News

March 10, 2010

VANE Minerals Delivers A Maiden Resource On Its Wate Uranium Project In Arizona

By Alastair Ford

After a slightly extended wait, VANE Minerals has finally delivered a maiden 43-101 resource number on the Wate breccia pipe in Arizona, jointly owned with Uranium One. Work undertaken by SRK shows Wate to contain an inferred resource of 695,000 pounds of eU3O8, contained in 43,000 tonnes of rock at an average grade of 0.8% eU3O8, using a 0.2% cut-off grade.

It’s not a bad result for a first pass. The idea of mining breccia pipes such as Wate is to mine short and sweet, at highly profitable margin. So huge tonnage was never the aim, or at least not from a single pipe. VANE’s got plenty more breccias pipes in development, but more on that in a minute. The point in the immediate term was to show Wate as a viable proposition, and, thus far, that’s been achieved.

In any case, there is scope for some expansion, as SRK concedes. SRK only worked on areas...