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Bannerman chief sees Namibia as catching Australia in the uranium stakes
LenJubber, chief executive of Australian uranium explorer BannermanResources believes that Namibia's potential as a global uraniumproducer is getting to the stage that it is matching Australia in theresource stakes.
Author: Ross Louthean
Posted:Wednesday,22 Jul 2009
FREMANTLE - -
Theopening day of Vertical Events' Australian Uranium conference in theWestern Australian port city of Fremantle was told today that mined andin situ uranium in the modern mining story of Namibia would now totalabout 1.2 billion lbs of U308.
Bannerman Resources Ltd (ASX: BNM) has an 80% stake in the Etangoproject east of Swakopmund and south west of Rio Tinto's Rossinguranium mine.
Jubber was born in Namibia and held a management role at the Rossinguranium mine there, later moving to New Zealand to run gold minerOceanaGold Corporation and then Australian base and precious metalsminer Perilya Ltd before taking over as manager of Bannerman eightmonths ago.
Later at the conference he told MineWeb that an announcement by another Australian explorer in Namibia, Extract Resources Ltd (ASX & TSX: EXT) (see Rossing South Zone 2 resource confirms huge uranium potential) would confirm more than 200 M lbs in resources to the country's inventory through Rossing South. Extract will present tomorrow.
Jubber said that as the Etango project grew so did the interest ofinstitutional investors and the company through equity placements and a$A20 million ($US15.8 M) convertible note had reached the stage where apre-feasibility study (PFS) was due in the current quarter.
The company was looking at three options on cut-off grade to put up in the PFS and on a middle cut-off of 150 ppm U308 the measured-indicated resource was 176.8 Mt @ 234 ppm for 41,500 tonnes U308 (91.3 M lb) The inferred resource on the same cut-off was 89.7 Mt @ 221 ppm for 19,800t U308 (43.6 M lb). The company was targeting an 80% increase in the resource estimate.
The established resource was on a 5 kilometres-long structure where over 200,000 metres of drilling has been carried out.
He told the conference that heap leaching appeared the best optionand testing has achieved recoveries of between 86-91% after 25 days ofhigh pressure grinding roll.
Based on a resource model developed earlier this year the knownmineralisation would provide a mine life of 15 years based on milling15 million tonnes per annum for between 5-7 M lb U308 a year.
Bannerman's 100% owned Swakop River prospect neighbours Paladin Energy's Langer-Heinrich calcrete-hosted mine.
Jubber said that while it was early days on Swakop River the resultsof drilling of the Bloedkoppie Channel had been encouraging.
Paladin's mine is Namibia's modern uranium pacesetter, but emergingprojects apart from Bannerman's Etango included Extract's Rossing Southand Ida Dome, Areva's Trekkopje, West Australian Metals' Marenica andDeep Yellow's Tumas-Tubas.