When Floyd left, Brad Wells came on

1A9

Swent :

Hazen:

the board, and then there was a man named Pete Chappell, who lived
in California, just north of Los Angeles. He had retired and was
on the board for quite a while. There's a story behind all of
these things. With the growth of our activities our income had
grown. We had established a profit-sharing plan early in the game,
and at the time that it became possible that was converted to an
ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) .

We want to talk about all this in some depth. You were beginning
to talk about retirement, but maybe we should go back and pick up
some of this first. You haven't got your son in the picture yet.

Nick has been there about eight years,
and then he went off.

He was there for a while,

Swent: You've changed your titles and your roles. You were running the

lab at first, but you were getting to be more into the development
of things, I would guess.

Hazen: I was always the president. Remember that we never became a
company which was, you might say, managed. The analogy which
probably is fairly accurate is that those of us in the early
days—people like Enzo Coltrinari, whom I've mentioned and who is
still with us and still a very powerful technical person; Gus, who
retired not too long ago; and I and other people — all served
clients. Basically, what everybody did was to work for clients.
As we grew and added more people — like Tim Goens, Jim Reynolds, and
lots and lots of others who came to work for us as we grew- -always
the guiding philosophy was that you had to work for a client,
because that's what the company did, like being a firm of lawyers.

Lawyers' firms don't have to have a president. I don't know
for sure what they have, but I don't see them as having management
who tells the attorneys what to do. What happens is that as people
grow older and become more experienced, they become the senior
lawyers who then take the big cases. They finally arrive at a time
when they retire, but they retire from the legal profession, not
from the management of a company. So we did that, too.

As we grew, everybody had clients, built up a clientele, and
there were relationships established between individual in the
company and various clients. Clients came back and always asked
for the same lawyer, you might say- -the same people to do their
work.

Swent: Did you personally do the hiring?

Hazen: Yes. In the early days it was a very easy philosophy. It was
easier to hire people then, because most of the time you knew

150

something about their background, and it was easy to check. You
could ask people about what their experience had been, and you
could ask them about their background. There are strict
limitations now, and you have to be very careful about how you
recommend people. So it was an easier time; the profession was a
little easier to get around in.

There were people who had a like-minded philosophy and we felt
that we were going to be compatible, so after a while we built up a
staff of people who were from industry. Many of them felt that
they wanted the freedom that they could have. It was almost as
though they could be individual consultants with the safety of a
monthly paycheck. We grew up kind of that way.

In 1975 we established an ESOP at a time when it became
possible. We converted the employees' profit-sharing plan into an
ESOP.

Swent: Where did the initiative for this come from? Was it from you?

Hazen: It was changes in the law. The employee stock ownership plan was
called a Kelso trust at that time. I believe it was a California
attorney named Kelso who founded it. The basic idea was that the
profit that was put into trust for the employees could be used to
purchase stock of the company, the employer. Before this had not
been possible to the extent that the new plan made it possible. If
you then paid dividends on your stock, to stock which is held in
trust for employees, it is a business expense and so escapes the
business tax—corporate income tax. So to the extent that you put
money into an ESOP as a dividend, as separate from a contribution
to the plan, you could pay dividends to many stockholders, but the
dividends that went to stock that was part of this plan escaped the
income tax. Therefore, if the employees owned all of it, for
example, they could derive all of the profit of the company as a
dividend and escape paying that 45 percent corporate income tax.
So they got a lot more money. Of course, at such time as they got
the cash, they would have to pay the personal income tax, but they
escaped one layer of taxation.

That was a substantial driving force behind it.

Swent: At this time you said you already had profit sharing; how was that
related to this?

Hazen: We converted the profit-sharing plan to an employees' stock
ownership plan.

151

Swent: Under the profit-sharing plan they simply got the money—a bonus,
you might say, at the end of the year? What was left over, you
gave them.

Hazen: It was distributed. I was a major stockholder, and the Colorado

School of Mines was a significant stockholder. There was some

stock held in other places, and many people who had left the
company had purchased stock.

Swent: But it was a privately held company; you were not on the stock
market.

Hazen: No.

Swent: Had you gone out and peddled the stock?

Hazen: No, I hadn't. One company who made overtures toward buying us

[Bolt Beraner & Newman] said they thought they would like to start
by becoming a stockholder, so we sold them some stock at that time,
and they became an outside stockholder. Then the Colorado School
of Mines was an outside stockholder by gifts of stock from both me
and Jim Lake, I believe. As I say, Jim Lake was a very major
owner. After he left, there was another outside owner of stock.
Dividends and so forth from that stock had to come out of after-tax
money .

With the passage of time, with the contribution to the

profit-sharing plan, which was then used to purchase stock in the

company, the ownership of the company began to shift more and more.

The natural workings of this process resulted in the employees
owning an ever larger share.

Swent: Did you have to consult with the employees about these changes?
Did they have to consent?

Hazen: No, because this is a plan that was established by the board. It
was a profit-sharing plan established by the board; it was the
company's profit-sharing plan. Now that it is an ESOP, it must be
administered according to very special rules, and there must be an
administration group and so forth.

The big change came when the ESOP did a leveraged buyout. It
borrowed money from the bank to buy out all the outside
stockholders. Now the employees' ownership plan became the entire
owner of the company.

Swent: They even bought your stock?
Hazen: Yes.

152

Swent: Could they do that without your consent?

Hazen: Well, I was happy to sell It to them. Here's the problem that I
felt I was facing: the clock ticks for everybody. I felt pretty
healthy, but I was sixty- five. I said, "Gee, this has been
wonderful. I've really enjoyed it. What I'd really like to do, if
I had my 'druthers, is to give up the presidency," because it does
carry with it some kinds of administrative things; you go to board
of directors meetings and so forth. I don't mind that, but you can
become involved with things like legal matters. What I liked was
the business of working with clients. I liked being clients'
representative, so I thought I could do that.

I asked Terry McNulty, who was vice president of technology
for Kerr McGee Chemical Company, to be president.

Swent: Your son was not with you then?

Hazen: No. Nick hadn't had the experience that was required. I'm trying

to think who the members were on the board. I think it was Pete

Chappell and Brad Wells mostly at that time. Terry came on board
as the new president.

Swent: He had not even been working for you? He came in completely from
outside?

Hazen: Right. Terry had been the director of Anaconda's laboratory for
quite some spell. He was uniquely fitted to the task. He had a
bachelor's degree from Stanford, I believe, a master's degree from
Montana School of Mines, and a doctorate from Colorado School of
Mines. He is just a great guy.

Swent: Did you have to twist his arm a little?

Hazen: Well, these negotiations take a little while, but I think he

probably enjoyed the opportunity. He came on board, and I think
things were just real fine, but after five years he decided he
wanted to become an independent consultant. He resigned and is now
an independent consultant as the head of an organization called
T. P. McNulty and Associates. He has gathered around him some of
the very bright lights in the consulting profession, people with
great experience and knowledge of the industry.

Swent: What were the years that he was with you?
Hazen: I think he came in '83.
Swent: Not a very good year.

153

Hazen: He came just in time to have things go to pieces. Yes, he came
late in '83. It was lucky for me, because he had some pretty
difficult problems that he had to wrestle with. The industry, as
you and I both know, was going through some pretty dreadful times,
and Terry had to grapple with all of those things.

He resigned in '88, but during his time what happened to us
was that many of the old-timers who had been there for so
long—people like Ralph Light, Frank Stephens, Jim Reynolds, and I
and others --were at retirement age. So we kind of faded away from
the scene, and Terry had to build a new team. In the midst of all
of that chaos in the mining industry, it was a very difficult time.

After Terry resigned we had a year where I resumed some duties
as management .

Swent : You went back in as president then?

Hazen: Yes, I think so. The reason I'm being a little hesitant about it
is that I had remained as the chairman of the board, and I took
over the duties as president. I think maybe I was the president.

Swent: You mentioned at one point something about a revolving presidency.

Swent: We were talking about your presidency, which you gave up for a
while and then went back to.

Hazen: For five years Terry carried the burden. When he left, I came back
on as ail interim, and we found Dr. Charles Baroch. Chuck took over
and brought a good deal of structure and management skills to the
company. We parted company a year ago. At that time the question
was, "What do you do? What does the company do in this kind of a
position?" I had no intention and have no intention of being the
president of Hazen Research. On the other hand, you can't just go
away and do nothing.

Terry has always remained a good friend and a consultant with
the company. He is on our board of directors. We've had some
other changes on the board of directors, including the election of
a new board a year ago which included Stan Dempsey, Jerry Bryant,
and Tom Vogenthaler, and Pete Chapell's retirement.

Terry and I said, "The employees own the company. We have a
number of vice presidents who are old timers who have risen up
because of the succession." People like Ralph, Frank, and others
had left, so the people who were working for them had taken over
their duties. If you have a model which says we're something like

ISA

a legal firm, we are not a hierarchy, and everybody works for
clients, then what is the proper role for, one might say, a senior
management group who manage other people? Again, the analogy: you
don't have to have a president of a legal firm, but you have to
have some way, because there are management questions.

An Operating Management Group

Swent: Somebody has to be in charge.

Hazen: Somebody has to ultimately be in charge. So we decided we would
establish what's called an operating management group. The
operating management group consists of all of the senior people who
are full-time employees. The exceptions would be Terry and me, who
are senior people, but we're not full time; I work part time, and
Terry works as a consultant for the company. This operating
management group would be a group of eight people, including the
head of our analytical activities, John Jarvis, and the head of our
accounting activities and our financial officer, Bob Rochat.

This group would meet on a regular basis to discuss the
company's problems and to see if they could find resolutions to
questions that arise. There would be something called the "Office
of the President." There are companies that do this; they have an
office of the presidency rather than—they have co-chairmen and so
forth. So it wasn't all that novel, but it would consist of two
permanent members, who would be Terry McNulty and Wayne Hazen.
Then it would have another two members who were, on a rotating
basis, part of the operating management group.

The way it works is that this office of the president meets
once a week to discuss those issues and make decisions that cannot
be arrived at by the operating management group. The OP, office of
the president, reserves to itself questions concerning changes in
staff salary--payroll--and also questions having to do with
significant capital investment s--f inancial matters. The rest of
the management of the company is in the hands of the people who
should be the ones most knowledgeable and best fitted to make wise
decisions.

The real strength of the company management lay with the
operating vice presidents, Erik Spiller, Wayne Carter, Rod Hodgson,
and Nick Hazen. These four, with Bob Coleman and Barry Hanson as
senior vice presidents and Bob Rochat for financial control and
John Jervis managing analytical services, really made the decisions
for the company.

154a

As for the technical strength, major players like Rick
Kennedy, who has added so much to our reputation for competence and
quality performance; Corny Berthold, Paul Quenean, and others
continued seeing that clients were well served.

Old timers like Paul Snoddy made sure that the facilities all
hung together and things were fixed when they broke.

This was not a line organization; sort of a controlled chaos.

Swent: How did you come on this? Were you going to management seminars or
reading books or--?

Hazen: No, we invented it by saying, "I wonder what you do?" If you have
a model—another model we sometimes think about is Doctors'
Hospital. The hospital administration doesn't run the doctors, but
the doctors have to have some self policing.

Swent: That's a problem there, too.

155

Hazen: No way of running a group of people is without problems.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, people come complete with
different personalities, backgrounds, capabilities, likes, and
dislikes.

The OP is the same thing as having a president. If you have
one individual and the operating management group, this one
individual, the president, might be trying to supply, if he can,
some leadership role. But if these are very competent, senior
people, they shouldn't be required to have a lot of people telling
them what to do. The company was never founded, never built that
way. People are supposed to be able to act; they are empowered to
carry on the business of the company, and they have great
authority. As a matter of fact, in almost all our years of growth,
anybody who needed to buy something would go buy it; he didn't have
to buck it up a line of committee judgments. We found that people,
when given this authority, very seldom abuse it.

Swent: Who sets your budget?

Hazen: I'm not sure I ever want this to appear in print, but we don't have
a budget.

Swent: It's pretty hard to have one, when you have clients coming in and
you don't know--.

Hazen: Let me give you an example. We watch very carefully what we call
the new work; that's our lifeblood. I'm not meaning that we are
scatterbrained about it. We keep a careful eye on the jobs coming
in and what that means in two or three months. The way work comes
in—some of the numbers recently are in the months of May, when we
had only something like $250,000 worth of new work. Well, we're
running at a rate of $700,000 a month, so that means that if in a
month you only had $250,000 worth of new work, you had better have
continuing projects which will carry that. In June we had some
nominal number; in July we had $1.5 million worth of new work, and
in August we had $1 million worth of work. By the last week of
September we had only $100,000 worth of new work, and I said, "What
do you do with a business that for two months in a row has an
average of $1.25 million worth of new work committed, and the
following month has only $100,000 worth of new work?" But suddenly
we got $2 million worth of work in one week.

So when people say to me, "Do you have a budget?" I say, "Not
really." Because the thing that floats up and down is the
percentage billable of our professionals. If they don't have work,
that's where you have to have this cash kitty. That's when you do
these other things that will bring you work in the future. So the
business about a budget is always a difficult one. We try to have

156

people plan for what they are going to do, and we are kind of at
the mercy of our clients.

Swent: You must have a financial officer.

Hazen: Oh, yes, we have a very splendid financial officer. Bob Rochat
does an outstanding job. He's the one who worries about all of
this stuff: "Do you have enough cash?"

Swent: How does all this tie in with your ESOP?

Hazen: They're the stockholders, so it doesn't have to tie in to daily
financial control. It's the profit-sharing plan of the company,
which purchased stock in the company and grew to a place now where
it owns all the stock of the company.

Swent: But they don't have a voice in management?

