I'm Andrew Jackson and the economic geologists with sprach global resorts investments and I'm responsible for the technical evaluations of the mineral companies and their properties that spot global investing I put together this all deposit 101 series of talks to help non-technical people understand doors closets the talks highlight some of the features of the main deposit types that investors in the resource sector may come across and provide an introduction to the jargon you'll find in press releases put out by exploration and mining companies this is the ninth talk in the or deposit 101 series and it focuses on uranium deposits I'll start with a general discussion of uranium its uses production resources and the main uranium ore minerals then I want to focus the bulk of the talk on the types of uranium ore deposits discussing as I go along how those deposit types are formed and how we go about exploring product then I'll talk briefly about how uranium deposits are mined and how the ore is treated to produce a final saleable product as usual I'll end up with a short list of critical takeaway points so let's start off with some background to uranium and the uranium mining industry what makes you rhenium a particular economic importance is its radioactivity uranium decays through a series of reactions to form a number of new elements thorium radium radon alone ium and lead and at each of these steps it spins off alpha particles from the nucleus and produces energy uranium is not a rare element it's found in most rocks although there's more common in felsic rocks like granite then in mafic rocks like gabbro jonathan generally contains about five parts per million of uranium this grade will be more than enough to form an economic deposit if we were dealing with gold but uranium needs a lot of a natural enrichment to reach economic grades uranium is average crustal abundance is 2.7 parts per million which makes it twice as common as molybdenum orton forty times more abundant and silver and 500 times more abundant than gold but the lowest grade primary uranium deposits being mined today have about hundred times of this crustal abundance the highest grade deposits have about five million times this concentration uranium grades are usually expressed in terms of percent you 308 the usual salable end product is you 308 or yellowcake is is commonly called this contains approximately 85% of uranium by weight but uranium is an emotive product with his mental associations with past ation disasters nuclear weapons and the fear of the invisible the ghosts of Three Mile Island Chernobyl and Fukushima loomed large in public mind much of the future demand for uranium depends upon this emotive factor the war of words waged between those strongly in favor of nuclear power versus those passionately against it however in the long run population pressure and the rising standards of living of third world countries were forced government's to rely heavily on nuclear energy to power their nations in spite of Fukushima incident the number of new reactors being constructed is increasing whereas they've been virtually no new nuclear reactors built in the US or Canada the last 30 years in fact for nuclear power stations were closed down in the first half of 2013 as of 2013 in July 2013 the US has three in construction and another nine being planned China by comparison has 28 under construction 43 more in the planning stage and 118 proposed for Russia the same figures at 10 under construction 24 and planning and 20 be proposed for India 7 18 and 29 so these are large numbers of reactors and they're going to need uranium to father so where are they going to get it all from if look first aware the current supply is coming from the top producers globally in order of the size of production our Kazakhstan by far and away the biggest producer Canada Australia New Year Namibia Russia Uzbekistan USA China LA Malawi and Ukraine looking ahead the listed to find uranium world uranium resources is somewhat different Canada stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world thanks largely to the Athabasca baton if followed by Brazil was Pakistan China Kazakhstan Ukraine and me share interestingly the uranium that was used the world's first two atomic bombs was mined in the Congo DRC a country which doesn't even feature on the current list of either produces all holders of resources uranium metal is the most unimpressive looking material it's da dull silver gray material it's heavy with specific gravity of eighteen point seven almost the same as gold but unlike gold uranium and metal never occurs in the elemental form in nature it's always combined with other elements and these are some of the more common uranium ore minerals Iran a night including pitch Bend is one of the most common all minerals it has a black lustrous color and is an oxide of uranium bran right in another more complex oxide it's also black and odour may have a least like a yellowish tinge sometimes Carnot ice is also a complex but common it's complex but more commonly uranium organelle and it's usually bright yellow or orange and it's most common in secondary uranium deposit those were the uranium is deposited by groundwater you're nfn a hydrated calcium uranium silicate it's yellow green and colored but it'll fluoresce bright green if you put it under a UV blacklight and finally or tonight a calcium uranium phosphate is also yellow screen in color now let's move on to the various other types that uranium a curtain there are at least 14 