Coal and uranium for the fatherland
During World War II Switzerland, which has few mineral resources, was on a frantic hunt for natural resources within its own borders. The Bernbiet was one of many regions where boreholes were dug, hillsides were excavated and evaluations were carried out.
Reto Bleuer
Reto Bleuer is a volunteer at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern.
There were shortages of many goods and more particularly of raw materials, as Switzerland is not rich in natural mineral resources. The impacts of this scarcity of everyday items are shown by a notice from the Oberländer Tagblatt of 3 February 1944 reporting that, due to a shortage of tyres, the daily postal van’s lunchtime run from Steffisburg to the village of Heimenschwand was now able to operate only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The afternoon run was suspended entirely.
During his survey Rutsch did in fact discover a coal-bearing layer (pitch anthracite) in one of the high nagelfluh walls on the bank of the Rotache. (Nagelfluh is a massive variegated conglomerate forming a prominent member of the Miocene series in the Alps.) The site was difficult to access, but an adit approximately eight metres in length was sunk into the rock to ascertain how the coal layer developed inside the nagelfluh. The result was disappointing; the deposit turned out to be too small to be worthwhile mining. Rolf Rutsch’s report to the “Bureau” was accordingly negative.
In 1949, geologist Dr Hermann Vogel from Basel remembered some pieces of coal that he had examined for a mining company three years previously and which exhibited higher levels of radioactivity. These coal chunks came from a small stream on the Buchholterberg range called the “Ibachgrabe”, a shallow channel that is one of a number of tributary waters of the Rotache. After its 18-kilometre journey, the Rotache itself finally flows into the Aare. Dr Vogel therefore set out to search for and to analyse in more detail further uraniferous coal deposits and marl layers in the Buchholterberg region. He found what he was looking for at several different locations. It turned out that the coal extended in a thin, discontiguous layer from the Falkenfluh, a crag approximately 1080 m above sea level, across the Buchholterberg to the Rotache. In a number of cuts and channels in the terrain, smaller veins of coal outcropped from the nagelfluh. Dr Vogel’s subsequent analyses showed that radioactivity could be measured in the rock and in the coal. He calculated that one ton of Ibachgrabe coal would be likely to yield around 1.6 kg of uranium. But here, too, the small amount of coal, scattered over a wide, inaccessible area, proved too great an obstacle to undertake mining.