Hazen: I own some stock in Hecla, but they don't ask me to help them with
their management.

Swent: Well, they are supposed to have a voice indirectly through your
elected directors.

Hazen: Of course. Therefore they have all the rights that regular

stockholders do, with the additional complexity that they are also
employees. We've talked before about there being a difference in
the view of a company if you are a stockholder or if you are an
employee.

Swent: Theoretically ESOP reconciles or harmonizes these views.

Hazen: People who believe that this is going to result in harmony, I wish
them luck.

Swent: I think that's the theory, though, isn't it?

Hazen: That's the theory. I think the tax implications of it are probably
the driving force. The idea of having the employees be the owners
and therefore be interested in the outcome is something which in
fact can be, and in some companies is, a very important factor. In
our company I have not seen that there has been any particular
change in people's views. Let's pick somebody forty years old who
is a rising professional, working hard, and he has kids and is
looking forward to their college and the expenses of a house. The
thing that counts, really, is the long-term paycheck, and he wants
to be assured that he has his job. Therefore his actions as a
stockholder are going to be those which will improve the lot of
employees.

157

They will automatically as stockholders have a shorter-term
view. If a question arises as to whether you increase salaries or
you put money into the future in the terms of larger capital
investment, this strain appears.

Swent: It's a fundamental dichotomy, isn't it?

Hazen: Yes, it is. When our guy who is a rising professional with family,
focused pretty much on his present budgetary problems at home, is
faced with decisions he is apt to make the choices which are
shorter term. That then gets in the way of capital investment, and
that has happened to us. He's going to say, "If we put money in
now, that's going to make us a better company, and that's good for
my job. On the other hand, it's going to increase the value of the
stock, but I'm only going to get that stock if I quit or retire.
My retirement is twenty years off, so the gain there is in the
stock of the company is neat, but I'm not really going to realize
that capital gain for twenty years." So it's pretty far off for
him to think about.

The guys who are really interested in the stock are the people
who are going to retire in a few years and have accumulated a lot
of stock. They're much more interested in seeing that.

Swent: That isn't a long-term decision; for them it's still a short-term
decision.

Hazen: Not that many people, when you get down to it, are all that

interested in the long term. I think this is part of humanity and
is pretty natural.

Swent: Has this come to an issue with you?

Hazen: Yes. Because over the years, on the average, year in and year out,
70 percent of our cost is payroll. Now, if you are dealing with a
manufacturing activity where labor is a relatively small percentage
of the costs, then the issues of labor-management are quite
different than if almost your entire costs are labor. In our
business, things that change payroll costs have a tremendous
impact. A 10 percent increase in our payroll costs would wipe out
our net income, whereas a 10 percent change in a manufacturing
entity, where labor costs are only 20 percent, wouldn't have
anything like such an impact on the final margin.

Therefore we are always in this tension between wanting to
hold down labor costs so that we can invest in the future — and
since all of what we produce eventually goes to the stockholder
employees (and there are only a trivial number of outside shares of

158

stock), this tension can arise and can cause some internal
dissension among the employees themselves.

Swent: I'm thinking that whereas another kind of company might have to

make the decision whether to invest in, say, a new plant or a new
building--a huge capital expenditure—your capital is in your
employees.

Hazen: That's where our data base, our knowledge, is. That's the asset.
Swent: So you need a high salary to attract these highly capable people.

Hazen: Yes. There is this tension between long- and short-term gain. It
has had expression just recently when the board has said, "Well, we
are in a very much better position than we were a year ago. We're
out from under some of the legal problem because of our being a
potentially responsible party in the Lowry superfund site. We've
paid off the bank debt to the leveraged buy out; all that debt is
paid off. We breathe a big sigh of relief. Now let's buckle down
and start putting money into the future. Let's save so that we
have a nice cushion, because things can sure go down. We've had a
big surge upward in the amount of work we are being asked to do, so
now is the time to save. The only time you can save money is when
you are making it. Therefore we're now looking forward to making
some good money. So let's get our capital improvement underway,
let's get the cash kitty. This is not a time, especially in the
light of the world as it is—people like the University of
California are having cuts in salary— for us to be very loose about
wages. Let's for a period of time not have any wage increases
until we've accomplished some of these things."

It caused a great upheaval. It seems that people had begun to
feel that they had a right to a raise every year. They say, "We
own the company. Why can't we do what we want?" Of course, there
comes the tension. I feel that the board of directors is hired for
long-term preservation and growth of the assets and the protection
of the jobs for the employees. So we have those two guiding
lights. Are the things that we are doing going to be so that we
don't have to have a convulsive layoff because of a downturn in our
income? And we've had these. We've had six months with very
little new work coming in, and this can drain your assets pretty
quickly. The long-term view, then, is the preservation of
employment by having the proper kind of financial cushions.

The other is reinvestment in the company so that there is a
long-term future. Keeping up and staying ahead in technology is
expensive.

159

Swent: How do your employees express their views? Is there a committee or
a delegate?

Hazen: Violently and personally. [laughter]
Swent: What means do they use?

Hazen: There is something called the ESOP committee, but that is supposed
to be a committee chosen from the employees to administer the plan.
The plan itself is a legal document with all its ramifications, and
it is not expected, nor do I think it would be wise, to have the
employees decide some of these issues. It should be decided by
people that they have chosen because they feel those people have a
longer-term view. I've always resisted having very many employees
of the company on the board for exactly this reason. They would be
in a very difficult position.

Swent: What percentage of your board are inside?

Hazen: I'm the only one, and that's a historical anomaly.

Swent: The others are outside the company?

Hazen: Yes. The effort on the board of directors has been to have

business-oriented people. We have Brad Wells, who has been with us
for many, many years, who is also our legal counsel; Jerry Bryant
has very successful businesses of his own; Stan Dempsey, the
president of Royal Gold, whom you know.

Swent: Yes. He's also an attorney.

Hazen: Tom Vogenthaler has been a business manager and so forth of

companies and is now retired from that; and Terry McNulty, of
course, has intimate acquaintance with the company but is not an
employee except as a consultant, but he has his own company. It is
a board of directors that is going to have a very business-oriented
view: How is this business going to look in two years and in five
years, and what do we do now so that it will be strong, keep its
position of eminence in this activity, and be financially powerful?
Their decisions are made on that basis. Employees will make
decisions on a different basis. That, I think, is the wis'dom of
having the employees elect a board which is business oriented,
because most of our people are not; they're technically oriented.

Swent: Right now the employees are upset about this?

Hazen: For a short period, and then gradually people will come and say,
"You know, we think that was pretty wise. Why don't we just hold
back until we get safely to shore?" That which I heard from many

160

Swent ;

Hazen:

people was, "If we're in such a great position, why can't we all
have raises?"

Again, I like some analogies. I said, "Now we're a little bit
like somebody who has been under a cloud or maybe been in prison
for ten years where his freedom was highly restricted. All of a
sudden he's out from under that, and the future looks wonderful.
But the present isn't all that strong, so he better not start using
a credit card, buying cars and clothes and houses until he's sure
he's able to keep it up."

So you've held the line? But you said there was a revolt. They
wanted new board members?

[laughs] Oh, yes. They all say, "If we're the stockholders, we
can all get together and get rid of this dumb board and get some
people in there who will be more understanding." I agree with them
that it is certainly within their right, and as stockholders they
can decide that the employees aren't being treated right. This
again is asking people to understand two quite different things.
One of them is a business matter having to do with stock ownership,
and the other is their daily life and their employment as
employees. They have both of those responsibilities to serve.

My reaction is that if they please, they certainly have the
right to get together and elect a new board of directors. As I
said to them, "You can get a new board who will give you everything
you want as long as it lasts. But while this board is in, they're
going to be making business decisions."

Swent: Under what circumstances did you say this to then?
Hazen: One at a time, when people come in.
Swent: They haven't really organized?

Hazen: Oh, no. I think it was a shock, and where we made a mistake was in
not preparing people for this. But a board meets once a month and
makes the decisions based upon the information it has at that
moment, and the information at hand at that moment did not include
the millions of dollars worth of new work that came in in the last
week. Therefore the decisions were made on the financial analysis
of the cash flow, et cetera, and I think it was a very sound
decision; but it was not as palatable as—people would have been
really pleased if we had raised everybody's wages 5 percent.

Swent: You don't feel a serious threat?

161

Hazen: No. But I think it's interesting. It's interesting to work it

out, and these companies are interesting to watch, especially this
tension.

Swent: Many similar companies have failed, I understand. You're one of
the success stories.

Hazen: We're still here. That is a success of some sort. American

industry is undergoing a violent upheaval. I think part of it is
not understanding the way things are changing. Maybe we don't
either, but we're going to try.

[break for lunch]
Swent: Where would you like to pick up?

Hazen: We've mentioned a number of people who have had their impact on us
over the years, and there are a couple I may have overlooked along
the way. I described Jim Lake's contribution to the company. When
he left in about 1976, he suggested that since he had been on the
board he would make a recommendation that his son-in-law, Bruce
Benson, be elected a director. Since Jim owned a very substantial
part of Hazen Research, it certainly seemed reasonable.

Bruce came on our board and served for many, many years and
was a very strong and helpful member of the board.

Swent: What was his background?

Hazen: Bruce is really an oil geologist. I think he got his master's
degree in petroleum geology and was in the oil business. His
degree was from the University of Colorado. He brought a very
strong entrepreneurial, business-oriented, financially-oriented
background to the board's deliberations, which was very welcome.
He was a very strong member of the tribe for many, many years. He
resigned after he became effectively the head of the Republican
Party in Colorado. I forget just what the title was, but he was a
major factor in Republican politics, and still is, in Colorado. He
did very effective services to them, and he just got too busy to be
able to spend the time for us.

Swent: I think it's interesting that you evidently have continued very
cordial relationships with a lot of people who have broken away
from your company.

Hazen: If you stop to take a little broader view, a long-term view, I

can't think of anything more helpful to the health of our company
than to have the entire industry filled with happy alumni of Hazen
Research. As a matter of fact, we might bring this up as a

162

troubling questions. So many people have stayed over the years.
They come, and they find a congenial atmosphere and the kind of
employment they like. Maybe life's too easy; I don't know,
[laughs] In any event, people stay, and our turnover is so small
in professional ranks that unless you have a very growing growth
situation, which we have not in the past ten years because of the
declining health of the mining industry—and I hope we are in a
growth pattern now--it is very difficult to bring in the new blood
that you want to bring in all the time. In a small company you
can't just wait for the old people to retire to make room for new
ones.

Swent: You have had to lay people off.

Hazen: Yes, but there have only been two major times in our history that
we have had to do that. There have been two episodes when
everything just went to pieces so seriously at a time when our
finances were at a low ebb also that we had to lay people off. The
last one happened at a time when, because of the lawsuit on the
Lowry landfill problem, no bank would have any interest in loaning
us money.

Swent: Other than that, people have--

Hazen: Stayed for a long time. My son Nick is a good young chemical

engineer, and he is building up a whole suite of clients and is
becoming a substantial force.

Swent: How old is he?
Hazen: He is forty-five.

There are some people I can think of who have left, and it all
has to do with the problem of keeping the vitality and the youth of
an organization. To keep it moving you must have lots of new kinds
of activities going on. That brings me back to what I consider to
be the desirability as a business form of having a central
organization which is kind of an idea place from which are spawned
many other activities which can be more, shall we say, business and
financially oriented. Then you have opportunities for people to go
off and have new--.

In a way it's increasing the number of people who are
connected with the firm, even though they're in separate
organizations. If you do that and spin some of their organization
off, then there is an opportunity for further financing. A company
which is industrially oriented and has a profit motive rather

163

dominant is going to be much more attractive to potential investors
than a think-tank of some sort that doesn't produce any money.

I was thinking of all of these things having to do with
people. Jim Kindig was a very inventive young man we hired fairly
fresh from Pennsylvania State, where he had a doctor's degree
associated with coal technology amongst other things. He was with
us for many, many years. He left to go found a company of his own,
which is going to exploit some technology. He left us to go do
that.

The problem that we see is that if there are individuals who
find it very comfortable, then it is relatively easy to relax in
great comfort. Sometimes the vitality and the vigor kind of
disappear in your organization. I don't know whether we have that
kind of problem at the moment, but I would say there is some of
that. In times when there was a lot of growth, there was a lot of
activity and excitement, and there were these other things going
on, as we talked about this morning, that people could be
interested in. They always had new things to think about and worry
about. Whereas if what you are doing is the same old thing, you've
got a client and are running a testing lab, then after while the
spirit dies.

We have a young man who has been with us since the very early
days. He's been with us for thirty years, so I guess he must have
between here pretty early. Roland Schmidt is his name, and he came
from Germany. He was trained in mineralogy and geology in Europe,
and when he came he had had some time in Denver as a technician for
a small chemical company. He joined us as an operator in a pilot
plant and as a technician. He had a very special skill in the
identification of minerals and microscopy. We didn't have a
microscope, so we bought a student microscope so he could begin
doing some of that. Then he began doing some interesting things as
adjuncts to our work.

The one thing I wish every client that we ever had and every
one of our employees would just live and breathe is that when you
get any kind of material, the first thing you ought to do is say,
"What is it?" You'd be surprised at the number of people who will
get a sample of an ore, and they're going to run a copper'
flotation; so they grind it up, run a float test, and look at the
concentrate. Whereas since flotation is a separation procedure,
you have to say the copper is being separated from what. The
important thing, really, is to find out what you are dealing with.

Well, Roland was an exponent of this and with a special talent
for things mineralogical. He began rapidly to add to our
competence. When ore came in on our projects, Roland would

164

Swent :
Hazen:

determine what the material was. We find that this is particularly
important now that we're involved in a lot of environmental
activities, too. With the student microscope, Roland began doing
some things which were real additions to the project, so we got a
bigger microscope.

