PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Uranium developer Toro Energy has again added to the resource estimate of its Wiluna project, in Western Australia, announcing on Monday that resource estimates for the Lake Maitland deposit had increased to 16.9-million pounds of contained uranium oxide (U3O8).
The mineral resource at the Lake Maitland deposit was expected to average at grades of 929 parts per million.
The Lake Maitland resource increase was in addition to the October increase announced for the Centipede and Millipede deposits, and represented an overall increase of 10% in the contained metal at the Wiluna project.
“The latest increase in resources proves conclusively that the Wiluna project is able to deliver a high head grade to the mill that will undoubtedly improve project economics,” said Toro MD Vanessa Guthrie.
“We now have the opportunity to assess the potential for a high-grade mine plan and feed this into the optimisation studies over the next few months to deliver improved project economics.
Toro in December said it was hoping to finalise its expansion plans for the Wiluna project during 2016.
Toro’s initial plans for Wiluna had included only the Centipede and Lake Way deposits, and the company was granted federal and state approval for the development of this project in 2013.
However, the expanded project would include the Milipede and Lake Maitland deposits. The project would still be based around a central processing plant.
Based on mining at the four deposits, the Wiluna project was expected to have a mine life of 16 years, with average production of two-million pounds a year of U3O8, for the first ten years of operation.