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CanAlaska Uranium served up some positive news about its 50-percent-owned North West Manitoba project on Wednesday. It said that drilling undertaken by its joint venture partner, Northern Uranium, shows the area has the potential to host a substantial unconformity-style uranium deposit.
Image courtesy of CanAlaska Uranium.
Given the amount of work that goes into first locating and then testing uranium deposits, it is always exciting when a company comes up with promising results. What’s more, finding a deposit located close to the surface is usually worth buzzing about.
CanAlaska Uranium (TSXV:CVV) served up some positive news about its 50-percent-owned North West Manitoba project on Wednesday, announcing that drilling undertaken by its joint venture partner, Northern Uranium (TSXV:UNO), shows the area has the potential to host a substantial unconformity-style uranium deposit. The results show elevated radioactivity in the area and have allowed the company to outline drill targets that will be the focus of a summer drill program that is expected to start early next month.
The news has been a long time coming, as CanAlaska first explored the area from 2005 up until 2007, when community consultation with the province of Manitoba put the project on hold. Work continued in March 2012, when it received new work permits and commenced ground geophysical surveys. The company’s results from various tests piqued the interest of Northern Uranium, which earned its 50 percent of the project following an agreement to put $3.2 million towards further testing.
Northern Uranium has taken over work at the property, completing ground gravity surveys, an AlphaTrack radon cup survey on land, a RadonEx radon-in-water survey and drilling 20 rotary air-blast drill holes and 10 diamond drill holes.
“Northern Uranium has now established that the Maguire drill targets are substantial in size and intensity of alteration. Indications of uranium are now being seen in multiple drill holes, the intense zones of clay-hematite alteration within the geophysical targets are providing a strong vector to additional and potentially more massive uranium mineralization,” CanAlaska President and CEO Peter Dasler said.
Encouragingly, the relationship between CanAlaska and Northern Uranium is only set to deepen. Northern Uranium has been increasingly investing money and resources into the project, and the upcoming summer drill program will see it bring in a second diamond drill, which will cover more ground and allow for the northern portion of the deposit to see some action. Northern Uranium is currently working towards earning an 80-percent interest in the project, and will have to spend $11.6 million on it and issue 15 million of its shares to CanAlaska to do so.
“Northern Uranium is spending a very large amount of money on the ground and they are very happy with the results that they are getting and they are happy enough that they are bringing in another drill rig,” Dasler explained, adding that it is also exciting to note how close the drill targets are to the surface.
“These are very shallow targets, about 100-150 meter deep holes. They may drill deeper, but the target is within 100 meters of the surface and you can drill 100 meter hole in a day. Some of the problem has been that there has been very slow drilling, now it looks like we are getting a bigger rig. I am looking forward to them drilling more holes into these targets,” he said.
At end of day Wednesday, CanAlaska’s share price was up 8.33 percent at $0.195.
Securities Disclosure: I, Kristen Moran, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
Editorial Disclosure: CanAlaska Uranium is a client of the Investing News Network. This article is not paid-for content.
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