I think I told you how much we liked our association with
Climax, how helpful they had been. Roland did some work for
Climax, and it came to the attention of Henderson, who was kind of
the Czar. Maybe that's not the right word, but he certainly had a
lot of influence on Climax activities. He thought that was very
interesting work, and in a conversation one time he said to me, "I
think this is very interesting, and we'd like to continue that.
What are those things that would help you push this along faster?"

I said, "We really don't have the kind of microscope that we
need."

•

So he said, "Why don't you buy it on our project, and when
you're done with the project, it's our microscope."

So we did. Roland, on a trip to Germany, went to the Zeiss
people and picked out the very best mineralogical microscope. All
of a sudden, then, we were able to perform very sophisticated
mineralogical activities, all because, in my view, of an
enlightened view by Climax management.

And you kept the microscope?

We kept the microscope until some years later our work for Climax
diminished; there were all kinds of changes going on. So we gave
it back to them, but by that time we had grown to a place where we
could afford our own.

Roland, then, has built an activity and a fame in his ability
to characterize material in such a way that it could have
significance to metallurgists who are trying to separate things.

We have found that this characterization of really
understanding what the material is is an underlying requirement.
You'd be surprised at the number of times people don't really think
of that, and we're seeing it on the part of young people who become
involved particularly with the EPA in regulatory matters. The
young people approach problems of cleanup of a site which has been
contaminated with uranium, and there are sites like that around the
world that need to be cleaned up, with a regulatory viewpoint.
They're all gung-ho and want to get things cleaned up, but it
doesn't really occur to them that cleaning up a uranium site

165

basically is the removal of uranium from an ore. It's just a
leftover ore.

The first thing you ought to know is what the material is that
you are taking the uranium from. To many of them it comes as a
surprise that the uranium industry already knows how to take
uranium out of ore, except that instead of having the objective be
to produce a yellow cake for sale, the objective is to produce
tailings which are clean. The technology is the same, except that
you work it harder if you have to have clean tailings. In the
original recovery of uranium from an ore, the decision as to how
much you wanted to leave in the tailings was an economic decision.
Now the decision is being made for other reasons — for regulatory
reasons—but the technology is going to be the same. You just work
it to a different end.

We have found, to our surprise, that we can go to conferences
that are being held under various auspices about cleanup problems
in the world, and we can talk about how mining and metallurgy is
practiced. We talk about ball mills, classifiers, agitators, ion
exchange, and we see people visibly affected; their eyes bug out to
think that all that technology is already there, that people
already know how to do these things. Especially when they talk
about things like, "Now what we want to do is heap leach this
material to get this cadmium (or whatever it is) out of it."
They're amazed to find that this technology already exists.

The point of all of this is that the first thing we try to do
is to see what the material is and what is already known. That is
the starting point. We have very good library facilities and good
relations in libraries, which are a very important part. Which
leads me to an innovation that I think may be of some interest to
some people.

We believe at the moment that at Hazen Research we have a
resource in the minds of the people who are experienced, many of
them old-timers, who have this background knowledge. But the
problem is how to access that knowledge. We tried to have each
individual put down a list of the things that he feels he could
have an input on, and we put them in a computer database so that if
somebody has a query from a client, he presumably could go to the
computer and find out who in the company knows about that, and then
he can go ask them. It's his burden to go find out what the
company knows. Usually he's hurried, usually he spent time looking
in the library, and when he finds somebody who the database tells
him has the information, that guy is out to lunch or something.

We're going to try to turn it the other way around and find a
way to broadcast the question. Then we're going to have everybody

166

Swent :
Hazen:

Swent :
Hazen:
Swent :
Hazen:

in the company trained to look at their E-mail or an electronic
bulletin board. Somebody will say, "I have an inquiry for what you
do to separate lead and cadmium in a waste dump." At some point in
time every professional in the company will have an opportunity to
either pass an electronic bulletin board, or he will have something
on his desk. The problem is going to be announced, and then the
database is going to go to the individual.

There are crazy ideas that occur to people, like, "Why don't
we have a big loudspeaker that at eleven o'clock every morning
says, 'Now hear this. Corny has a problem concerning the
separation of trona from banana skins.'" Everybody has heard the
message, and some people will then call and say, "I know about
that. I did it in a previous activity." I think a great deal of
what is happening in the world is--we talk about the flow of
information, and you and I have talked about libraries and storage.
I'm not sure that the changes that have taken place have made
knowledge all that much more available, particularly the knowledge
that is stored in what is called experience. That's what we have
to have: how do you get that?

Maybe that's a part of what you are doing now with this oral
history.

That's what we're trying to do, to record the unrecorded. So much
just stays in people's heads.

And they have no reason—that1 s why we want to hire people who have
had some industry experience. Precisely for that reason.

It's not all on the printed page.

And not all just laboratory. It's real life experience.

There's a lot to be said for experience, isn't there?

And with the advent of more complicated circuits, it's a pretty
wise thing for people to have had experience, because more
complicated circuits can bring with them hazards. For example,
there are people who contemplate acid circuits followed by
cyanidation. Well, you want to be very careful that you never get
cyanide and acid put together, because the results are pretty
deadly. It has been a means of capital punishment for some time.
If somebody comes to us with industrial knowledge --"we better put
that part over in this building and that part in this building, and
be careful about the piping in between" --we are apt to be much more
successful.

167

Sample Preparation Laboratory in Anchorage

Swent: We still have Alaska and the Lowry landfill.

Hazen: Oh, my goodness, we can get through the Alaska in one--. It's

another example of our effort to expand by not replicating but by
seeing an opportunity where we can take advantage of a situation.
There was a time when Alaska was pretty hot for exploration. The
problem that people had in Alaska, and may still have, is that when
they get samples they want to get assays as quickly as they can,
and there weren't necessarily any substantial analytical
laboratories close enough by, and they'd have to send the samples
off. So we put in a sample preparation laboratory up in Anchorage.

Swent: Sample preparation?

Hazen: Yes. When people brought samples in, we would prepare them. Then
they could have the samples prepared immediately, and we'd get them
on a plane and send them down to our laboratory. They'd be
analyzed right away and put on our computer, so that the guy in the
office in Alaska the following day or the day after could access
our computer with his computer to get the answers. The guy from
the field didn't have to take the drill cores; he just brought the
drill cores to us, and we did all the preparation. It was a nice
thing for about a year, and then all of the work dried up, again at
the mercy of the cycles in the mining business.

Swent: That was probably in the seventies, wasn't it?

Hazen: Yes.

Swent: They brought you the whole cores, and you would split them?

Hazen: Yes, we could split them and do whatever we wanted with them.

Swent: That was a good service.

Hazen: Yes, it was a good service, but then the need disappeared and so

did our lab. This is always part of a pattern that has to do with
keeping vitality. Here was an opportunity for somebody to go into
a new venture.

Swent: How much overseas work have you done? I know you've had a lot of
clients overseas. Have you actually set up offices overseas?

Hazen: No, we haven't. I'm a little troubled about this, as to whether it
would be a good thing to do. It turns out that a lot of our
overseas work is not necessarily done for overseas companies.

168

There are American companies that have deposits overseas. At the
present time we have an association with SGS, a big firm whose
headquarters is in Geneva. We have a joint marketing activity in
South American countries with them, because they have many, many
laboratories all around the world, and many in South America, where
they do analytical work, but they don't offer a metallurgical
testing service. So we're joining forces with them.

It turns out that if you are talking about relatively small
quantities, like five hundred pounds or so, air transportation is
awful fast and awful good. It's easier for us to receive a sample
of an ore and do a test work on it than it is to have the capital
investment of a laboratory overseas. How this will change in the
future, I don't know. There are major laboratories in the world,
such as in South Africa. There's the big national laboratory
there. Most of these big national laboratories are having some of
their funds curtailed, and they're trying to see how they can
perhaps keep their staff by having public participation and serving
clients. So we may have more competition in the future.

Swent: You mentioned earlier Mountain States Engineering,
in business?

Are they still

Hazen: Yes, Rhoshan Bhappu bought it from Ed Froling, and he's still

running it. I think Rhoshan is kind of the mainstay of that; I
think it depends upon his particular personal skills to keep it
going.

There are not very many commercial laboratories. There are
some, like Dawson Labs, and there are some in Reno which have a
relatively small number of people who specialize in a particular
thing such as percolation leaching or something like that. But
there are not very many places that have the expanded facilities
and staff to take on major problems.

Swent: I wasn't clear on what SGS does.

Hazen: They are a service business which have major analytical

laboratories all around the world to analyze for things like PCBs,
They do all the analytical work that one would expect- -

Swent: Not necessarily just mineral work?

Hazen: No. If one needs to have an assessment made of a shipment of an
ore to go someplace, the people there will make an examination.
They are a very substantial business. I think they're about a
billion dollars a year worldwide. They have hundreds of
laboratories. They own CT&E, Coal Testing and Engineering firm,
and they've acquired various firms. We have an association with

169

them, because we do a lot of work that emanates from Chile. We
want to have a presence there, but I don't think we need to have a
laboratory.

There is one problem that has become apparent to us when we
talk about having laboratories in other countries, and especially
in South American countries. There is a national pride involved
where countries very frequently want to have national laboratories.
The United States has national laboratories. They don't compete
with us very much, but some. There are national laboratories in
Chile, Argentina, and others. That makes it difficult for a
foreign firm to come in and establish itself—the matter of
contacts and building them up.

Swent: What about Asia and the South Pacific? Have you thought about
getting in there at all?

Hazen: We think about these things. We have been so busy at home, trying
to keep going well, that the thoughts of expanding in that way have
never seemed appropriate. If we are going to have more facilities,
a substantial capital investment, we ought to be able to do it
where we are.

Another subject you have asked about is the Lowry Landfill.

The Lowry Landfill

Swent: Yes, we need to talk about that.
Hazen: That has been particularly vexing.

Swent: Let's establish what it is we're dealing with. Where is the Lowry
landfill?

Hazen: Outside of Denver, on the eastside near Lowry Field, there is a
landfill. It's a city dump and was administered by Waste
Management Company and the city. For untold years it has, been the
place where you paid your fee and dumped your material.

We had a number of projects, an example being flotation of
materials from clay—one can think of floating alumina from
clay- -and you wind up with flotation tailings. As the years have
gone by, we've had a number of these, where material has been
brought in, and we've run a pilot plant, which generates a
substantial quantity of tailings. If it's regular tailings that
has a lot of clay or just good old gangue materials that would be

170

coming from an ore, you have to dispose of it. You can't put it in
the city sewer, because it will plug up the sewers, and you can't
take it out on a country road and dump it. So what to do with it?

Ready made was the landfill at the city dump. We did this.
Fifteen or twenty years ago we established a substantial amount of
material of this sort that we had taken out, paid our dump fees,
and put it in the dump. Then this landfill was declared a
super fund site. I don't know the criteria for making a super fund
site, but the reality of it I've often questioned. I've sometimes
wondered if it was really necessary to clean it up—whether one
could find ways to reverse flow so that you could keep things from
getting into aquifers or what have you.

But this was declared a superfund site, and the first thing
that happens is that they get a list of everybody who has ever put
anything into this dump. They become potentially responsible
parties for cleanup. Since the law of the land includes joint and
several responsibility, according to the law anybody who put
anything into it bears the responsibility, theoretically, for the
entire cleanup. The cost of the entire cleanup at the time this
was getting started—it really began getting hot about seven years
ago—was estimated at that time at from $500 million to
$2.5 billion.

Hazen: In getting the facts under control, the EPA asked— demanded— that
anybody who had ever sent anything to this Lowry landfill should
give them a list of what they had sent, when they had sent it, how
they had sent it, what the quantities were, and what the
constituents were that they had sent. If somebody asks you what
you had sent to the dump fifteen years ago, you would be a little
hard put. Nevertheless, we all did the best we could.

When we sent anything out by truck, ultimately we had to pay,
and there is a record and a manifest in all these things. So this
tremendous job of data collection went on, and we were included
amongst the contributors to this pollution problem. And, you know,
the mood of the country is that a polluter has to clean up his
mess, which is kind of a nifty rallying cry, but it leaves
something to be desired. There is a feeling amongst many people
that somehow or other this is justice, but I don't see very many
people feeling so strongly about their pollution in terms of their
garbage contributions to landfills. Should it ever come back to
them, I wonder what would happen? And municipalities are excepted
from this law.

171

Swent : The average citizen who had taken a bed spring or something was not
included in this?

Hazen: He would be if they could find him. I was thinking of the

municipalities that collect garbage who are not included. As a
matter of fact, there were millions of rubber tires. It was
unbelievable. It was a real mess. There are those who say, "Let
the polluter clean it up," and there is a kind of a rough justice
sort of feeling in that, as long as you don't examine that too
closely, because we're all polluters. Big quantities that go into
dumps are not of themselves hazardous.

Swent: Was any of your stuff highly toxic or hazardous? You mentioned
clay, and it certainly isn't hazardous.

Hazen: In the definitions that are the law of the land now, yes, some of

it. For instance I would, I suppose, include things like old paint
cans; or we would have things which would have the residue from
oil. They were regular things; we had nothing at any time that I'm
aware of that had anything that I would call toxic materials other
than the kinds of things I've been talking about.

Swent: Did you have arsenic, uranium, cyanide?

Hazen: I don't know of any arsenic. Usually these were handled in such
small quantities, and we have for a long time adhered to a policy
that when a client sends us something, we make separations and send
the products back to the client. Otherwise we would be buried in
samples .