different deposit type as you will probably have noticed some geologists are inveterate splitters but only six of these are really economically significant in global terms these can be broadly grouped into two primary deposits with the uranium is introduced with the original magma and secondary deposit where the uranium is dissolved by groundwater and then read and redeposited from solution I'll start with the primary deposits and I'll start by coming back to the same slide that I've used in all the other or deposit 101 talks you'll remember the cool dumped adult stuff and skim off the cream protest so I won't leave at that point most of the primary uranium deposits are associated with either IO CGS and oxide copper gold deposits all with Mesa Thermal veins and pegmatite in other word in other words deposited directly from Magnus or by hydrothermal fluids derived from healthy rocks at intermediate depths the first of these primary deposit types are the IOC G's virtually the only economic uranium deposit of this kind type is bhp billiton is John's Olympic Dam deposit in South Australia although it is only the only significant IOC G uranium mine it produces almost 4,000 tonnes of you 308 per annum making it the second largest producer in the world after MacArthur River which provides about 6 percent of global your uranium production Olympic Dam has an incredibly low uranium grade of just 0.03 4% you 308 and the only reason it can produce at this grade is that its primary it's primarily a copper producer and the uranium is just a fortunate by-product the resources at Olympic Dam are stunning 9.5 billion tons there were plans to double the annual production but environmental and anti-nuclear protests have put these plans on the back burner for the time being here is a section through the Olympic Dam area from a paper by hands at L it's pretty old but I don't think the model has changed much since 1995 when it was published the genetic model called for a mixing of cool shallow saline oxidizing groundwater from within the basaltic volcanic which is yellow in the section with hot deep more reduced magmatic water blue in the section the uranium is postulated to have been brought in with the shallow saline water and precipitated in the mixing zone due to reduction as you will see this precipitation of uranium from an oxidized third as a result of reduction is a common theme in uranium deposits the top of the Olympic Dam mineralization is at a depth of 350 meters below surface buried under transport cover and barren postman or sediments the mine has been operating as an underground mine since of inception the new expansion will call for the development of a super pet the mineralized rocks are quite impressive being full of red hematite various green uranium Minogue's Blue Boar Knight and black magnetite pitch Bend and bran right so if Olympic Dam is hidden under 350 metres of overburden and postman or sediment cartridge expirations discover it and the other entities that are Simmons similarly buried undercut the cover of the guard baller cotton geochemistry won't work unless the deposit is at or close to the surface instead geophysics plays a dominant role because IOC G deposits have several features that your physical techniques can dipped in detect if the deposit outcrops radio metrics may work however this is not the case in the Olympic Dam area but magnetics can to take the abundant magnetite that is often associated with ir CGS gravity may be able to differentiate between the heavy magnetite hematite and sulfides of the ore and the lower density under mineralized rocks you can see how well this worked at Olympic Dam which is found due to both its gravity and magnetic geophysical signatures although the two are not fully coincident and only overlap over a small portion of the ore body sometimes as in the case of Punt your target to the south gravity outlines the permissive area but fin pointing the actual mineralization is much more difficult and finally e/m or electromagnetics may be able to detect an IOC cheese method sulfite however at the end of the day as usual drilling will be required to validate the geophysical anomaly so much why I said geez let's look now at the so-called intrusive related deposits although as I said earlier Granite's generally contain higher background levels of uranium than basically automatic rocks primary deposits can be associated with inclusives of all sorts of different compositions the palabra deposit in South Africa for example is hosted in Cubano ties and ultramafic s-- intrusive related uranium deposits provide one of the clearest examples of magmatic concentration of metals with the uranium being concentrated in the last remnants of a magnet to crystallize however the grades are sold from the lowest of the uranium deposit for example Rossing in your Namibia's Namib Desert which you can see in this satellite image has a grade of just point o3 5% just 72 times that of the average crustal abundance rawson was discovered way back in 1928 but with little use for uranium until after the Second World War and their development of nuclear power it only finally got into production in 1976 its share of the world production is steadily shrinking and there's now only 3% compared to seven percent five years ago uranium occurs as fine-grained uraninite in neuron afaid in alaska a granite with virtually no matric minerals whereas olympic down produces uranium only as a by-product Rossing is a pure uranium producer in spite of its very low grade disease genomic