The article describes the current situation in the global uranium concentrate market, explains the reasons for the formation of an excess amount of finished goods and the subsequent decreasein prices. The authorsevaluated the prospects of using market mechanisms to improve the financial results of Russian uranium mining enterprises. The location of the main mining centers in comparison with the centers of consumption of finished goods, pricing for the products of uranium mining companies, the dynamics of price changes over the past 20 years, the influence of non-market factors on the supply of finished products are analyzed.This study led to the conclusion that the expectation of changes in the market situation is not viable in a long term. The authors outlined the direction to improve the profitability of mining enterprises by introducing technological changes aimed at reducing the cost of the final product.

Radial charts were commonly used in the industry to allow retrospective assessment of technological parameters. Today it is relevant to digitize the obtained data in order to simplify the automation of technological processes. Digitization of radial charts by means of standard methods is carried out with the help of human labor at significant time costs. The article proposes an automated method for digitizing radial charts using software, developed in the LabVIEW programming environment. The results of processing radial charts are displayed on the screen in numerical and graphical form, and can also be exported to a file (for example, to Notepad or MS Excel). The presented technique can be applied to images obtained on a color or black-and-white scanner, which minimizes geometric distortions, associated with the conversion of a paper document into electronic form, and ensures recognition quality of the clear plot line with an average relative error of up to 3 %. In case of ink fading or perspective photos of the diagram, the value of relative error can reach 8 %, as a result of which additional manual correction of the data will be required.

The necessary condition for the operation of crushers in the production of crushed granite is feeding of the crushers with granite fragments of a certain size. At the same time, granite fragmentation after blasting does not always meet the required size for the crushers and needs additional destruction by blasting or disintegration directly on site. Hydraulic breakers are most often used in disintegration of oversizes. For example, in quarries in Vietnam, JCB HM380 hydraulic breakers with a fracture energy of up to 2.5 kJ are widely used. The working tools of the hydraulic breakers are steel picks of various diameters and shapes. The operation of this tool is accompanied by its intensive wear due to the impact-abrasive action of rocks; the pointed part of the tool gets gradually blunted, which affects the rate of penetration of the pick in rock. In this regard, it is relevant to determine the influence exerted by the degree of wear of the pick on the performance of the hydraulic breaker, and to find out whether replacement or re-sharpening of the pick is expedient. In this paper, based on the previously determined crack propagation velocity in granite and the impact time, the length of the fracture is calculated. The dimensions of a crack in a granite block are calculated depending on the degree of blunting of the pick at a certain number of blows per cycle. At the same time, the limiting value of a crack that causes chipping of a piece from rock mass was considered as the fracture length to free surface at different degrees of pick blunting. Based on these calculations, the average productivity and energy input of disintegration process were determined. It is shown that for a tool with a completely worn tip, the decrease in the productivity and the increase in the energy input of fracture reach two times compared with a sharpened pick. In this regard, from the point of view of increasing the hydraulic breaker capacity, it is advisable to replace or re-sharpen the pick after complete wear of its tip.