The law is that anybody who has contributed to a superfund
site can become a potentially responsible party for its cleanup.
We were faced with being one of those who was classed as a
significant contributor to the problem because of the gallonage
when you run a pilot plant, using ten gallons a minute or
something, gets to be a large quantity if you run it for a month.

The upshot of all of this was that we began settlement
negotiations. It was agreed that you can't get blood out of a
turnip.

Swent: Was this with the EPA directly?

Hazen: No, this is with city of Denver and Waste Management. I guess the
city employed Waste Management to run the landfill. I just know
that from my standpoint, these legal problems were not anything
that I was equipped to handle. We hired a very fine law firm, and
we spent years. As a general principle, I think I'm distressed

172

about the proportion of the money that is spent for litigation
versus that which is spent for actually cleaning up something.

Swent: Do you want to say how much that is?

Hazen: It's pretty substantial. I've heard that 80 percent of the
remediation money in the country goes for attorneys.

Swent: Do you want to give the figure it cost you?

Hazen: The problem is that the litigation has been stopped, but the judge
has said that until some more legal matters are settled, these
settlements are to remain secret.

Swent: Anyway, it cost you a lot of money.
Hazen: Oh, heavens, yes.
Swent: A great deal of money.

Hazen: As a matter of fact, it was very clear that we were facing

bankruptcy. There was no way we could meet the legal cost if we
had gone to trial. In the first place, we could not have afforded
to go to court. We were spending $30,000 a month in legal fees,
which for a small company is substantial. Month after month, this
begins to add up to real money.

It finally was settled in a way that we are able to carry the
load and make the payment. But I feel--it rankles.

Swent: Of course it does. It was legal at the time you did it.

Hazen: Oh, yes. We were required to do it; we had no other alternatives.
I get a little concerned about the changes in a system so that one
can become retroactively liable. And also joint and several
liability I consider very substantial straying away from what to me
have always been considered as American justice. Somehow it
doesn't seem fair that you can proceed on doing that which is legal
and correct and required, and then be held liable for it many, many
years later because the law was changed. Of course, it's having a
dreadful impact on all kinds of things, like bank loans to
businesses where if the property is used as collateral, somebody
has to give an environmental assessment that it isn't ultimately
going to be up to the bank to clean it up.

I don't know how these things get eventually resolved, but the
present situation is not very healthy. It puts a tremendous burden
on industry. Probably most people understand that businesses just
have to carry their costs in their prices, so ultimately the

173

American public is going to pay it. Because a business either
recovers that money or doesn't stay in business. If it's going to
recover that money, and it's going to be paid eventually by the
taxpayers, why not avoid the legal cost and have the taxpayers
clean up that which has been done in good faith in the past, with
the understanding to business that if you cause more of this, then
you are at risk for all of it.

Swent: But not retroactively?

Hazen: Well, not very many people are in favor of the mining industry now.
An awful lot of people aren't in favor of industry, either; they
just want the jobs. [laughter]

So that's the Lowry landfill, and I think it's safely past.
Swent: You did get it settled? Did you make a settlement payment to them?

Hazen: That's what it will be ultimately. As I tell our employees,

ultimately they are the owners. The company is not worth as much,
because we have this sudden bill that we have to pay.

Swent: What do you do with your wastes now?

Hazen: Returning them to the clients. Occasionally you get really
trapped. We received some ore from Africa. It was sent as
ordinary ore, because it came from a mine. To our intense
amazement, we discovered that it was radioactive—had a
radioactivity that had to be taken care of in a different way.
Now, from being an article of commerce, all of a sudden it has
become a waste product of low-level radioactivity. We couldn't
send it back, because the African country wouldn't accept
radioactive material. [laughter]

We had another one that I thought was even more interesting.
We had a material that had some organic contamination and low-level
radioactivity. I think it was five or ten gallons. The licensed
facilities--! believe they're in Utah—for accepting low-level
radioactivity material would not accept it because it contained
organic hazardous material. The hazardous waste people would not
accept it because it was radioactive. This went on for years, and
finally we were fined because we had kept radioactive material and
hazardous material too long. It was a very difficult thing, and it
cost us an enormous amount of money to resolve the problem.
Somebody finally relented and said they would take it. We spent a
lot of time thinking, "What we have to do is find some way to
separate those things so that they can go to separate dumps."

174

These are some of the kinds of detailed ways that some broad
principles which seem just great work out to be pretty bad in
practice. "The devil is in the details."

Swent: It must be terribly frustrating.

Hazen: There are times when it is. On the other hand, there are times
when it's very exhilarating, and you feel you are accomplishing
something worthwhile. And it's fun. It's a mixture of
interpersonal relations that have to go on with clients all the
time and the technical things, which are fun also. Right at the
moment, even as we speak, things are doing well.

Swent: You are the president still?

Hazen: No, I'm part of the office of the presidency. I only work part

time, so it's kind of a nice life for me. I was able to write the
job description--.

Swent: And Nick is coming along. Do you think he will succeed you?

Hazen: Well, he's one of the people who works there. He says it would be
easier for him if his name wasn't Hazen. There's no ownership
interest or anything; he's just another one of the employees trying
to build a good life for himself.

Swent: It would be nice to have a third generation come on.

Hazen: That would be fun, wouldn't it? But these things have to work
themselves out.

Swent: Do you want to mention some of your hobbies that you've gotten into
along the way. You mentioned your helicopter license.

Hazen: Flying has really been a major passion. That and music. I've
taken piano lessons all my life. Occasionally I learn to play
something with two fingers. My wife teases me and says, "Sometime
you're going to be able to play with both hands at the same time."

Swent: I didn't know you were a pianist.

Hazen: I'm not a pianist, but I take lessons. I always used to envy

people like Vedensky, who was an accomplished pianist, and his son,
who played the violin. I've always had the desire but never
anything other than that-- just the desire to do it. I keep taking
lessons because I enjoy it. It's a nice hobby.

Flying was a very major interest.
Norma and I got into flying?

Did I tell you how both

175

Swent: It is not on the tape.

Hazen: At one time, maybe twenty years ago, I was having a fit of the

blues about one's spending all one's time working and never having
time to do the things he really liked to do. She said, "What is it
that you haven't been able to do?"

I said, "I haven't ever been able to learn to fly."

She said, "Well, if you wait long enough, you won't be able to
pass your medical examination, and then you'll have another excuse
for not flying."

I decided I had better go see about it now, and she went with
me. We both took the introductory flights and loved it, so she and
I entered flight school together and both learned to fly. She is
now an instrument -rated pilot, and we flew for fun. We got a small
airplane, a Comanche, and we had just wonderful fun with that
airplane. I had more fun than she, because unfortunately she gets
very airsick. When she flew a lot, it wasn't so bad, but flying
only occasionally it was worse.

We did things like fly down to Mexico to the Yucatan peninsula
and off the coast to the island of Las Mujeres. We flew frequently
down there. One thing led to another, and I began getting more
interested. It turns out that what I really enjoy about flying has
to do with the systems that are required. This led to an interest
in instrument flying—bad weather flying. If you're going to try
to do bad weather flying, and you're around the mountains and where
there is icing, there is a certain virtue to having two engines.

So we got a little two-engine airplane, and I used to fly that
quite a bit when I'd go to visit clients. For instance, when I was
doing some work for Hanna at Ribbing [Minnesota] , I used to fly
from Denver to Ribbing in this little twin-engine Cessna 337.
Maybe you've seen it: it has an engine in front and one in back,
kind of like a pushme-pullyou. It was turbocharged, so that even
on one engine I could keep plenty of altitude to get over the
mountains. Flying in the mountain regions, it's nice to have
plenty of power.

We had some very exciting, wonderful trips. We flew up to
Alaska one time and up to Glacier Bay, and we have flown a lot in
the United States.

Swent: Did you use it for hopping up to your place in Vail?

176

Hazen: No, Vail is not a very good place to get to; Avon is the nearest
place. But when we owned the Horsethief Ranch in Grand Junction
along the river, we had a little airstrip bulldozed out, and we
used to fly over there for the weekend. That was really lots of
fun. Perhaps the greatest fun however was learning to fly a
helicopter. It is much harder and I was really excited when I
finally passed the flight test and got the license.

After a while, you find that the novelty begins to wear off,
and the expenses begin to mount. It turned out that it was so much
cheaper and just as fast to use commercial airlines as to fly
myself, so it no longer was as attractive and as much fun. Then I
had a heart incident of atrial fibrillation, so I couldn't get my
medical license renewed. All of these things added up. When I fly
now, I have to hire somebody who is licensed to fly with me, so
that keeps the Federal Aviation Authority happy. But it's been a
wonderful hobby.

Swent: Do you still have a plane?

Hazen: No. We sold our plane about five years ago. Not too long ago I
went out to the airport and asked an instructor to fly with me up
to Cheyenne for lunch. So I indulge in it as I feel like now.
Some things have their time, and then they are past. I can still
fly to the extent that I want to, except there is the inconvenience
of having somebody along who is licensed.

Swent: It could be Norma, though?

Hazen: Yes, it could be; but she has grown away from it, too. It's one of
those things that if you don't keep up—it's very dangerous to not
keep current, because you have to have the familiarity. Probably
the single most important variable that shows up in accidents to
light planes is recent experience and frequency of flying. For
people who fly all the time, it doesn't seem very dangerous.

We used to fly to the Bahamas occasionally and enjoy that.
There have been lots of these good hobbies. Mountain hiking and
mountain traveling- -Norma and I did adopt for quite a while from
the young people and went with backpacks. We've hiked through
Nepal and Pakistan and other places.

Swent: Patagonia?

Hazen: Yes, but that wasn't as much backpacking, because we just went out
on day hikes. We went a lot around Greece and other places. These
hobbies have been wonderful. So I can't claim that I had to work
too hard. [laughter]

177

Possibilities in High Pressure Extractive Metallurgy

Swent: The autoclave.

Hazen: High pressure extractive metallurgy, I feel, is an unexplored

domain that we and our corporate technology hope to be able to do
something about sometime. One of the ideas that has been around
for a while is that if one were able to go relatively inexpensively
into the region of high pressure and high temperature, some
interesting things could be done that cannot be done at lower
temperatures. Of course, we all know about the oxidation of
sulfides since the advent of the Mclaughlin plant, for example, a
big autoclave digestion of sulfides.

One of the problems has to do with the expense of the
machinery. You have to have an autoclave that is usually made of
either titanium or it's steel, brick-lined, and lead and so forth.
It has to be a very husky apparatus to stand the pressure and
temperature. Then you have pumps that have to feed the slurry in,
and then you have to have letdown. A lot of this autoclave
activity was pioneered by Swede Carlson and Stu Simons on cobalt
nickel work, the Moa Bay procedure; Moa Bay, in Cuba, was one of
the very, very early places to use autoclave digestion of nickel
laterites. Then there's the big plant in Louisiana near New
Orleans, where they used to ship sulfide concentrate from Cuba and
put it in autoclaves to digest sulfides. That technology has been
adapted into the gold industry.

This whole business about the chemical reaction taking place
with sulfides and the things that you can do is largely unexplored,
because people say it's going to be so darned expensive. One of
the ideas that has occurred to people is that if you had a vessel
which was down in the bottom of a deep hole, and the hole was
filled with water, the vessel would be under high pressure. If you
had a pipe leading down to a vessel, then you could pour an ore
slurry into that pipe, and it would descend into the vessel. Then
a u-tube fashion would cause the slurry to come up out of the hole
without requiring a high-pressure pump. If it's at the bottom of a
hole filled with water, the pressure is going to be pretty high,
where the pressure would be the containment pressure of the water.
So you don't need a very heavy-walled vessel to contain the
pressure.

There's no theoretical limit to how much pressure you can have
doing that, because it depends on how deep a hole you want to
build. An idea which has been kicking around for some time is that
if you have a mixed copper oxide sulfide, and you had a hole in the
ground that was filled with water that was, say, two thousand feet

178

deep, if you put a u-tube in that, and an entrance pipe and a
discharge pipe from a vessel that was down there at the bottom of
that, and the hole was filled with water to counterbalance the
slurry pressure so that you don't have to have too thick-walled a
vessel, you can have a thousand pounds pressure. If you put an
electric heat on it, you can have hot, high-temperature,
thousand-pound pressure without having either a thick-walled vessel
or heavy-duty slurry pumps to pump it in.

If you have a mixed oxide sulfide copper ore, then in the down
pipe you inject a little oxygen. As the slurry descends, heats up,
and gets under pressure, the oxygen will oxidize the sulfides,
which we know, because that's an ordinary autoclave, and form acid
and copper sulfide. The acid so formed would dissolve the copper
oxide minerals, and you would wind up with copper sulfate in
solution. You might want to add a little acid to the balance,
depending on what the ore was.

Swent: You wouldn't need the pumps because it would just pressure up?

Hazen: Sure.

Swent: The processing would take place just in the time it moves through?

Hazen: Or you have a containment vessel down below, and this is just the

pipe coming in and the pipe going out. So when it goes down it has
some oxygen being carried down with it.

Swent: And it pushes up the discharge?

Hazen: Yes, the discharge of the vessel is being pushed up. On the way
down, the copper oxide sulfide ore has dissolved all the copper.
When it gets down to the bottom where it's hot and under this high
pressure, this reaction takes place. Then on the upside, you
inject a small amount of hydrogen. As we know from Sherritt
Gordon's practice and so on, hydrogen will reduce things like
copper sulfate, nickel, cobalt, and so on, to the metallic form.

On the upside you have the slurry, mixed with this copper
sulfate and hydrogen. The hydrogen reduces the copper, and now you
have flakes of metallic copper coming up. When the slurry
discharges up to the surface again, you put in a flotation machine
to remove the copper.

