URANIUM mining, albeit at trial scale only, is set to resume in Western Australia for the first time in more than a decade, heralding a new era for the state’s rejuvenated uranium industry.
URANIUM mining, albeit at trial scale only, is set to resume in Western Australia for the first time in more than a decade, heralding a new era for the state’s rejuvenated uranium industry.
Adelaide-based Toro Energy last week secured state government approval to develop a trial open pit at its Lake Way-Centipede site, 30 kilometres south of Wiluna.
The approval will allow Toro to extract about 45,000 tonnes of ore and waste rock from the Centipede deposit to further evaluate the resource as part of a detailed bankable feasibility study into $160 million mine development.
The six-week mining program represents the first time substantial tonnages of WA uranium ore have been mined since the last bulk ore samples were extracted from a pilot underground mine at the massive Kintyre project in 1997.
Toro’s proposal also harks back to the industry’s halcyon days in the early 1980s when production trials were under way at five other major projects across the state.
The biggest trial was at Yeelirrie, near Leinster. Discovered by WMC in 1972, more than 130,000t of ore were extracted over the next decade and sent to a dedicated pilot processing plant outside Kalgoorlie. The plant was closed in 1983, but was not dismantled until 2004.
BHP acquired WMC in 2005 and is now undertaking fresh development study aimed at establishing a 5,000t per annum mine by 2014 from total resources of more than 52,000t.
Mining trials were also carried out at the Lake Way, Mulga Rock and Manyingee projects before being killed off by the Hawke Labor government’s Three Mines policy in 1983.
Work at Manyingee, near Onslow, also included an in-situ leaching trial, which operated for six months before being shut down in 1983. The project is now owned by Paladin Resources.
Though trial mining was originally carried out at the Lake Way deposit in 1982, Toro managing director Greg Hall said the new trial would be carried out the higher grade Centipede deposit, which was not part of the project in 1982.
Mining would start in March and would enable detailed evaluation of the resource, mining methods and groundwater management.
Toro plans to produce around 730t of uranium oxide a year at Lake Way-Centipede by early 2013, from total resources of around 11,000t.
That puts it just behind Mega Uranium’s planned early 2012 start at its $120 million Lake Maitland project nearby, and on par with Energy & Minerals Australia’s planned 1,000tpa mine at Mulga Rock, north east of Kalgoorlie.
Meanwhile, Cameco and Mitsubishi, which paid $500 million to buy Kintyre from Rio Tinto in 2008, hope to commission a 1,500tpa operation around the same time as Yeelirrie comes on stream.