because of its size importantly the fact that the uranium will not occur between the quartz and salt our grain grains and it takes little grinding to achieve high recoveries the several of the deposits nearby that are in advanced stages of exploration and evaluation as for the IOC G's expiration for intrusive related uranium deposits relies very heavily on geophysics I skimmed over your radio metrics as an exploration tool when talking about the ILC G's as the Olympic Dam is deeply buried but let's talk a little bit about it here as it provides pivotal as it is a pivotal exploration tool for shallow or outcropping deposits as I mentioned earlier uranium decays to produce alpha particle radiation and this can be detected with a simple ammeter or spectrometer if the radiation sources within say were 30 centimeters or one foot of the surface below this the overlying material masks the radiation most radiometric surveys are flown using either helicopter or phix tween helicopter aircraft an airborne spectrometer is more sophisticated than a since lammeter and it can differentiate between radiation from uranium thorium and potassium because they can't do this the readings from centimeters need to be taken with a pinch of salt and much of this radiation could be simply from valueless potassium or thorium spectrometers rely on germanium or sodium iodide crystals that ferrous under array under radiation a spectrometer Center to be spent on the sides of that crystal and it can vary from 15 to 30 liters in volume this size obviously impacts the weight as they weigh up to a hundred kilograms weight in a very large man and hence the cost of its impact on the cost of flying a survey airborne radiometric surveys are usually combined with e/m or magnetic surveys to make the most of the aircraft's availability once the radiometric data has been collected by the airborne survey it's processed and plotted to provide maps of uranium thorium and potassium radiation intensity now you can see one of those maps from the survey in Western Australia you can see the uranium anomaly of the mckubre no uranium realization lighting up in the red once radiation is detected from the airborne survey exploration moves on to the ground for geological mapping surface sampling and of course drilling drilling can be core or RC it's possible to get a very quick estimate of the other uranium content by using downhaul spectrometer probes like this but this only gives counts per second and you need to follow the subject of chemical assay of the core or chips in the lab to get results that can be used in estimating a resource okay so much for primary uranium deposits will now move on to the secondary of uranium deposits which I think are more interesting they classified a secondary because they result from groundwater leaching uranium from a primary magnetics source Rock the uranium is then transported in the solution and redeposited often resulting in a major grade increase so we're now moving from in this high up into this diagram to the very shallow areas where ground Wolf's circulation plays an increasingly important part of the formation of order fibers secondary uranium deposits are all founded on one underlying principle namely that uranium is soluble in the oxidized water but insoluble and reduced water so if we have a rock containing a low grade uranium and oxidized groundwater flows through it the uranium will be dissolved if the Iranian bearing groundwater then encounters any reductant the groundwater will be reduced and uranium will precipitate straight out of solution most common reductants are carbon in the form of graphite or buried organic material or sulfide such as pirate - the secret to exploring for second view uranium deposits so consider a potential oxidized primary source determined where the ground water flowing through the source is likely to encounter these reductants the silikal unconformity rate related deposit are some of the most important to uranium deposits economically as well and we'll start with Eaton and I'll spent quite a bit of time on them given their importance to the uranium mining industry what exactly is an unconformity related deposit an unconformity is the erosion surface dividing the older older and younger rocks usually are very different ages you can see a tip of unconformity in the proto when the older rocks on underneath were folded and eroded before the younger brown red brown were sediments were deposited on top the yellow line marks the unconformity sometimes the upper and lower rocks have very different degrees of oxidation which makes the unconformity a redox boundary usually in these cases uranium is dissolved in relatively oxidized groundwater in the upper unit and then drops out a solution when this water mixes with reduced water in fractures in the lower unit depending on whether the groundwater is traveling upwards or downwards so-called egress or ingress situations the uranium will drop out in the upper or lower unit but either way it is generally within a couple hundred meters of the unconformity the specific uranium minerals that are deposited and the Associated metals generally depend upon the composition of the reduced fluid and conformity related deposits are generally far and away the highest grade uranium deposits and provide the biggest contribution to the Western world's uranium production the 33% coming from this group of deposits most production comes from Canada's Paleozoic and proterozoic basins the red areas on this map of North America