PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Uranium developer Toro Energy has told shareholders that it was evaluating other avenues to extract value from its Wiluna project, in Western Australia, given the current suppressed uranium price.

The ASX-listed company said on Friday that it was assessing Wiluna’s prospectivity to host other metals, most notably gold.

The company pointed out that the Lake Maitland deposit, which was discovered in the early 1970, has been underexplored for gold and other metals, despite the discovery of gold in the Yandal.

Meanwhile, Toro also on Friday said that the company would advance to the next stage of the beneficiation and process design (BPD) studies for its Wiluna project, following the success from previous testing.

Previous BPD studies saw the re-design of the process flow sheet, which reduced the capital cost of the proposed hydrometallurgical plant from $134-million to A$78-million, and lowered the processing operating costs to about A$16/t run-of-mine feed.

The next stage of the BPD studies would look at leaching and ion exchange testwork, which Toro was hoping would allow for the sodium diurinate precipitation circuit to be reduced in size, or to be removed altogether.

This would result in significant capital and operating cost savings, the company said.

The second phase of the BPD studies would involve the review and update of the Metsim model developed in the studies to date, while Phase 3 would focus on the development of an updated processing circuit design package, based on outputs from the Metsim model, and would include equipment sizing and selection.

Phase 4 of the study would involve revising the capital and operating costs, based on the output from the processing circuit design package.

Toro expected the Phase 1 BPD work to be completed in the third quarter of this year, with the subsequent phases dependent on the results of Phase 1.