The Berlin project is a sediment-hosted, multi-commodity prospect with a historic resource1 of 12.9 million tonnes at an average grade of 0.13% U3O8 (38 million pounds U3O8) estimated on the southern 4.4km of a 10.5km long mineralized trend.
No estimate of other elements was reported from historic work. Trenching is underway to confirm historic data that indicates similar uranium grades occur in the northern 6km of the property.
The mineralized unit encountered in the drilling to date on the Berlin project is a fine-grained sandstone layer that lies at the contact between a sandstone sequence and the overlying organic-rich, black shale.
The mineralized sandstone unit is soft and poorly consolidated, which has led to core loss in some bore holes such as hole DDB6.
Bitumen has impregnated parts of the mineralized sandstone and also occurs in the overlying shale. The black shale contains graphite and has a variable pyrite content from 0.5% up to 30%.
Microscopic study of core samples shows that the phosphate occurs as fine, crystalline fluorapatite (Ca5(PO4)F) masses in the sandstone. Uranium is associated with the fluorapatite, while yttrium and some of the vanadium and molybdenum occur as phosphate minerals.
U3O8 Corp’s initial 1,500m drilling program on the Berlin project commenced near the southern tip of the canoe-shaped fold, primarily aimed at obtaining fresh samples for metallurgical testing.
U3O8 plans to commence infill drilling in the latter half of 2011 towards the definition of a potential NI 43-101 resource estimate.
In the Berlin project, significant grades of uranium associated with phosphate, vanadium, yttrium, rhenium, molybdenum and silver contribute to a potential high in situ value for this multi-commodity prospect.