saskatchewan data Baskar basin is the crown jewel in the crown many will deposit cast of uranium deposits allocated here including kamikochi Lake Denison's Wheeler River calicos MacArthur River and sea garlic and Rios Rough Rider deposit and fission fission and Alpha's Patterson's XLT we will note that this last deposit appears to be outside the Athabasca Basin but in fact the basin you sleep see and sell over Patterson lake before glacial erosion removed it leaving just the roots of the system in the lower stratigraphic unit first let's look at cigar Lake Mine as an example of a typical unconformity related deposit although it's grade is high even for unconformity related deposits then we'll take a look at two pre-development offers cigar Lakers join jointly owned by Kimiko and Arriba and it's under development a cigar Lake the mineralisation is above on and below the unconformity suggesting that the deposits formed over a long period and that the groundwater moved both up and down the basement structure during that time the deposit has a well-developed que alteration halo the orange unit in the cross-section beyond that is an even larger bleach so blue in the section the mineralization is buried beneath about 450 meters of largely unknown lines flat line up up red resurrection zones the basement consists of metal first and folded lower lower Proterozoic based sediments in broad terms the mineralization looks like an almost two kilometres long flattened snake winding along the unconformity and following a basement structure as I mentioned cigar lake is incredibly high grade and averages 20 percent you 308 this means that the ores worth $15,000 per ton at today's price of $35 a pound some sections of the oil deposit exceeds a staggering 50% you 308 the reserve not not resource episode garlic at five hundred and thirty-seven thousand tons at 18.3% you 308 for two hundred and sixteen million pounds of you 308 total production is planned to be 223 pounds million pounds production is scheduled to begin in late - in 2013 and my life is estimated to be 15 years a recent deal with a reburn that joint venture partners and owners of the McLane make mill has lowered the forecast production cost to about $18 60 per pound deposit the deposit has had a torrid development with major setbacks caused by flooding in 2006 and the difficulty of designing a safe mind with such a higher grade of all in a new second chart has completed in early 2012 which has allowed development to continue to avoid human contact with the or as much as possible mining will be remotely operated a high-pressure water jet the pulverizer all will then be loaded to surplus in pipes and deported before being trucked to the McLain the lake mill the recovered water will be recycled now let's talk about the Roughrider deposit it was discovered by Hathor in 2007 five kilometers to the northeast adenosine to mid west of it Hathor was bought off by Rio Tinto in 2011 for six hundred and fifty four million dollars total resource at the time of the sale to Rio was 58 million pounds at four point seven percent you 308 Rough Rider consists of at least three pods of mineralization all at or below the regional unconformity the sold in image air for image shows a vertical section through the three deposits at that stage the third pod had only one drill hole it set the first point to note is that the individual pods in this type of deposit are tiny the biggest deposit biggest footprint is only 160 by 60 metres the second point is that the shallowest of the three parts of the original discovery is at the unconformity and 225 and metres below the surface but the top of the third and deepest pod is 120 meters below the gun conformity and it extends to at least 400 meters below surface the fact that a third pod was so far below below the unconformity is unusual but not unheard of as another recent discovery shows pushing an alpha muggles discovered new mineralization by following a radioactive Boulder train left my glasses to what they believed to be the bedrock source as I mentioned earlier the Patterson Lake mineralization died several kilometers outside the current limits of the anime as Vaska basin however the Athabasca sediments once covered this area before they're removed during at least two original periods but some of the uranium mineralization which predates the Eurasian still remains it's hard to estimate how deep below the an original unconformity the all formed but it was probably at least a couple of hundred meters however the erosion means that the multiple pods of mineralization are now covered by just a thin skin of glacial deposits and so portions of them are probably going to be open pitiable no resource has been released by fishing yet but the average grades of the in drill intercepts as I write this is three point six percent you 308 not quite as high as the Rough Rider but the mineralization is much shallower than a trap rider let's talk a little bit about exploration for unconformity related uranium deposits as I mentioned they're usually blind that is they don't are proper service not only that but the antibiotic a basin is in the north of Saskatchewan with its tough winters and transported glacial cover which makes them challenging exploration targets expressionist need a sound systematic exploration strategy if they're to succeed let's look at the steps starting with first-order targeting firstly almost all of these were formed during the Proterozoic the red blobs on on the map of North America so we need to focus