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The report is titled “Pre-feasibility Study for the Wheeler River Uranium Project, Saskatchewan, Canada”.
Denison Mines (TSX:DML,NYSEMKT:DNN) reports that it has filed a technical report under Canadian Securities Administrators’ National Instrument 43-101 Standard of Disclosure for Mineral Projects for its 90 percent owned Wheeler River project in Saskatchewan.
The report is titled “Pre-feasibility Study for the Wheeler River Uranium Project, Saskatchewan, Canada”.
As quoted from the press release:
the PFS considers the potential economic merit of co-developing the Phoenix and Gryphon deposits. The high-grade Phoenix deposit is designed as an In-Situ Recovery mining operation, with associated processing to a finished product occurring at a plant to be built on site at Wheeler River. The Gryphon deposit is designed as an underground mining operation, utilizing a conventional long hole mining approach with processing of mine production assumed at Denison’s 22.5 percent owned McClean Lake mill.
Taken together, the project is estimated to have mine production of 109.4 million pounds U3O8 over a 14- year mine life, with a base case pre-tax Net Present Value (“NPV”) of US$1.31 billion (8 percent discount rate), Internal Rate of Return (“IRR”) of 38.7 percent, and initial pre-production capital expenditures of US$322.5 million. The base-case economic analysis assumes uranium sales are made at UxC Consulting Company, LLC’s (“UxC”) annual estimated spot price for mine production from the Phoenix deposit (from ~US$29/lb U3O8 to US$45/lb U3O8), and a fixed price for mine production from the Gryphon deposit (US$50/lb U3O8). Using the same price assumed for the project’s 2016 Preliminary Economic Assessment (“2016 PEA”), a fixed uranium price of US$44/lb U3O8 (“PEA Reference Case”), the PFS produces a combined pre-tax project NPV of $1.41 billion – representing roughly 275 percent of the US$513 million pre-tax project NPV estimated in the 2016 PEA.
