The latest drill results from Hathor Exploration’s (HAT-V) Roughrider uranium discovery on the Midwest Northeast project in Saskatchewan’s prolific Athabasca basin are literally off the scale.
“This is a globally significant discovery in terms of grade,” Michael Gunning, Hathor’s chief operating officer, tells The Northern Miner. “The grades we are seeing are real at Roughrider.”
While testing the heart of the newly discovered Roughrider East zone, hole 648 cut 63.5 metres grading 7.75% U3O8, starting from 237 metres downhole. The intercept included 17.5 metres averaging 24.28% U3O8, with individual assays as high as 87.2% U3O8.
“This is a spectacular hole,” says Gunning. “Not only is the grade continuity at Roughrider the best-of- breed on a global scale, it is more continuous than people think. It is an intersection that every uranium geologist in the world should look at.”
Hathor believes the 63.5-metre-long intersection is close to the true structural thickness of the zone. Two higher-grade sections of 42 metres averaging 11.06% U3O8 and 18.5 metres of 1.48% U3O8 are separated by a 3-metre-wide zone of less than 0.05% U3O8.
The intercept starts from about 10 metres below an unconformity at the contact between Paleoproterozoic basement metamorphic rocks of the Wollaston Group and overlying sandstones of the Athabasca Group.
Hole 648 was an infill hole designed to test a 40-metre gap between holes 613 and 610, which were drilled earlier this year during the winter campaign. Spotted 20 metres downdip from hole 648, hole 610 hit a previously reported 12 metres of 22.51% U3O8 in an upper 61-metre-long zone of lower-grade mineralization averaging less than 1% U3O8.
Hole 613, drilled 20 metres updip of hole 648, intersected a previously reported 4.5 metres of 1.17% U3O8 in an upper 39-metre-long lower-grade zone, plus 16 metres of 1.24% U3O8 in a lower zone.
Hole 648 is the first hole to be released with complete assay results from a summer’s drilling campaign that targeted the Roughrider and Roughrider East zones with an additional 18,840 metres in 52 holes. Hathor has released all geological and radioactivity data for the holes.
“If people do their homework they can see which holes hit and which holes didn’t,” explains Gunning.
Roughrider East was discovered last year at the end of the summer program in an area 200 metres east of the original Roughrider zone.
The discovery hole into Roughrider East intercepted 28 metres grading 12.71% U3O8, starting from 302 metres downhole. Since then, Hathor has put some 50 holes into the new discovery, defining 220 metres of strike length.
“It is easy to see the resource potential at Roughrider East is such that it could be as big as Roughrider or perhaps more,” says Gunning. “When you look at thickness, vertical extent, copper numbers, there is a lot of evidence, just as a geologist to say, that it looks like Roughrider East is the meat of the system in terms of fluid and mineralization.”
Hathor is working on a geological model for Roughrider East, which will be used to start the resource model once all assay data from the summer program are in hand. An updated resource estimate for the main Roughrider deposit is also expected in the coming months.
The original Roughrider deposit was discovered by Hathor during a drilling campaign in February 2008. While drill testing a coinciding gravity and resistivity anomaly, Hathor intersected 11.9 metres of 5.29% U3O8, starting 261 metres downhole.
The Roughrider zone was defined along a northeast-southwest strike length of 220 metres and up to 100 metres across strike. A major east-northeasterly striking fault zone is a controlling factor on mineralization, which occurs at depths of 190 to 290 metres.
Roughrider was conservatively estimated in 2009 to contain an indicated 116,000 tonnes grading 2.57% U3O8, plus an inferred 83,000 tonnes of 3% U3O8, for a combined total of 12 million lbs. uranium oxide. The original estimate was based on the first 120 diamond drill holes. Hathor has now completed more than 250 drill holes on Roughrider alone.
“The 12 million lbs. that was estimated for Roughrider a year and a half ago was preliminary,” stresses Gunning. “The geological model wasn’t developed in-house so it wasn’t what I would call robust. Having now developed that inhouse geological model over the past six months, the grade continuity in the overall resource of Roughrider is going to be much more significant than that original estimate.”
The infill drilling has provided more intercepts of high-grade uranium. “We have 130 holes now that have intercepted visible massive pitchblende mineralization,” says Gunning. “It has provided a whole bunch more data points where we are going to be able to fill in block model cells with high-grade material as opposed to low-grade.
“Our data was capped on the original model at 50% [U3O8],” explains Gunning. “We won’t be cutting assays below 80% because there are a lot of 80% assays at Roughrider, and we won’t be excluding drill holes because we now have the drill hole density.”
Hathor has also extended the Roughrider mineralization both up-section and downdip, in terms of zones that are stratigraphically higher and zones that are farther along downdip.
Hathor owns 90% of the Midwest Northeast property, while Terra Venture (TAS-V) owns a 10% interest, carried through to the completion of a feasibility study. The Midwest Northeast property is in the eastern Athabasca basin of northern Saskatchewan, 8 km north of Points North Landing, a service centre, and 400 km north of La Ronge.
The 5.4-sq.-km property is 11 km west of the operating McClean Lake mill complex, and less than 5 km along strike of the Midwest uranium project owned by Denison Mines (DML-T, DNN-X), Areva Resources and OURD Canada.
Development of the Midwest project was shelved in 2008 for an indefinite period due to global economic concerns, a depressed uranium market and rising capital costs. The status of the project is being reviewed every six months.
The Midwest deposit is home to 42.9 million lbs. uranium oxide in an indicated resource of 354,000 tonnes grading 5.5% U3O8.
At presstime, Hathor was trading around $2.30 in a 52-week range of $1.35-$2.47, with 107 million shares outstanding, or almost 118 million fully diluted. Terra shares were at 36.5¢ trading within a 52-week range of 25¢-60¢. The junior has 54.2 million shares outstanding.
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