So in a one-step process you have gone from an oxide sulfide
copper ore to, effectively, cement copper, without requiring
heavy-duty pumps and without requiring high-pressure equipment.

Swent: And no electrolysis or anything?

179

Hazen: No electrolysis or anything. That would be the equivalent of

cement copper, which used to be a regular article ^ It's copper
that has just been smelted to make blister copper.

There is such a hole on our property at Hazen Research, two
thousand feet down. It's a cased hole. Fill it with water, hang
vessels in it on a pipe, and you could carry out high-pressure
reactions without having to have the pumps and the high-pressure
equipment. Isn't that neat?

Swent: This is what you call the geoclave?

Hazen: Yes. I don't know where autoclave comes from, but geoclave--earth
clave--seems like a nice name for it.

Have we done this? This was an idea that was sponsored by a
company, a partnership that was put together, searching for new
ideas in metallurgy. About the time when this all got done—this
must have been in the mid eighties, and you know what happened to
all the interest in copper and stuff like that; it just
disappeared, and the funding disappeared.

Swent: This wouldn't work for gold?

Hazen: Oh, yes, it could be done with gold, too. But you run into

something that I certainly understand, and that is that people who
have a gold deposit, if there is a technology with which they can
get into production and begin getting into a profitable mode, they
don't want to do something new unless it's very clearly,
demonstrably better.

What it was used for, instead of as much for metallurgy, was
as a means for doing some hydrogenation of heavy oils to make them
less viscous. An oil company got interested in doing work, so much
of our work was done with Venezuelan crude oil to make it more
pumpable.

Swent: Did you do any research on the Mclaughlin plant?

Hazen: Yes, I think we did basic laboratory work, and Sherritt Gordon did
the pilot plant.

Swent: But you weren't involved in that autoclave development there?

Hazen: Not from the equipment development, but the laboratory work I think
we did. That was some time ago. When was that?

Swent: It opened in '85, and was built in '83.

180

Hazen: So the lab work would have been done maybe in '81.

Swent: I think you were involved in that.

Hazen: Yes, we did the basic metallurgy.

Swent: Then Sherritt Gordon- -

Hazen: --built the plant.

Swent: Well, Davey built the plant.

Hazen: Sherritt Gordon didn't build the plant, but they were the ones for
the autoclave design. They were the ones who had a lot of
experience in full-size, industrial equipment.

Swent: That is supposed to have been the first one for gold, and Barrick I
think did the second.

Hazen: I think there are lots of them around. It has been kind of an
established technology. We have a very nice continuous pilot
plant.

Swent: Some of it was originally developed in Germany, I understand.

Hazen: I'm not aware of that. Frank Forward up in British Columbia was
one of the pioneers of autoclave digesting of ores and wrote some
of the very early papers. I don't know whether Herb Kellogg was
involved in that or not, but he probably was. Frank Forward was
the guy who did a great deal of that. The Sherritt Gordon activity
started with the Lynn Lake deposit, and I think Plato Malozemoff
was the guy who had the metallurgical- -

Swent: He acquired them for Newmont, I think.

Hazen: He was the one who I think was the decider on the development of
that technology. Then came all of this Moa Bay work. I'm trying
to think what part Duval played in that. Stu Simons and Swede
Carlson were with the company that ran Moa Bay, Freeport Nickel.

Swent: They were the ones who had the autoclave in Louisiana.

Hazen: Yes, they were the ones, then, who developed that autoclave system.
A lot of that was really pioneering work. I think one can trace
the history of the development of autoclaves from things like Lynn
Lake, a place with Sherritt Gordon technology; Freeport Nickel,

181

with Moa Bay and then New Orleans; and then the move into the gold
business.

Swent: How did you learn about it?

Hazen: I think through work for Stu Simons or for Freeport. I don't

remember how I became aware of it. Yes, I do. I can remember part
of it now. It would have been in the early 1960s, because my dad
wrote a paper on the use of high-pressure technology to develop the
counterpart to — [interruption]. He said, "You know, we have
hydro-metallurgical smelters for lead, zinc, and copper; why don't
we have a chemical smelter and use hydro-metallurgy, because now we
can crack the sulfide problem with autoclaves." He wrote a paper
that was published in the Denver Equipment Company's Deco Trefoil.
Remember the Trefoil? [laughter] Dad published a paper called
"Why Not a Chemical Smelter," which talked about using this
technology and other kinds of things like solvent extraction, but
basically it was digesting the sulfides in an autoclave. So it was
a long time ago. How I came upon it, I'm not sure, except I've
always known that if you raised the temperature, you could
accelerate reactions.

Swent: And then C. S. Simons came to you as a client?

Hazen: No, I don't think so. I think the first work we ever did on

autoclave was probably some work which we did for ourselves as a
counterpart to a roasting study that we had. Now I'm fishing back;
I'll have to see if I can find a real record of how I got into the
autoclave. There were papers written on Moa Bay and the nickel
sulfide, and there were papers written on Sherritt Gordon, so this
then becomes part of the metallurgist's arsenal—the things that he
does .

Swent: Just general knowledge?

Hazen: Yes. Ah, the first autoclave work that I can recall we ever did
was for Climax Molybdenum on the use of sulfur dioxide for
reduction of an oxide molybdenum ore. So I don't think the first
work we ever did was actually on a sulfide. In any event, it
becomes one of those things like acid leaching or ion exchange or
something else; it's one of the methods you look at.

Come to think about it, if you take a long enough view, there
has been a lot going on in the mining industry in the last fifty
years in the way of changes. I'm happy to say that I think Hazen
Research has been involved with an awful lot of it.

182

Research on Coal

Swent: I should ask you about carbon and coal.

Hazen: We've done a reasonable amount of work on coal of various sorts and
on concentrating schemes. Of particular interest is the
possibility of removing the sulfur from coal. Sulfur in coal
usually has two major forms, one is as pyrite and the other is as
organic sulfur, usually bound up in some organic compound in the
coal itself.

Jim Kindig and one of his fellow workers, Ron Turner,
conceived an idea for removing the pyrite form of sulfur from coal
based upon a discovery—an invention of these two gentlemen—that
the gas-iron carbonyl would make pyrite magnetic if the pyrite
surface was exposed to the gaseous carbonyl at a temperature of
about 150 degrees Centigrade or so. This led to the concept of
taking coal, breaking it down into an appropriate size, and passing
it through a heated chamber, where it was exposed to the vapor of
iron carbonyl. After leaving the chamber, it would pass over a dry
magnetic separator, where the now magnetic pyrite could be removed.

This was a very interesting example of this corporate
technology idea that if you have people who are actively engaged in
a field and are of the right sort, they will simply invent things.
Ideas occur to them as they stay active in the field, because the
people who gravitate toward this kind of career are usually people
with pretty inventive minds and are pretty creative types.

This was patented, and the process itself was offered to
people. They could obtain rights to the process by funding the
laboratory and pilot plant work required to try to bring it to
commercial reality. Then what happened was that all of a sudden
the laws having to do with the emission of sulfur dioxide from
boiler stacks were changed so that instead of saying that one had
to just remove the sulfur to a certain level in the coal, the law
had to do with removing a percentage of the sulfur that was
present. Basically, the ratio of the amount of sulfur in the coal
that was present as pyrite and the amount that was there as
organically-bound and therefore not susceptible to removal, so it
was not possible to meet the regulatory requirements.

In the meantime, it was a very nice bit of thoughtful research
and development work that these people did under our policy of
letting people do things that intrigued them.

Swent: This is something that there had been a big need for, obviously.

183

Hazen: Oh, yes. Jim Kindig and Ron Turner, being inventive guys and

feeling they were in a circumstance where they had the freedom to
try things that interested them, came up with something that was of
great interest to all of us.

Swent: So you obviously did quite a lot of work in coal that we haven't
touched on at all.

Hazen: Yes, but coal research had its season. It went through a period of
time when there was debate between eastern and western coals, and
the whole business about sulfur content has now settled down. At
one time we were very heavily involved in coal activities, even to
the extent of going into the field and exploring, finding coal
deposits, doing the geology, helping people get a mine started, and
then building for them a station where unit trains could come in,
load up the coal, and go on to the Midwest without hardly even
slowing down.

So we've had a lot of experience with coal. That was a major
move, to try and do something that was novel and new technology.

Swent: How small did you break up the coal?

Hazen: Oh, it only had to be about a half inch; it didn't have to be
powdered coal. But it had to be free enough so that the gases
could penetrate enough into the coal to get at the pyrite.

Swent: This has been a wonderful interview, Wayne. Thank you very much.

Transcriber: Judy Smith

Final Typists: Eleanor Swent and Shannon Page

184

TAPE GUIDE- -Wayne C. Hazen

Interview 1:
Tape 1,
Tape
Tape
Tape

July 22, 1992

Side A

Side B

Side A

Side B
Tape 3, Side A
Tape 3, Side B not recorded

1,
2,
2,

Interview 2: July 23, 1993

Tape 4, Side A

Tape 4, Side B

Tape 5, Side A
Tape 5
Tape 6

Tape 6,
Tape 7,

Side B
Side A
Side B
Side A

Tape 7, Side B not recorded

Interview 3
Tape 8
Tape 8
Tape 9

October 13,

Side A

Side B

Side A
Tape 9, Side B
Tape 10, Side A
Tape 10, Side B
Tape 11, Side A
Tape 11, Side B

1993

10
19
29
40

46
56
66
76
85
96
104

112
122
132
142
153
162
170
180

185
APPENDICES --Wayne C. Hazen

A. Patents Issued to Wayne C. Hazen 186

B. Wayne C. Hazen, Selected Papers and Presentations and

Resume 189

C. "Solvent Extraction of Uranium at Shiprock, N.M.," by
W. C. Hazen and A. V. Henrickson in Mining Engineering.
September 1957 190

D. Biography, Joe E. House 194

PATENTS ISSUED TO 186
WAYNE C. HAZEN Appendix A

HRI U.S. Patent Date

Number Number Title Issued

2,557,361 Ore Flotation Employing Ion Exchange Materials

2,810,638 Method of Eluting Adsorbed Complex Cyanides
of Gold and Silver

2,954,276 Hydrometallurgical Process

2 ,992 ,894 Process for Concentrating Copper and Zinc
Values Present in Aqueous Solution

2,994,580 Hydrometallurgical Process

3,037,627 Method of Beneficiating Sulfide and Oxide

Ores of Copper, Manganese, Lead, and Zir.c

3,151,933 Solvent Extraction Process for the Recovery
of Vanadium from Solutions

3,206,288 Apparatus and Method for Contacting
Liquids with Liquids

3,214,239 Recovery of Metal Values from Aqueous
Solution by Solvent Extraction with an
Organo Phosphorus Extractant

3,252,272 Apparatus for Separating Materials

3,307,938 Process for Extracting Metal Values

3,333,924 Recovery of Acids

3,372,982 Method of Recovery of Vanadium from Its Ores

3,425,799 Recovery of Phosphate Values from
Phosphatic Slimes

3,615,170 Process for Separating Metals Using Double
Solvent Extraction with Bridging Solvent
Medium

3,676,106 Ion Exchange Process for the Recovery of
Metals with Cation Exchange Agents

3,767,543 Process for the Electrolytic Recovery of
Copper from Its Sulfide Ores

3,872 ,209 Ion Exchange Process for the Recovery of
Metals

3,857,919 Separating Metal Values by Selective
Extraction

561493 Solvent Extraction Method and Apparatus

(Russian) (Russian Patent 561493)

4,606,764 Geoclave oxidation-reduction of metal oxides-

sulfides

187

Appendix B
WAYNE C. HAZEN

Selected Papers and Presentations

July 1993

1) Hazen, W. C.: "Solvent Extraction", SME Mineral Processing Handbook. Society of Mining
Engineers of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, Inc.,
New York, 1985.

2) Hazen, W. C.: "Changing Patterns in Mineral Processing Technology", International Seminar
on Mineral Exploitation Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan, 1979.

3) Hazen, W. C.: "The Impact of Today's Pressures on the Mineral Processing Industry", 1977.

4) Hazen, W. C.: "Changing Patterns in World Mineral Supply and the Implications for Research",
Denver Mining Club, 1976.

5) Hazen, W. C.: "The Expanding World of Hydrometallurgy", Tucson and San Francisco
Seminars (Mixing Equipment Company, Inc.), 1973.

6) Hazen, W. C.; Kindig, J. K.: "Cyclone Separators for Solvent Extraction in Metallurgy", AIME
Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, 1970.

7) Hazen, W. C.: "Significant Recent Developments in the Field of Hydrometallurgy", AIME
Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1969.

8) Hazen, W. C.: "What's New and Profitable in Hydrometallurgy", AIME Meeting - Colorado
Section, 1969.

9) Hazen, W. C.: "Role of the Metallurgical Engineer in Industry", presented to the orientation
class, Colorado School of Mines, 1965.

10) Hazen, W. C.: "Research for the Mining Industry", 1965 Mining Show, American Mining
Congress, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1965.

11) Hazen, W. C.: "Solvent Extraction in Hydrometallurgy", presented to graduate class in
Hydrometallurgy II, Colorado School of Mines, 1964, 1967, 1968.

12) Hazen, W. C.: "Hydrometallurgy for Tomorrow", Dedication Ceremony of the Benedict
Laboratory at Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, 1964.

13) Hazen, W. C.: "The Chemistry of the Recovery of Uranium and Vanadium from Ores",
American Chemical Society National Meeting, 1963.

188

Wayne C. Hazen
Selected Papers and Presentations
July 1993
Page 2

14) Hazen, W. C.: "Solvent Extraction Techniques", DECO Trefoil (Publication of the Denver
Equipment Company), Vol. 27, No. 4, Bulletin No. T4-B32, 1963.