on these rocks particularly where there is an oxidized red red sediment overlying an older more reduced sequence then we need to add late progress Greenwich and pegmatite ranked as the primary sources of uranium in the oxidized red bed sediments finally we need crustal scale fault in the basement to provide a focus source of reduced fluids to cause the uranium to drop out of solution these requirements drastically reduce the number of potential terrains where we should where we could begin looking for these deposits once we've established the regional scale targets we can set down into the second order targeting because the deposits are usually overlaid by transported sediments that radio metrics cannot penetrate radiometric surveys are a little use therefore we have to rely on indirect methods that recognize features associated with fluid plumbing and potential reduction traps these include various e/m techniques and magnetics and magnetics which can identify structures and graph a graph attack units which may provide sources of reduced fluids seismics which detect the steps in the unconformity that may represent fault displacement and using geochemistry to detect radiation leakage through the overlying sediment this image shows uranium anomalies in a lay-in lake sediments in Quebec lake sediment samples are collected by dropping a hollow sphere into the lake from a boat or helicopter some success is being claimed on sampling lake lake water for radon a dotter product of uranium decay other expiration methods include identifying play alteration sales that form a halo around the deposit once again direct methods have been applied it's time for direct testing in the forming of form of drilling when a hole has been drilled down down Hall spectrometry will give a quick indication of the grade of mineralization before the assays are available so much for unconformity related deposit now run quickly through the remaining type groups of secondary uranium deposit starting with the sandstone hosted style again the reduction of oxidized uranium bearing meteor orders the key here incense and hosted deposits as the name implies the uranium is deposited in sandy sediments usually intubated with shells or mud stones are coming into contact with plant debris or sulfides that act as reductants as a result fossilized wood is often somewhat rare radioactive approximately 18% of the world's uranium resources of the sandstone hosted cell so it is a significant one the deposits are usually low to medium grade higher than most primary deposits but not as high as a young Conformity related deposit the best-known areas for these deposits of otto River Basin in Wyoming South Texas neasha Kazakhstan Uzbekistan Gabon South Africa and Australia in other words they're pretty widely spread roll front deposits are a particular subset of the sandstone hosters deposits and indeed their most economically important of the sandstone hosted deposit 8 here oxidized groundwater flows along a reduced sandstone bed dissolving uranium already in this instead and then redepositing it a thought is steadily reduced by organic matter or sulfides in the Samsun uranium forms irregular or crescent-shaped blobs where the oxidation zone becomes reduced as you can see in this photo I ran a night and kapha night of the usual mineral deposit so the mandalas Asians usually dark or dark brown or black in most cases real front deposits are mined in see you in such elite or ISL technique and I'll describe the mechanics of this method shortly the second last group of the secondary deposits are thus official deposits these are formed at the surface due to evaporation of uranium bearing groundwater so they're usually hosted in recent sediments or soil profiles because of the evaporating groundwater contain salts in addition to uranium the host rocks are usually cemented by calcite gypsum dolomite or iron oxide kelp retort caliche is the most common host the original source of the uranium is usually deeply where the Granite's and the groundwater that contained drains these Granite's usually reach the surface in seasonal river channels and player legs so these are the favored deposit locations the most common uranium mineral in official deposits is sulfur yellow karna tight this type of deposit obviously needs low rainfall but high evaporation form and Australia and Namibia have several audits of this kind langa Heinrich is a well-known example of a cow Preet hosted sufficient above it it's hosted by young filaments in a sandy River Valley in the Namib Desert that drains an area of uranium rich granite you can see the Sandy River Valley running up the center of this aerial view of the our operation the mineralization forms a series of seven flat pod spread out over a 15 kilometer section of the channel individual pods vary from just one kilometer one meter thick to up to 30 meter thick and are over 50 meters to over a kilometer and width compare this into the footprint that we were looking at earlier of the unconformity related deposit which are tiny by comparison Langa Heinrichs reserves contain 130 million pounds of you 308 at a grade of point zero five percent you 308 the Carnot type that makes up the mineralization occurs as thin films lining cavities fracture plans and individual grains that's easily leached and so on to the last of the deposit tax the courts cable conglomerates these make up approximately 13% of the world's uranium resource but only a few percent of the global production they can be either primary uranium producers