dream uranium scheme bombs - the australian

The Australian
Dream uranium scheme bombs

Robin Bromby
September 27, 2005

IT was one of those great mining ideas whose time came and went in an afternoon.

Pepinnini Minerals had some exciting news for the markets - and a deceptively simple idea to transform its dream into reality.

Not only had it uncovered some extremely promising uranium samples, there were also established processing facilities nearby that would save the company the time and expense of building its own plant.

Pepinnini, which is exploring for uranium near the old Radium Hill mine in South Australia, saw its shares rocket as high as 69c before closing 17 per cent or 8.5c higher at 58c on sampling results reported yesterday.

A sample at one prospect had produced grades of 2.1 per cent uranium - with "South Australia's leading uranium miners averaging between 0.04 and 0.18 per cent", as the company put it.

Managing director Norman Kennedy thought he could get mining up and running within 18 months by treating the ore at Port Pirie -- just the way the South Australian government had done between 1954 and 1961. (The South Australian government operated the mine to provide the US and UK military with yellowcake for their nuclear weapons programs.)

"There's no reason why we can't use the same treatment operation straight away," Mr Kennedy said.

"We didn't think it could be so easy," he added.

When asked how uranium could be treated at a lead-zinc smelter at Port Pirie owned by Zinifex, Mr Kennedy thought this not an insurmountable problem as it involved reasonably simple crushing and concentrating processes.

One problem: Radium Hill ore was treated, not at the lead smelter, but by a plant built at Port Pirie by the former South Australia Department of Mines, a plant long since closed and dismantled.

A Zinifex spokesman advised that for at least 70 years the lead smelter had not had any equipment that could treat uranium.

A SA Primary Industries and Resources spokesman confirmed there was no chance of the state Government getting involved in uranium processing this time around.

When advised of the fact that the uranium plant in Port Pirie was no more, Mr Kennedy agreed that plan was now out PepinNini's range of options.

"It does come back to us setting up our own site plant," he conceded. But, he added, there were still bits and pieces of the old Radium Hill plant lying around the site.

Other than this hiccup, the news looked promising for a company listed just last April. The high sample grade was recorded at the Becaroo property, near the small Australian town of Olary across the border from Broken Hill.

It is located 10km northeast of PepinNini's main Crocker Well uranium field.

The company said it was near being able to issue a stock exchange-compliant resource statement on the Crocker Well and Mt Victoria uranium deposits where about 1000 holes were drilled up until the 1970s.

Becaroo also contained what PepinNini termed e high grades of titanium and rare earths, including yttrium, scandium, cerium and lanthanum, used in fuel cells and water treatment.