Definite uranium mining potential existed at the company's Randfontein shafts, especially Cooke Three, acting Harmony CEO Graham Briggs said on Monday.

Briggs said that both gold and uranium at Harmony’s underground operations had been assayed in the past six months.

In reply to Mining Weekly Online, he said: “There are some shafts that stand out as definite potential, those are the Randfontein shafts, especially Cooke Three.

“It would be very interesting to see what sort of credits we could get for uranium as a byproduct,” he said.

With the interest in uranium in the Randfontein area, he said that there might be infrastructure that could advantage the situation, “but we are really not there yet”.

Work was being done on on cut-offs and the manner in which simultaneous coextraction would take place, but much depended on the gold-uranium ratios and the cuttoffs obtainable from mining the two metals together.

Current assaying of both gold and uranium in underground operations was helping the company to arrive at an understanding of the ratio between the two metals.

He pointed out that potential existed for uranium to serve as a by product credit in the same way as base metals and silver were used to credit cash costs at gold mines elsewhere.

One of the biggest drawbacks, however, was that it was difficult to gather all the required information in a short while, because Harmony had for years not assayed for uranium.

Meanwhile, acting financial director Frank Abbott announced that Harmony was currently looking at the disposal of some of Harmony suface uranium assets. These were also in the Randfontein area.