The yellowcake road winds back to Mary K Robin Bromby January 04, 2007
STAND by for another phase of the uranium frenzy - this time in northwest Queensland. Goldsearch ignited it, and now another exploration junior, Deep Yellow, has added fuel to the fire with its announcement yesterday that it had joined the crush looking for uranium around Mt Isa. Expect, too, to hear the name Mary Kathleen, as the historic uranium mine is invoked by companies pegging tenements anywhere in the neighbourhood.
Mary Kathleen, which lies about halfway between Mt Isa and Cloncurry, was discovered in 1954. A year later, Rio Tinto formed a company to mine Mary Kathleen to supply Britain's Atomic Energy Authority.
It operated in two bursts, 1958-63 and 1975-82, producing a total of 8882 tonnes of uranium.
As with any market craze, it is unclear who has what in terms of finds in the Mt Isa-Cloncurry belt. Only one local explorer, Summit Resources, has come up with significant established uranium resources (about 34,000 tonnes) at its 50 per cent-owned Skal and Valhalla deposits close to Mt Isa.
Summit is in partnership with Paladin Resources after that company paid $174 million to buy Valhalla Uranium, which held the other half of Skal and Valhalla. The only other established deposit is held by Canada's Laramide Resources, its Westmoreland project 350km northwest of Copper City holding 20,900 tonnes of uranium.
The rest is all speculation.
But one thing can be said: while the Mary Kathleen mine itself has been depleted, there is every chance the region could become a significant uranium province.
This story was ignited only last week when frantic trading in Goldsearch stock began, even though the company said it was unaware of anything that would have set traders going. Results are expected from samples later this month, and the company has said only that those samples indicated grades above 0.005 per cent - and that is a very low grade.
But the stock nearly doubled in price when the market reopened on Tuesday.
Then Deep Yellow came out yesterday morning saying it had acquired six uranium tenements in the Mt Isa district. So it was off to the races with that stock, Deep Yellow climbing 9.5c to 56.5c.
Deep Yellow is also in joint venture with Matrix Metals in the latter's various uranium prospects close to Mary Kathleen. Drilling began on those in November.
The great swath of Queensland running from north of Mt Isa through to Cloncurry has only in recent years been opened up by smaller explorers, much of the area having been locked up for years by the former MIM. It was thick with uranium explorers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and with some big players including BP, Esso, the then CRA (now Rio Tinto) and Belgium's Union Miniere.
They all pulled up and left when the uranium price collapsed. Now that Goldsearch and Deep Yellow have taken off, the other uranium players in the area - Universal Resources, Monaro Mining and Paradigm Gold - will also be watched carefully by traders.
Universal Resources has tenements that lie within 4km of the Mary Kathleen mine site, and on which CRA did some exploration in the 1970s. That exploration recorded rock chip samples up to 6.18 per cent uranium.
Universal began exploration on that ground last month.
Paradigm has picked up ground that was prospected by Energy Resources of Australia in 1978 when samples graded up to 0.03 per cent uranium. ERA went no further, as it was focused on its huge Ranger deposit in the Northern Territory.
Monaro holds tenements north of Mary Kathleen.
It picked these up in September through an alliance with their owner, Mohan Varkey, who was credited with the discovery of the Nabarlek uranium deposit in the Northern Territory and then went on to help find Cigar Lake in Canada.
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