15) Hazen, W. C.: "The Role of the Uranium Ore Milling Plant in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle", Atomic
Industrial Forum, Washington, D.C., 1959.

16) Hazen, W. C.; Warren, S. P.: "The Mill with No Operators", AIME - Colorado M.B.D.
Meeting, 1959.

17) Hazen, W. C.: "Performance of the Kermac Solvent Extraction Plant in the Ambrosia Lake
District", 1959.

18) Hazen, W. C. (co-author): Chapter 11-5.1, Uranium Ore Processing, pp. 331-345, Second
International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy Commission,
1958.

19) Baker, R. D.; Hazen, W. C.; Henrickson, A. V.; McNeese, W. D.; Morgan, A. N.; Thomas, R.
L.: "The Los Alamos Plant for Remotely Controlled Production of Plutonium Metal",
Transactions of the Conference on the International Uses of Atomic Energy, Geneva,
Switzerland, 1958.

20) Hazen, W. C.; Henrickson, A. V.: "Solvent Extraction of Uranium at Shiprock, New Mexico",
Mining Engineering, pp. 994-996, September 1957.

189

WAYNE C. HAZEN

Vice President and Senior Technical Advisor

Areas of Expertise

Inorganic chemistry, hydrometallurgy, minerals
beneficiation, nuclear energy fuels, management of
research and development activities.

Experience Summary

Mr. Hazen plays an active role in the technical
aspects of many current projects at HRI. To these
he brings five decades of metallurgical problem-
solving. Through thousands of projects he has
developed the philosophy that various departments
within the company should not operate in isolation;
more than one discipline is often needed for
development of an optimum technical solution.
This philosophy plus his uncompromising
dedication to quality of work has been instrumental
in the growth of Hazen Research from a tiny, one-
building laboratory to the largest private
metallurgical R&D contractor in the United States.

Founder of the company. Served as President
until 1983 and currently as Vice President, and
Senior Technical Advisor. Internal consultant on
a wide range of Hazen Research projects with
special emphasis on solvent extraction, diagnostic
mineralogy, and difficult metallurgical separation
problems such as rare earths and radioactive
minerals.

Credentials

B.Sc. Chemistry, 1940, University of California;
American Chemical Society; American Institute of
Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers;
Sigma Xi (Honorary Chemistry); The Canadian
Institute of Mining and Metallurgy

Registered Professional Engineer, State of
Colorado

Employment History

1983 - Present

22 years

Vice President and Senior
Technical Advisor
Hazen Research, Inc

President & C.E.O.
Hazen Research, Inc.

7 years
7 years
2 years
2 years
2 years

Key Projects

Metallurgical Labs
Kerr-McGee Oil Industries

Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory

Battelle Memorial Institute
Minerals Division

Technical Superintendent
Manganese Ore Company

Research Chemist

Pan American Engineering

Company

Directed research programs in uranium, vanadium,
and potash.

Responsible for operation of pilot plant for
uranium leaching and solvent extraction. Aided in
design of Kermac Uranium Mill at Ambrosia
Lake, New Mexico.

Responsible for design, construction, and initial
operation of vanadium solvent extraction plant at
Shiprock, New Mexico.

Directed research and development work on
plutonium processing.

Performed taconite flotation research and
development.

Technical Superintendent at manganese recovery
mill.

Selected Publications

Numerous published papers, subjects uranium ore
processing, solvent extraction, and minerals
research.

Twenty U.S. patents issued, others pending,
subjects mineral processing and extractive
metallurgy.

190

Appendix C

THE SEARCH FOR LOWER COSTS
PROBING THE PROCESSES

Solvent Extraction of
Uranium at Shiprock, N.M.

By W. C. Hazen
A. V. Henrickson

URANIUM plant operations of the Kerr-McGee
Oil Industries at Shiprock, N. M., began in De
cember 1954. As originally designed, the plant
treated Plateau carnotite ores by the acid cure proc
ess, which dissolved both uranium and vanadium
minerals.

After 16 hr of acid curing, the ore was conveyed
to an agitator and leached for 2 hr in acid liquor at
a pH of 1.0. The leach pulp was then separated at
100 mesh in a classifier, the sands continuing through
a washing classifier circuit and the slimes going to a
countercurrent decantation system of four thicken
ers.

Leach liquor containing the uranium and vana
dium values was passed through a column ion ex
change plant for uranium recovery, and the barren
liquors were further processed by a precipitation
method for vanadium recovery.

In mid-1955 an expansion of the mill was planned
to double the original tonnage. It was also decided

W. C. nAZEN ana A. V. HENRICKSON are Chemical Engineers
with Kerr-McGee Oil Industries Inc., Boulder, Colo.

to alter the flowsheet and substitute a 16-hr agita
tion leach for the acid cure process, since with the
new ores vanadium recovery was no longer of im
portance. Agitation leaching would also permit re
duced acid consumption and less labor.

Since more ore was to be handled, the expansion
had to include additional equipment for recovering
uranium from the larger volume of leach liquor
produced. The company had been studying solvent
extraction in the laboratory for some time and this
seemed a natural place for its application. Before ex
pansion to the new process was decided upon, how
ever, experimental work was undertaken on a larger
scale. Tests were made in 50,000-gal wooden tanks
that had previously been used for vanadium precipi
tation. A batch of feed liquor was pumped into one
of the tanks and adjusted to the proper voltage and
pH. After the solvent was added, the whole mixture
was agitated 10 min and allowed to stand 1 hr to
separate into its two phases. The uranium-loaded
solvent w?c th°*> ^^'Tnn^ed. from t^ie t-v^ of. ths SLC^J^-
ous phase, stripped with sodium carbonate solution,
and returned for a second extraction.

EXTRACTION CIRCUIT
MIXER- SETTLER ARRANGEMENT

FROM NO 3

AQUEOUS

(FROM NO1

MIXER-SETTLER)

TO NO. 4
MIXER-
SETTLER

994— MINING ENGINEERING, SEPTEMBER 1957

802.2

Table III. Typical Uranium and Ammonia Balance

Urmolam Balance
Bails:

Ore assay uranium, pet
Feed rate, kg per hr
Extraction uranium, pet
Pregnant liquor assay uranium.

g per liter
Soluble uranium to CCD system.

Soluble uranium removed as sam
ples, g

Net soluble uranium to CCD sys
tem, g

Dlttrlbotlon of Uranium In CCD
System:
Thickener No. 1 overflow:

45.4 liter per hr x 1.5 g per

liter x 12 hr
Soluble loss:

9.5 liter per hr x 0.11 g per
liter x 12 hr

Total

Distribution of Uranium In Preclp-
iUtor:

Loss in barren solution:
SO liter per hr x 0.006 g per

liter x 12 hr
Overall uranium loss:

Soluble loss 4- loss In barren

solution

Ammonia Balance
Basis:

Discharge from leaching unit,

liter per hr
Assay of pregnant liquor, NHj. g

per liter

Total NHa to CCD system, g
NH,i removed by sampling, g
Net NHj to CCD system
Distribution of NHj In CCD System:
Thickener No. 1 overflow:

45.4 liter per hr x 12.8 g per

liter x 12 hr
Soluble loss:

9.5 liter per hr x 1.2 g per
liter x 12 hr

Total

Distribution of Ammonia In Preeip-
lutor:
Ammonia recovery:

35.2 liter per hr x 15.7 g per

liter x 12 hr
Loss m barren solution:

50.0 liter per hr x 0.30 g per

liter x 12 hr
Unaccounted loss

Total
Overall loss:

Soluble loss + loss in barren
solution + unaccounted loss

Dlst. Pet

98.4
1.6

0.7
2.3

20.2

30.0
7272
143
7129

Dist. Pet

98.0

6631.7

180

161.5

6973.2
478.

cipitation tower is operated on a c
a test was run maintaining the soli
cipitation tower at pH 8 by conti
the pregnant solution to the towe:
and B' show that by maintaining p
tation tower could be operated on a
and accomplish almost complete pr
uranium. Although a pH of 7.5 app
ical point with respect to redissol
cipitate, it is believed that the c
with each ore, depending on the s
the solution after stripping the am

At the time maximum precipitati
um occurred, more than 99 pet of t
carbon dioxide had been stripped ft

Composition of the Precipitate: I

95.0

2.6
2.3

6.9

ntinuous basis,

on in the pre-

uously feeding

The curves B

8, the precipi-

Dntinuous basis

|ipi tation of the

Irs to be a crit-

lon of the pre-

lical pH varies

\s remaining in

onia.

of the urani-

ammonia and

m the solution.

ecipitates were

produced from operation of the int< jrated plant on
three ores. Table II gives the dat; obtained from
chemical and spectrographic analys ; of these pre
cipitates. These data show that wl m the precipi
tates are air-dried, uranium content waries from 44.7
to 59 pet. When the precipitates fare ignited at
1742°F the uranium content varies f|om 59.3 to 72.5
pet. As shown by the spectrographic analysis, the
variation is caused primarily by solids carry-over
from the countercurrent washing cirluit. This con
tamination could have been reduced by employing a
clarification filter between the thickener overflow

and the precipitation towes The uranium compound
in the air-dried precipitates was identified as UO. •
2H.O by X-ray diffraction
was identified as U,O,.

The ignited precipitate

Operation of the Integrated? Plant for the
Extraction and Recovery 06 Uranium

Because one of the attlj&ctive features of the am
monium carbonate pressure leach is the recovery
of the ammonia for retwrn to the leaching circuit,
a countercurrent decantition washing circuit and a
precipitation tower wert added to the system. The
objective of the prograpi was to demonstrate the

uranium and ammoni
complished in an integ
not within the scope o
turn the ammonia to t
towers were employe-
the precipitation towe
and ammonia balanci
the integrated plant

These data show t
from the countercur:
pet of the uranium i
an additional loss
barren solution dis
tower. On this basi
Ore 3 was 95.5 pet
leaching system. In
approximately 93 p
in the leaching t
uranium was appr
the integrated pla

With respect to
the data show tha
charge from the co
system was equiva
feed, and that the
system including
and the unaccount
per ton of dry fee

recovery that could be ac
ted plant. Although it was
this program to actually re-
leaching circuit, absorption
o recover the ammonia from
Table III gives the uranium
obtained from operation of
Ore 3.

t the soluble loss of uranium
t decantation system was 1.6
the pregnant liquor and that
0.7 pet was incurred by the
arged from the precipitation
the recovery of uranium from
the uranium in the feed to the
he case of Ores 1 and 2, where
of the uranium was extracted
,rers, the overall recovery of
imately 91 pet of the feed to

he ammonia recovery system,
he ammonia lost with the dis-
tercurrent decantation washing
nt to 1.67 Ib NH, per ton of dry
otal loss of ammonia from the
e loss with the barren solution
le loss was equivalent to 5.85 Ib
to the integrated plant.

Conclusions

The data obtaii
strated that the
leach is a technic!
tion of uranium fi

As in the case
the extraction of
process does not
or high vanadium]
low reagent cost
of substantially a.
pears to have ad'
processes. In addi'
it is probably
medium-lime on
acid leach usuall;
uranium from li
appears to mainti
and disadvantage!
for extracting ui
such that a carefi
made for each ori

References

1 F. A. Forward and fl Halpern: Studies in Carbonate Leaching oj
Uranium Ores, Trans. JCan. Inst. of Mln. and Met., vol. 56, pp.
255-258. 1953. Also Can^Min. and Met. Bull., pp. 634-648, 1953.

: F. A. Forward and 3 Halpern: Development! in the Carbonate
Processing of Uranium t)res. AIMS Trans., 1954, vol. 200, p. 1408:
JOUPNAL or METALS. De» ?mber 1954.

>R. W. Mancantelli add J. R. Woodward: The Beauerlodge Hydro-

from this study have demon-
ammonium carbonate pressure
lly attractive method for extrac-
bm high-lime ores.
if other processes developed for
Iranium from domestic ores, the
ppear applicable to high gypsum
Dres. On the other hand, with its
Sr precipitation and the recovery
| of the ammonia, the process ap-
kntage over other alkaline leach
Dn, because of these same factors,
ipetitive with an acid leach of
At the same time, because an
[will extract about 98 pet of the
I'-lime ores, the acid leach still
its advantage. The advantages
I of the several methods available
fnium from low-grade ores are
economic comparison should be
being considered.

metallurgical Plant. Alii

E Annual Meeting, Chicago, February 1955.

SEPT^BER 1957, MINING ENGINEERING— 993

By repeating this stepwise extraction a number of
times it was possible to lower the uranium assay in
the aqueous liquor to the discard level. The opera
tion was analogous to batch experiments in the lab
oratory and suffered the drawback of batch opera
tion, but even with this makeshift experimental set
up it was possible to add to plant output signifi
cantly, since each batch contained the solution from
about 75 tons of ore. This experimental procedure
was incorporated as part of production, and from
July 1955 until September 1956 liquor from many
thousands of tons of ore was treated.

A continuous countercurrent solvent extraction
plant built in the summer of 1956 was placed in op
eration in September, at which time the batch oper
ation was discontinued.

Process: The process in the new plant utilizes
di-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid and tributyl phos
phate dissolved in a high flash-point kerosene to ex
tract uranium from the acid leach liquor. The ura
nium-laden solvent is stripped with 10 pet sodium
carbonate solution and the barren solvent is re
turned to the extractor. The uranium-bearing car
bonate liquor from the stripper is acidified and the
uranium precipitated with ammonia or magnesia.

