With a price of US$30 per pound, uranium is a hot commodity these days. As with all of the metals, little effort was devoted to exploring for uranium while prices were low. Mines that are now entering the development pipeline were discovered years ago and will do little more than offset declining production as older mines are
depleted. As a result, many Canadian junior exploration companies are now feverishly searching for new uranium deposits, according to an article in Western Standard. How do they find these deposits? Reporter Graham Matthews believes that we must understand a little more about uranium in order to answer that question.
Uranium is one of the more common elements in the Earth's crust -it is more abundant than tin and about 500 times more abundant than gold. Pure uranium is heavy (more dense than lead), silver-white in colour, metallic, and naturally radioactive. Uranium can take many chemical forms, but in nature it is generally found as an oxide (in combination with oxygen).
It can be found almost everywhere in soil and rock, in rivers and oceans. Traces of uranium are even found in food and human tissue. However, concentrated uranium ores are found in just a few places, usually in hard rock or sandstone.
The highest-grade uranium deposits discovered to date are located in Canada and are described as unconformity deposits. An unconformity is an ancient erosion surface that can typically be found at the base of a major sedimentary basin. The Cigar Lake and McArthur River uranium deposits, located in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin, are prime examples.
Like copper and most base metals, the uranium price is quoted by the pound. A 1% U3O8 assay contains 20 pounds of uranium per ton. Based on a US$30 uranium price, one ton of ore averaging 1% U3O8 is currently worth US$600.
The McArthur River mine in the Athabasca Basin has 437 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 25% U3O8. The gross value of that deposit is over US$13 billion. That is about six times the gross metal value of Goldcorp's Red Lake mine, Canada's highest-grade gold mine. Put another way, the energy from 400 million pounds of uranium is equivalent to 9.5 billion barrels of oil or 2 billion tonnes of coal.
Uranium is one of the more common elements in the Earth's crust -it is more abundant than tin and about 500 times more abundant than gold. Pure uranium is heavy (more dense than lead), silver-white in colour, metallic, and naturally radioactive. Uranium can take many chemical forms, but in nature it is generally found as an oxide (in combination with oxygen).
It can be found almost everywhere in soil and rock, in rivers and oceans. Traces of uranium are even found in food and human tissue. However, concentrated uranium ores are found in just a few places, usually in hard rock or sandstone.
The highest-grade uranium deposits discovered to date are located in Canada and are described as unconformity deposits. An unconformity is an ancient erosion surface that can typically be found at the base of a major sedimentary basin. The Cigar Lake and McArthur River uranium deposits, located in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin, are prime examples.
Like copper and most base metals, the uranium price is quoted by the pound. A 1% U3O8 assay contains 20 pounds of uranium per ton. Based on a US$30 uranium price, one ton of ore averaging 1% U3O8 is currently worth US$600.
The McArthur River mine in the Athabasca Basin has 437 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 25% U3O8. The gross value of that deposit is over US$13 billion. That is about six times the gross metal value of Goldcorp's Red Lake mine, Canada's highest-grade gold mine. Put another way, the energy from 400 million pounds of uranium is equivalent to 9.5 billion barrels of oil or 2 billion tonnes of coal.