or by-product producers and the average grade depends upon which which they are obviously the byproduct producers can work at a much lower cuddles and grade than the primary producers but either way grades are generally low - the best known examples are elliot lake in Ontario which is a primary producer and of advanced joint mind which produce uranium ISM as a minor byproduct to gold production the quartz pebble conglomerates deposits can be very large varying between 12 and 375 billion pounds to 308 and most of the mineralization is in the form of black uraninite which is unusual for secondary deposits so to know to round off this talk--i briefly go over how you mine and process uranium or its remaining methods open putting underground mining and in situ reaching YSL the advantage of open putting over underground mining quite apart from the economic advantage is that the hazards associated with radon gas are significantly reduced due to better ventilation in a pit however the environmental dust concern is less easily oppressed most of the high-grade unconformity related deposits are too deep for pitting and underground rock rush in and our underground operations great care must go into the safety aspect of running a mind the health dangers are minimized by using remote mining techniques control from outside the ore body or even from surface this involves hydraulic mining using high-pressure water jets and pumping the slurry door to surface or deliberately diluting your with wall Rock waste stroke the level of radioactivity of the hand water material minimizing dust and maximising ventilation and using radiation badges to monitor exposure and ensure that internationally established and safety levels of exposure are not exceeded the third method of mining is insert of each yfl it's also variably referred to as in situ mining AFM in situ recovery is our or in situ extraction ISE but they're all the same processing it's used in cases where there is a porous and with sandstone host sandwiched between two impermeable beds as is often the case with roll front deposit no traditional mining is used the process relies entirely on bore holes pumping a solution that will dissolve the uranium in place down one set of balls and then pumping the uranium pregnant solution back up a different set of bore holes to the surface it relies on the same red ox principle that we've seen before and also on changing the pH the amount pumped in the Matteson solution pumped into the ground is always slightly less than my mom pumped out so that the solution does not migrate out of the leached area the solution may be slightly acid or alkaline depending on the nature of the deposit the pur solutions are generally pretty benign karna tight is insoluble but most of the other yellow uranium oxide such as your n FN are leachable colors the uranium extracted from the or all from a put soil under guard mine is crushed and slurry to the mill a weak acid or alkaline solution and hydrogen peroxide a oxidized solution solution is added so that the uranium dissolves the uranium is then filtered to remove the now spelled soft and spent solid leaving just the pregnant leachate if the mineralization has already been leached using IFL the leachate enters the circuit at this point after purification ammonium sulfate is editor's solution which causes the you 308 to precipitate the precipitate is then filtered out and dried and voila red yellow cake so there we have it as usual I'll lend or for the list of takeaway points to come after this talk uranium is not rare and it occurs in most rocks it's just a question of finding rocks with the higher and more consistent grades deposits can be split into primary deposits those that the within the original igneous or on and secondary deposits where the uranium has been leached by groundwater and concentrated somewhere else primary deposits include IOA CGS and intrusive related deposits secondary deposits include unconformity related others sandstone hosted and rolled front deposits official deposits including calc reach and quartz pebble conglomerate deposits grade is King unconformity and related to positives in the Athabasca deposits are the Cadillacs of uranium deposits they have but they have tiny footprints and seldom are prop making them challenging exploration targets exploration tools use to find uranium deposits include gamma ray spectrometer to detect the uranium directly and various electromagnetic methods such as the airman CSA MT and mag and seismics for blind deposits the key in the secondary deposits is to find the rid of stomata boundaries where uranium traveling in oxidized groundwater will be reduced and precipitate on solution the big boys of uranium of Canada Australia and Kazakhstan mining can be from open put underground or in situ leaching and uranium mining is no more dangerous than other forms of mining but the emotion surrounding the radiation clouds the issue a set public perception is slowly improving due to threats rights and as a perceived green energy source but events such as the faecal fukushima leak and the suit after the tsunami damage set back at the uranium industry by five to ten years so that's the end of this introduction to uranium deposits thanks for watching the next talk in this series will be the exploration process and I'll take you through a toolbox of techniques available to the exploration geologist how the search narrows down from regional targeting to defining drill targets and the development of an exploration time strategy