In determining the particular solvent to use, con
sideration was given to the amines, the monoalkyl
phosphates, and di-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid.
Of the many possibilities, the Oak Ridge DAPEX*

• This solvent process was developed in the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, Raw Materials Chemistry Division, by the group headed
by K. B. Brown. Much of their work has been published in declas
sified form and is now available.'

process, using di-2-ethyl hexyl phosphoric acid, had
one outstanding virtue — the solvent was already
available in commercial amounts at an established
price. All other solvents were potentially available
only in experimental quantities. Although the
DAPEX process has other qualifications for the
Shiprock feed liquors, solvent availability was the
decisive factor.

In the application of the process at Shiprock no
significant deviations were found from the data that
have been published. It is a tribute to the compe
tence of the Oak Ridge work that the estimates made
there from laboratory tests have been verified so
closely by actual experience in a production plant.

Reduction Circuit: In the DAPEX process the acid
liquor must be relatively free of ferric iron, since
this element extracts to some extent under the con
ditions used for uranium recovery.

Reduction of ferric iron to ferrous is accomplished
by passing the acid liquor from the thickener over
flow through a bed of scrap steel shavings purchased
from machining operations. These steel shavings are
loosely packed to a depth of 6 ft in a 5-ft diam
wooden tank having a false bottom. The solution
flows into the bottom of this tank and is reduced as
it rises through the steel shavings.

By insuring that there are always enough shavings
and that fine material does not clog the tank and
cause channeling, it is possible to reduce ferric iron
easily and cheaply. It has been found by experience
that if the liquors are reduced to an electromotive
force between 175 and 300 mv (negative), substan
tially no iron is picked up in the extraction circuit.

Extraction Circuit: The extraction section is com
posed of four mixer settlers arranged in a cluster.
The mixer settlers differ in elevation from one unit
to the next by 12 in., so that the aqueous phase flows
by gravity, while solvent is transferred uphill from
one stage to the next by air lifts.

192

The extraction unit is designed for an aqueous
flow of 120 gpm, the liquor produced from 350 tpd.
Maximum solvent flow at this capacity was to be 40
gpm.

Each mixer-settler stage is comprised of one
wooden stave tank, 6 ft deep and 16 ft diam, and a
4x4-ft stainless steel mixing tank placed on legs
against the wall inside the settler. The major pur
pose of placing the mixers inside the settlers was to
facilitate piping, since connections between mixer
and settler are achieved by holes cut in the wall of
the stainless mixer tank.

Agitation in the mixers is provided by 18-in. diam
turbomixers with V-belt drives. Two of the four
mixers are operating at 150 rpm and two at 200
rpm. No decision has been reached as to which speed
is better.

The air lifts for advancing the organic phase are
constructed of polyvinyl chloride plastic pipe and
are set in each settler inside a plastic pipe boot into
which the solvent overflows. The total height of or
ganic in any settler can be raised or lowered easily
by changing the position of this plastic boot.

The aqueous phase flows from one settler into the
succeeding mixer through a 6-in. diam flexible Car-
Ion hose. Both aqueous and solvent flow are meas
ured by recording Rotometers.

Stripping Circuit: The stripping circuit is com
posed of a two-stage mixer-settler. In this case the
mixers are outside the settlers and connected to
them by piping. Th solvent flows by gravity, while
the sodium carbonate stripping solution is advanced
countercurrent with air lifts. All equipment in this
part of the plant is built of mild steel, since it has
adequate corrosion resistance.

Mixers are the same size as those used in the ex
traction circuit — 4x4 ft equipped with 18-in. diam
turbomixers. Steam coils made of three turns of 2-in.
pipe are welded in each mixer.

The settlers are 8-ft diam cone-bottom tanks with
internal launders for solvent overflow. Cone-bottom
settlers were used because of the presence of small
amounts of precipitates of titanium and iron hydrox
ides, or their basic carbonates, which are formed
during stripping.

In operation of the stripping unit the pregnant
organic solvent from the first extraction unit settler
is pumped by a centrifugal pump to mixer No. 1,
where it is agitated with the advancing carbonate
liquor. Solution from the mixer flows by gravity to
settler No. 1, where the phases separate, the organic
overflowing by gravity to mixer No. 2 and the car
bonate liquor, which contains some suspended
solids, flowing via an underflow leg to a pump and
storage tank.

This pregnant carbonate liquor is pumped through
a plate and frame press to remove suspended solids
and the clear filtrate is sent to the uranium precipi
tation circuit.

The 10 pet sodium carbonate solution is made up
in a 5000-gal agitated batch tank, from which it
flows by gravity through a recording Rotometer to
the stripping circuit.

Precipitation: Uranium from pregnant carbonate
solutions is recoverable by either of two general
methods: 1) caustic precipitation or 2) destruction
of carbonate with acid, followed by precipitation of
uranium as yellow cake with ammonia or magnesia.

Caustic precipitation of uranium from carbonate
strip liquors, followed by recycling of the carbonate,
was used in some of the batch runs at Shiprock, but

had no particular merit over the acid method be
cause of local plant conditions. Shiprock has an ion
exchange plant that produces a uranium-bearing
acid solution and a solvent extraction plant that pro
duces the sodium carbonate solution. It is obvious
that some reagent economy can be effected by mix
ing these two streams and allowing them to neutral
ize each other and then precipitating the uranium
oxide product from this mixed solution. This is the
practice that has been followed for several months.
In some respects the complication in operating
procedures introduced by mixing these two streams
has perhaps outweighed the reagent economy, and
consideration is now being given to the advantages
of precipitating the ion exchange eluate and the
strip carbonate liquors independently.

Operating Results

Operation of this plant has turned out to be very
straightforward and simple. One operator per shift
runs th-? extraction and stripping. A net of typical
operating conditions is given below:

Aqueous flow
Solvent flow
Aqueous feed analysis:

electromotive force

Temperature

U,0, gpl

V,0jgpl

Sodium carbonate to strippers
Stripping temperature

100 gpm
20 gpm

— 300 mv
1.3
90'F
IA

0.6

2.5 gpm
HOT

For long periods of time it has been possible to
operate the solvent extraction unit with a tailing so
lution assay averaging less than 0.005 g U,O, per
liter, corresponding to better than 99.7 pet recovered.
At a period of stable operations samples have been
taken through the entire system and analyzed for
uranium content. A typical set of such analyses is
shown below:

Circuit

Organic Phase
UjO« Gpl

AqneoDs Phase
V,0, Gpl

Extractor No. 1
No. 2
No. 3
No. 4
Stripper No. 1
No. 2

8.95
7.92
2.29
0.47
0.37
0.010

1.27
0.43
0.023
0.002
55.6
2.6

Consumption of reagents in this plant has been
close to that predicted from laboratory work:

Iron for reduction

Sodium carbonate
Solvent loss

Sulfuric acid to destroy carbonate
Ammonia for precipitation

0.75 Ib per Ib U»Oe

2.0 Ib per Ib UiO»

0.'} gal per 1OO pa', of aoucous

Ireaieu

1.6 Ib per Ib UiOe
0.15 Ib per Ib U,O»

The amount of iron required for reduction is nat
urally a function of the properties of the leach solu
tion — primarily the ferric iron content. This would
be one of the major considerations in the choice of a
solvent system, since amine solvents are not so sen
sitive to the presence of ferric iron as phosphates
are. At Shiprock, however, steel shavings for reduc
tion are delivered at $22.00 per ton, so the cost per
pound of product for this reduction step is low.

Soda ash consumption can be reduced nearly to
theoretical amounts but this will depend, to some
extent, on the titanium content of the feed liquor
and on the care used in operating control.

Solvent losses given above were determined for
the first 10 million gal of feed liquor treated in the
plant. This loss is made up of two components. The
first is the actual solubility of the solvent in the
aqueous phase, and the second is the loss of organic
carried out by the raffinate as small droplets. The
solubility factor is small. Measurements of entrain-

193

ment loss show that it accounts for at least half the

total solvent loss.

Undoubtedly a trap tank would prevent some of
this entrainment loss. Another possibility would be
to operate the mixers with the organic phase con
tinuous by recycling solvent from the settlers back
to the mixers. In experiments this has been found
to decrease entrainment of solvent. Both alterna
tives, the trap tank and continuous organic phase in
the mixers, are under consideration for the Shiprock
installation.

The cost given for sulfuric acid required to destroy
the carbonate and the ammonia required for precipi
tation of yellow cake are for the amounts that would
be necessary if the acid eluate from ion exchange
were not mixed with the carbonate strip liquor.

The use of a high flash-point kerosene as a diluent
has been of great aid in processing because of the de
creased fire hazard. The material used at Shiprock
is sold under the trade name Napoleum 470 and is
produced hv the cc-npar.y's Drap Pock Oil Div. It
has a flash point of 160°F compared to 105° for
ordinary kerosene as available in the Shiprock area.
The price is ISVztf per gal delivered at Shiprock, but
the relief from fire danger is well worth the added
cost.

The problem of emulsion formation is always
raised in discussion of solvent extraction. At Ship-
rock the only problem of this sort has resulted from
the introduction of graphite into the system by dis
solution of steel shavings. There is no clarification
filter on the feed liquor system and graphite freed
from the iron is carried into the first stage extrac
tor, where it transfers into the organic layer in the
No. 1 mixer. In the plant design provision was made
for removing this solid material by filtering the sol
vent at periodic intervals, but it has never been
necessary to use this cleaning equipment because of
an unforeseen but fortunate circumstance. The
graphite-stabilized clods of emulsion, which have
been called seaweed, float to the surface of the sol
vent in the settler instead of remaining at the inter
face as had been anticipated. These clods pass over
the organic overflow and into the sodium carbonate
stripping circuit. In the first stripping mixer this
graphite-stabilized emulsion is broken and the sol
vent is released while the solids drop out with the
solid hydroxides and are removed in the byproduct
filter. In time this gummy material can cause trouble
by plugging pipelines and pumps, but a clarification
filter to be installed on the feed liquor will elimin
ate the trouble at the source. In the meantime no
problems have been caused by the presence of these
seaweed clods.

Flow rates have been easy to maintain and control
at any desired ratio. Control of interface levels has
turned out to be no problem at all. The level of the
aqueous phase in each settler is, of course, set by the
height of the weir on the discharge pipe from that
settler. The elevations of these weirs were set by
calculation when the plant was designed and have
not been altered.

The design of the settlers includes enough free
board so that if the organic should stop flowing for
any reason, such as air lift failure, there is room for
accumulation of the entire solvent excess in any one
settling tank. It is impossible to spill solvent over
the top of a settler.

Reference

1 C. A. Blake, K. B. Brown, and C. F. Coleman: The Extraction
and Recovery of Uranium land Vanadium) from Acid Liquors with
Di < 2-ethylhexyl I phosphoric Acid and Some Other Organophosphor-
ous Acid's. ORNL-1903. May 13, 1955.

996— MINING ENGINEERING, SEPTEMBER 1957

19A

BIOGRAPHY Appendix D

Joe E. House

3735 Larchwood Drive

Minnetonka, MN 55345

612-473-7065

EDUCATION;

Primary and Secondary Schools of Missouri and California

AB & BS Degrees-1947- Southwest MO State University,
Springfield, MO. Majors- Chemistry and Mathematics.
Graduated with High Distinction.

MS Degrees-University of Oklahoma and Washington
University — Chemistry and Business Administration.

EXPERIENCE;

1847-1956: Taught chemistry on secondary and university

levels.
1856- Joined Research and Development Dept . of General Mills

Chemicals. Began work on the development of reagents

for mining and metals application. Introduced new

amine reagents for non-metalic floation.
1858-Synthesized and commercialized FIRST tertiary amine

for uranium extraction. Same reagent is still used

for the recovery of 85% of world's production.
1960-1 nt reduced an extrctant for alkaline circuits used to

recover V, Mo, W and to purify chemical process

streams. Also, used as a phase transfer catalyst.
1860-Began work on the development of an extractant for the

recovery of copper- A COMPLETELY NEW CONCEPT.
1963-1 ntroduced the first copper extractant.

Copyrighted the LIX trade mark, now synonymous for

metal extractants around the world.
1864-1 nt reduced second copper extrant- LIX-64.
1965-Became head of R&D for Gen Mills Chem.
1968-First commercial copper mill using LIX-64 came on

stream. Mill built by Ranchers.
-Promoted to Vice— president of Gen Mills

1968-Second copper mill came on stream - Bagdad Copper.
1374-World's largest mill located in Zambia came on stream.

This is still the largest mill.
1975-1885-Devel oped new reagents for other metals and

improved copper extractants.

1977-Henkel bought General Mills Chemicals.

1982-Bought Shell technology package for oxime extractants.
1968-1986; Responsible for Research, Development,

Production and Sales and Services for the International
Di visi on.
1986-Ret i red, having built a multi r-illior. dolla** worlrl

wide business from an idea.

