JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Uranium developer Toro Energy on Monday reported that beneficiation studies on the proposed processing circuit for the Wiluna uranium project, in Western Australia, had successfully demonstrated that a simple screen and deslime beneficiation circuit process could significantly upgrade the majority of the feed to the proposed mill.

The aim of the beneficiation test work was to identify methodologies to produce a high-grade, low-mass uranium concentrate as mill feed, thereby delivering greater overall operational efficiencies and reduced costs at Wiluna.

The results showed that high-grade mineralisation associated with fine grained sediments can be beneficiated up to 3.3 times the original grade, resulting in a reduction to 27% of its original mass, with a low 16% loss of the total uranium.

Toro pointed out that the beneficiation upgrades were not grade dependent and that they were achieved across all grades from as low as 220 parts per million (ppm) uranium oxide (U₃O₈) to sample grades of more than 2 000 ppm U₃O₈.

“These results show that the beneficiation combination works best wherever clays and/or very fine grained sediments dominate the geology, which is a significant proportion of the Wiluna geology.”

“Even in samples where clay is not dominant, desliming still produces an improved result. Given the well understood flow-on benefits from desliming for process design, it is likely that desliming to remove the fine grained fraction will deliver processing efficiencies across all lithologies at Wiluna,” Toro MD Dr Vanessa Guthrie said.

The most recent test work was conducted on seven drill core samples from the Centipede-Millipede and Lake Maitland deposits, by independent metallurgy group Strategic Metallurgy.

Guthrie added that, based on these results, Toro would proceed to the next phase of optimisation studies, which included leach testing on the beneficiated concentrates of each of the seven samples.

“Given that the potential economic benefits from the beneficiation extend beyond the obvious direct improvements to include flow-on benefits in the processing circuit, we are confident that a redesign of the process flow sheet will yield significant improvement to the overall project economic,” she stated.