UPDATE:Paladin says construction at Kayelekera still on track

*One worker pronounced dead.

Paladin Energy (PDN-T, PDN-A) says worker unrest at its Kayelekera uranium project in Malawi hasn’t slowed construction and it expects commissioning by the end of April as scheduled.

The company says roughly 250 of its 1,600 person construction workforce began protesting just two days after three workers were critically injured, one of which later died in hospital, due to a work related fire.

“They protested not over working conditions or safety issues but simply because they want to keep their jobs,” Greg Taylor, a spokesman for Paladin says.

With construction winding down, Paladin is having to trim its workforce down towards the roughly 300 it will need during operations.

While the company explained to locals that construction jobs were only temporary, in a country with basically no significant mining history, some are finding it difficult to come to terms with the fact that many jobs won’t be there in a month’s time.

Police were called in to disperse protestors, but only as a precautionary measure the company says, and it has since been in negotiations with the workers.

Taylor says the company has been able to keep construction on pace, despite the fact that the protesters have not gone back to work, because it had extra staff on hand.

“We were giving workers, that weren’t truly needed, extra jobs to make the transition easier,” Taylor explains. “So the protests are not interfering with construction.”

As for the accident in which three construction contract workers were injured, the company describes it as a flash vapor fire that occurred when solvent cleaning fluid used in a steel tank was ignited.

An investigation into the exact cause of the ignition is underway.

On March 20 Paladin announced that one of the workers died of their injuries in a South African hospital.

The men had been transferred out of Malawi to South Africa on March 17th, a day after the incident.

Paladin did not release the name of the deceased, saying only that he was 20 years old. The two other men, aged 29 and 36, remain in a stable condition.

Paladin has an 85% stake in the Kayelekera project with the government holding the rest.

The project has a measured resource of 2.2 million tonnes grading 0.12% U3O8; an indicated resource of 13.1 million tonnes grading 0.08% U3O8; and an inferred resource of 3.4 million tonnes grading 0.06% U3O8.

In Toronto on March 19 the company’s shares closed 10¢ higher at $3.04 on 3.8 million shares traded.