1986-Dre.seni:-Trder>endent consultant (international)

195

INDEX- -Wayne C. Hazen

Allen, Gene, 121

AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] ,

58, 64, 65, 66, 67, 78, 90, 99
Ambrosia Lake uranium mill, NM

90-98

acid leach vs. carbonate, 93-95

Buck Keil, Stearns Roger, 97

flow sheet decision, 94

pilot plant for, 93

solvent extraction startup, 97
Anaconda Company, 41, 88, 94, 97
Anderson Brothers Pipeline

Company, 91
Anderson, Maxie, 91, 106-110,

115-117

Apex mine, St. George, UT, 132
Archer Daniels Midland, 109, 112
Artillery Peak, AZ, 24
ASARCO [American Smelting &

Refining Company] , 5

Baker, R.D., 54, 69

Barnes, Bill, 134

Barnes Engineering Company, 134

Baroch, Charles, 153

Battelle Memorial Institute, 39-

42, 71

Bechtel Corporation, 109
Benson, Bruce, 161
Bhappu, Rhoshan, 41, 168
Biedenbach, Anna Vesta. See

Hazen.
Biedenbach, Charles L., 2-3, 17,

46-47

Blackbird mine, ID, 141
Blake, Dick, 133, 145
Bluebell mine, 104
Bluebird mine, AZ, 106, 110
Bluewater uranium plant, NM, 88,

Bradbury, Norris, 55
Bradley, Henry, 63
Bradley, Philip, 37
Brown, Keith, 91
Bryant, Jerry, 153, 159
Budelman, Herman, 7

Carlton mill, CO, 95-96

Casa Grande copper plant, AZ 146

Cato Research, 120

chalcopyrite

electrolytic oxidation, 120

Cymet process, 121-122
Chappell, Pete, 149, 152-153
Christopher, Dave, 133
Climax Molybdenum Company, 103-

106, 117, 164, 181
Climax uranium mill, Grand

Junction, CO, 91
Colorado Plateau uranium boom, 65,

66, 74, 100
Colorado School of Mines, 36, 41,

126, 151

Research Institute, 80-81, 83,

85, 93, 125

Coltrinari, Enzo, 102, 123, 149
Connick, Bob, 19
copper, solvent extraction of,

107-110
copper recovery from ore by

solvent extraction, 107-110
Coyne, Kenneth, 105
Crabtree, Ed, 93
Cuthbertson, Bob, 104
Cymet process, 121-122, 132
Cyprus Mines, 121-122, 139, 144

Damon, A.C., 135-136

Day and Zimmerman, 43-44

Defense Plant Corporation, 26, 32

Delamar mine, NV, 8-17

Delamar Cyaniding Company, 9-15

Dempsey, Stanley, 153, 159

Denver Equipment Company, 135-136

DEPA (di-2-ethyl-hexyl phosphoric

acid), 79-82
di-nonyl napthalene sulfonic acid

copper extraction, 107-108

Edgemont mill, SD, 99, 100
Edgemont Mining Company, 99, 115
environmental concerns, 3, 5, 10-
16, 42, 49-52, 165

196

Environmental Protection Agency

[EPA], 142, 165, 170
ethics in business, 112-115

Falconbridge, 145. See also

Lakef ield Research) .
Fermi, Enrico, 55
First National Bank of Golden, CO,

111, 112

Fortune, John, 111
fraternities at University of

California, Berkeley, 18, 21-22
Freeport Nickel, 180

General Mills and chemical amines,

xiv-xvi, 91-92, 112
Geoco, 133, 145
Goens, Tim, 149
gold recovery from ore

carbon in pulp, 96

ion exchange, 69-71

pyrite roasting, 96
Goren, Mayer, 98
Gray, Alan, 101
Griffith, Bill, 103

Haas, Frank, 104, 123
Hager, Dr. John, 126
Hanna Nickel and M.A. Hanna

Company, 25, 28, 36, 38, 72,

73, 133

Hamilton, E.M., 1
Haskell, Floyd, 143, 148
hazardous waste management, 142-

143, 145
hazards, environmental, 3, 5, 10-

16, 49-52
Hazen, Anna Vesta (mother), 2, 5,

15, 17, 99, 130, 148
Hazen, Barbara Zoe, 68
Hazen, Charles L., 2, 4, 7, 17,

18, 21-22

Hazen, Claire Elise, 40
Hazen, Claire Wernecke, 37
Hazen, Harold Lewis (Lew)

(father), 1-10, 13, 15, 17, 63,

65-67, 72, 99, 100-102, 110,

112, 114, 123, 130, 134, 148,

181

Hazen, Isabella Fowler, 7
Hazen, Jeffrey Lewis, 76
Hazen, Jonathan, 68
Hazen, Lee Colby, 23, 28
Hazen, Louis Whitfield, 7
Hazen, Nick, 152, 162, 174
Hazen, Norma, 175-176
Hazen Research, Inc., 41, 55, 72,
73, 74, 98, 103-174
A.R. MacPherson, 146
Alaska laboratory, 167
analytical standards, 144-145
arrangement with Susquehanna,

101
Barnes Engineering Company,

134
Boulder laboratory, CO, 77-80,

87
business philosophy, 125-129,

131, 162, 163
Casa Grande—Capitol Wire and

Cable, 146
Cato Research—Paul Kruesi,

120, 145
Climax association, 104, 117,

164
communication with clients,

reports, 118, 128
directors of, 143, 148, 153,

159, 160, 161

environmental cleanup, 165
ESOP, 150, 156, 159
ethics and client relations,

112-115, 125
First National Bank of Golden,

CO, 111

foreign work, 168
Geoco, 133, 145
getting started, 102
Hazen-Quinn, 134-138
high pressure metallurgy, 177
iron carbide, 124
Lowry landfill, 169-173
management organization, 154-

156
Metcon, 144

197

Hazen Research, Inc. (cont.)

mining research decline of the
1980s, 139-141

moly oxide, 105

office of the president, 155

relations with Denver Equipment
Company, A.C. Damon, 136

relations with Ranchers
Exploration, 115-117

research in coal, 182

SGS, South America, 168, 169

use of unbillable time, 123-
125

women in the organization,

130, 133
Hazen-Quinn Company (see Quinn

Equipment), 134-138
Hecla Company, 107, 146
Henderson, Bob, 104, 117, 164
Henderson molybdenum mine, 104,

117
Henrickson, A.V. (Gus), 49, 55,

69, 71, 75-81, 84-87, 97, 98,

104, 135-136

Hermann, John, 90, 98, 102
Hildebrand, Professor Joel, 19-20
Holzgraf, Dean, 43-44
Home stake Mining Company, 131
House, Joe, xii-xviii, 91, 108,

109, 110

Howe, Harry, 8-10, 12
Humphrey, George, 25-26, 37

ion exchange

compared with solvent
extraction, 85

flotation of magnetite, 41, 71

gold recovery, 69-71

vanadium recovery, 67, 69, 75
iron carbide development, 124

James, Amy, 130-131

Jarvis, John, 154

Joy Manufacturing Company,

135

Keil, Buck, 95-97, 99
Kelex reagents, Archer Daniels
Midland, 112

Kerr-McGee Corporation, 67-68,
76-81, 84, 90, 91, 93, 98, 100,
102, 117, 139
Ambrosia Lake, uranium mill,

NM, 90-98
Boulder laboratory, CO, 77,

90, 98
Shiprock uranium and vanadium

mill, NM, 83-91
Kerr, Senator Robert S., 71
Kindig, Jim, 163, 182-183
Knott, Woody, 91
Kruesi, Paul, 119-122, 145

Lake, Jim, 72-73, 108, 132-133,

148, 161

Lake, Mac, Jr., 72
Lake, Mac, Sr., 25-26, 36, 37,

72, 73
Lakefield (Research), 41, 145,

146

Lamont, Archie, 105
Landay, Hans, 77
leaching

Delamar mine tailings, 8-11

sulfur dioxide leaching of
manganese, 24

towers for sulfur dioxide

leaching, 30
Lewis, G.N., 20
Light, Ralph, 153
Los Alamos National Laboratory,

45-63, 68, 69, 75

DP West site, 47

living conditions, 48

security regulations, 56-60

working conditions, 68
Lowry landfill, 169-173

MacArthur, Charlie, 67 .
MacDonald, Robert, 39, 40
McGee, Dean, 68, 69, 71, 75-77,

79, 90, 95, 98, 105, 110
McLaughlin plant, CA, 177, 179-

180

McNulty, T.P. and Associates, 152
McNulty, Terry, 139, 152-153
McPherson, A.R. , 146

198

Malozemoff, Plato, 23-24, 35, 180
manganese ore research and

recovery, 25-37

roasting of manganese sulfate,
31-32

sulfur dioxide leaching, 24,
30Manganese Ore Company, 28-
32
manganese oxide, formation by

direct reduction, 34
manganese sulfate roasting, 28-30
Manhattan Project, 45
Mattson, Vernon (Bill), 83-84,

87, 93, 95

Melones mill, CA, 1, 3,
metallurgical research

laboratories, U.S., 41

mining research, 42
Metcon Company, 144
Meyer, Suzanne, 130
Miller, Art, 109-110
mines and mills

Ambrosia Lake, NM, 90-98

Apex, UT, 132

Artillery Peak, AZ, 24

Blackbird, ID, 141

Bluebird, AZ, 106, 110

Bluewater, NM, 88, 89

Casa Grande, AZ, 146

Climax, CO, 91

Delamar, NV, 8, 17

Edgemont, SD, 99, 100

Henderson, CO, 104, 117

Mclaughlin, CA, 177, 179-180

Melones, CA, 1, 3, 7

Moa Bay, Cuba, 177, 181

Riverton, WY, 99, 100

Shiprock, NM, 78, 83-91, 110

Soda Springs, ID, 100

Three Kids, NV, 24-37

Vitro, UT, 100-101
mining research, 42
Moa Bay, Cuba, 177, 181
Molycorp Corporation of America,

119-120

Motica, Johnny, 107, 116
Mountain States Engineering, 144,

168

Newmont Company, 35, 40, 41

Oak Ridge National Laboratory,

91-92
Oakes, Dr. William and Josephine,

Osborn, Clyde, 83
Outokumpu Company, 133, 140

Pan American Engineering Company,
23-28, 42, 72

Perkins, Bill, 19

Piddock, Mary, 104, 123, 130

pilot plants, 26-31, 35, 36, 80-
84, 92-93, 110, 122
appropriate size for, 26
for weapons, 46-49, 61
problems of scale-up to full

size, 27-34
reasons for, 27

Pittman, Frank, 47, 48, 49, 54

plutonium

contamination prevention

measures, 50-54, 56, 58
hazards, 49-52
nitrate from Hanford, 49
production, 45, 52-54, 60, 62
recovery activities at Los

Alamos, 47, 51-55
research for weapons, 46-49,
61

Powers, Ken, 110

Quinn, Jim, 135-139
Quinn, Rick, 137

radiation hazards and

contamination, 49-51, 54, 60,

86, 173

Ramsey, Bob, 35
Ranchers Exploration and

Development Company, 106-107,

110, 115

Reynolds, Jim, 149, 153
Richards, Jerry, 104
Riverton mill, WY, 99, 100
Rochet, Bob, 154, 156
Rocky Flats plant, CO, 49

199

Ronzio, Dick, 104

Ross, Al, 104-107, 109, 117

Ryland, Bob, 49

safety concerns, 13, 15. See

also hazards.
San Manuel, AZ, 144
scale-up problems. See pilot

plants.

Schlecter, Al, 40
Schmidt, Roland, 163-164
Scott, Tony, 39, 40
Seil, Gilbert, 32, 37, 43-45
Sherritt-Gordon, 179
Shiprock uranium and vanadium

plant, MM, 78, 83-91, 110
Shreve, Dick, 83
Simons, Stu, 177
Soda Springs vanadium plant, ID,

100
solvent extraction

Alamine 336, 92

Ambrosia Lake ores, 92

copper, 107-110

DEPA, 79

design questions, 94, 95

tertiary amines, 91-92

uranium, 79

vanadium, 78-83
Standard Cyaniding Company, 63
Stearns Roger, 94, 97
Stephens, Frank, 39, 123-124
Stewart, Maxine, 133
sulfur dioxide leaching

di-thionate formation, 24

liquid-solid separation of
leached ore, 26, 33

of manganese ores, 24-30

pilot plant at Pan American, 26

use of absorption towers, 30
Sullivan, John, 32, 37, 39, 40
Susquehanna Company, 100-101,

103, 115
Swanson, Ronald, 92

Thomas, Pete, 144, 148
Thompson, A.J. "Lefty" (and
Betty), 40, 69-70, 96, 103

Three Kids manganese plant, NV,

24-37
Totavi Development Company, 69-

71, 79
Turner, Ron, 182-183

University of California, 18-22,
48, 70
chemistry department and

faculty, 19-21
employer at Los Alamos, 48
fraternities, 18, 21-22
uranium

Ambrosia Lake mill, NM, 92-97
basket resin in pulp treatment,

88
batch extraction at Shiprock,

column ion exchange, 89
ion exchange, basket method,

88
lignite, 99

Vedensky, Dmitri, 16, 17, 23-25,

35, 42

Venable, Bud, 45, 49
Vitro mill, UT, 100-101
Vogenthaler, Tom, 153, 159

Waste Management Company, 169,

172

Wells, Brad, 143, 148, 152, 159
Wernecke, Claire (Mrs. Hazen) , 37
Wernecke, Livingston, 37
Western Machinery Company, 9, 12,

White, John, 99
Wilfley pumps, 14
World War II, 19, 30, 63-64

Eleanor Herz Swent

Born in Lead, South Dakota, where her father became chief
metallurgist for the Homestake Mining Company. Her
mother was a high school geology teacher before marriage.

Attended schools in Lead, South Dakota, Dana Hall School,
and Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Phi Beta Kappa.
M.A. in English, University of Denver. Assistant to the
President, Elmira College, New York. Married to Langan
Waterman Swent, mining engineer.

Since marriage has lived in Tayoltita, Durango, Mexico;
Lead, South Dakota; Grants, New Mexico; Piedmont,
California.

Teacher of English as a Second Language to adults in the
Oakland, California public schools. Author of an
independent oral history project, Newcomers to the East
Bay, interviews with Asian refugees and immigrants. Oral
historian for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project.

Interviewer, Regional Oral History Office since 1985,
specializing in mining history.

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Plutonium technology applied to mineral processing, solvent extraction, building Hazen research, 1940-1993 : oral history transcript / 1995"

See other formats