Purepoint Uranium drills up to 8,850 cps at Hook Lake PUREPOINT URANIUM REPORTS TOTAL GAMMA SPIKES AS HIGH AS 8,850 CPS AS IT COMPLETES WINTER DRILL PROGRAM AT HOOK LAKE JOINT VENTURE
Purepoint Uranium Group Inc. has completed its winter drill program at the Hook Lake joint venture at the Carter corridor. The Hook Lake project is a joint venture between Cameco Corp. (39.5 per cent), Orano Canada Inc. (39.5 per cent) and Purepoint (21 per cent) and lies on trend with high-grade uranium discoveries, including Fission Uranium's Triple R deposit and NexGen's Arrow deposit.
"As this was our first-pass drilling of the Carter corridor, the main conductive trend was tested using 800-metre stepouts toward the north in order to identify the most prospective geology," said Scott Frostad, vice-president exploration at Purepoint. "Our team was thrilled when the fifth hole of the program, CRT23-05, encountered elevated radioactivity associated with graphitic shearing and intense clay alteration. The downhole gamma results are the highest counts per second we've seen outside of our Spitfire discovery."
Highlights:
- A total of 2,710 metres of diamond drilling were completed in six holes to test the Carter corridor.
- CRT23-05 returned peak radioactivity of 8,850 counts per second with three intervals of anomalous radioactivity over 34.8 metres that included 0.9 metre at 3,950 counts per second and 2.2 metres at 1,660 counts per second (see attached table).
- CRT23-06, a 100-metre stepout from CRT23-05 toward the south, returned peak radioactivity of 3,225 counts per second from an anomalous radioactive zone averaging 1,745 counts per second over 3.1 metres. The Carter corridor is a long-lived, reactivated graphitic fault zone that lies between the Clearwater domain granitic intrusive rocks to the west and runs parallel to the Patterson structural corridor to the immediate east. The 25-kilometre strike length of the Carter structural/conductive corridor is almost entirely located within the Hook Lake joint venture project.
Drill hole CRT23-05 targeted a stepwise moving-loop electromagnetic conductor and encountered the unconformity at a depth of 280 metres. The hole intersected a sheared/faulted chlorite-altered, graphitic diorite gneiss over 15 metres before encountering five metres of intense clay alteration. The graphitic shear featured elevated radioactivity, including 3,950 counts per second over 0.9 metre from 318.9 metres to 319.8 metres and 1,660 counts per second over 2.2 metres from 330.5 metres to 332.7 metres from the downhole probe. The hand-held spectrometer showed the radioactivity to be almost totally sourced from uranium.
Drill hole CRT23-06 was collared on the same pad as CRT23-05 using a similar dip of minus-60 degrees but with the azimuth swung 34 degrees toward the south. The target represents a 100-metre stepout from the CRT23-05 graphitic shear zone intercept. The hole intersected a 35-metre sheared/faulted graphitic diorite gneiss interval from 309 metres to 344 metres before being completed at 404 metres. The hand-held spectrometer showed the radioactivity from CRT23-06 to be primarily related to thorium, suggesting that follow-up drilling should test the area north of CRT23-05.
The most recent National Instrument 43-101 compliant technical report on the flagship Hook Lake joint venture project can be found on Purepoint's website -- "Technical Report on the Hook Lake Project, Northern Saskatchewan, Canada; April 19, 2022."
Gamma logging and geochemical assaying
A Mount Sopris 2PGA-1000 downhole total gamma probe was utilized for radiometric surveying. The total gamma results provided in the attached table were selected using a cut-off of 500 counts per second over a 0.3-metre width. Core sampling is facilitated using an RS-125 hand-held gamma ray spectrometer that provides a readout of equivalent per cent potassium and parts per million of uranium and thorium. All drill intercepts are core width and true thickness is yet to be determined.
Core samples are submitted to the Saskatchewan Research Council's (SRC) geoanalytical laboratories in Saskatoon. The SRC facility is ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited by the Standards Council of Canada (scope of accreditation No. 537). The samples are analyzed using partial and total digestion inductively coupled plasma methods for boron by Na2O2 fusion and for uranium by fluorimetry.
Hook Lake -- the Carter corridor
The Hook Lake joint venture project is owned jointly by Cameco (39.5 per cent), Orano Canada (39.5 per cent) and Purepoint Uranium Group (21 per cent) as operator and consists of nine claims totalling 28,598 hectares situated in the southwestern Athabasca basin. The Hook Lake joint venture project is considered one of the highest-quality uranium exploration projects in the Athabasca basin due to its location along the prospective Patterson Lake trend and the relatively shallow depth to the unconformity.
The Patterson Lake area was recently flown by an airborne gravity survey (Boulanger, Kiss and Tschirhart, 2019) that was funded by the Targeted Geoscience Initiative (TGI), a collaborative federal geoscience program. The gravity results show the southern portion of the Carter corridor as being associated with the same gravity-high response as the Triple R and Arrow uranium deposits. The gravity-low response west of the Carter corridor reflects the geologically younger, Clearwater domain intrusions. The TGI (Potter et al., 2020) consider the Clearwater domain intrusions as being high-heat producers that warmed and circulated hydrothermal fluids over the structural corridors. Prolonged interaction of oxidized uranium-bearing fluids with basement rocks through reactivated faults is thought to have formed the high-grade uranium deposits.
Purepoint completed three drill holes in the southern portion of the Carter corridor (HK08-01 to HK08-03) during 2008. HK08-01 intersected very strong sericite and silica alteration and returned a maximum of 17 parts per million uranium within basement rock but missed the conductor source. HK08-02 returned locally elevated radioactivity from 20 to 30 metres below the unconformity while HK08-03 intersected 60 metres of intense hematite alteration below the unconformity.
About Purepoint Uranium Group Inc.
Purepoint actively operates an exploration pipeline of 12 advanced projects in Canada's Athabasca basin. In addition to its flagship joint venture project at Hook Lake with partners Cameco and Orano and a second joint venture with Cameco at Smart Lake, Purepoint also holds 10 100-per-cent-owned projects with proven uranium-rich targets. With an aggressive exploration program under way on multiple projects, Purepoint is emerging as the pre-eminent uranium explorer in the world's richest uranium district.