Chris Frostad, president and CEO of Purepoint Uranium, said: “These techniques will help us to identify deep uranium mineralization from surface. We anticipate that utilizing CAMIRO’s findings will significantly reduce the time to new uranium discoveries while providing lower cost exploration methods”.
In 2006 The Canadian Mining Industry Research Organization (CAMIRO) carried out a scoping study documenting and evaluating the relative effectiveness of methods applied in the past to explore for uranium in the Athabasca Basin.
This scoping phase formed the basis for designing field studies to develop new methods and optimize existing ones for the direct detection of uranium deposits along the unconformity of the Athabasca sandstone.
Field studies were carried out in 2008 and 2009 and the final report was released in April 2010. All scientific results arising from the Research Project are subject to a confidentiality period ending on March 15, 2013.
Purepoint and other members of Canada’s uranium industry (including Cameco, AREVA, Denison and the Saskatchewan Research Council) sponsored the three year research study. The field samples were collected from the areas overlying the McClean Lake, Cigar Lake West and Dawn Lake uranium deposits in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin.
Scott Frostad, vice president of exploration at Purepoint, said: “Now that we are confident in the utility of this approach, we will be incorporating it into our ongoing exploration programs to help prioritize our drill targets.
“We consider the work performed by the late Mr. Robert Jackson who initially led the project and the team at CAMIRO will prove invaluable in advancing one of the world’s most prolific uranium bearing regions.”
