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Resumed exploration puts more spirit into Rum Jungle with uranium, base and precious metals

Rum Jungle was the famous uranium mining of Australia’s yesteryear and it’s on a big revival campaign not just for uranium but also for copper, cobalt, nickel and silver. The company leading the charge is Sydney-based Compass Resources NL.
Author: Ross Louthean
Posted: Monday , 16 Jul 2007

PERTH - With the northern wet season gone, Compass Resources is showing up the scope for new mine development targets in the Rum Jungle region near the Finniss River, south of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.


The company today released some high grade copper-uranium intercepts from its first two holes in the new season drilling at its Browns East prospect. This showed wide zones of base metals with significant intervals rich in copper, cobalt, silver and uranium.


Hole 7BE 01 recorded 43 metres grading 1.97% copper, 0.3% cobalt, 0.2% nickel and 43 grams/tonne silver, and there was a 10m section from 138m depth going 6.61% Cu, 0.46% Co, 0.33% Ni, 165 g/t silver and 3.8 lb/tonne U308.


Hole 7BE 04 intersected 46m @ 2.5% copper, 0.16% cobalt, 0.15% Ni and 67 g/t Ag, and a narrower zone of uranium mineralisation had a peak 1m section of 1.34% U308. This hole had a high grade zone of 15m going 5.79% Cu, 0.17% Co, 0.21% Ni and 203 g/t Ag, while a lower zone of 3m went 2.25% Cu, 0.1% Co, 0.09%, 0.09% Ni and 10.9 lb/t U308.


Company secretary Philip Cohen said these initial results demonstrate the presence of good grades of uranium between the historic Intermediate copper mine and Whites uranium-copper mine.


“They also show grades of copper-coablt and silver that are significantly higher than the average grade of the inferred resource previously published,” he said.



Compass has been one of the NT’s most durable explorers-developers, with some stop start developments in and near Rum Jungle, and it now has the Browns oxide copper-nickel project underway which is to ramp up from October to a production of 10,000t copper, 1,000t cobalt and 750t nickel per annum.


The bigger project ahead at Browns is the sulphide project which would tap into higher grades and is expected to cost $A350 million ($US308 M) to develop. Hunan Nonferrous Metals Corporation (HNC) of China is a development partner having purchased 12 M Compass shares at $A2.50/share ($US2.20) for a $A30 M ($US26.4 M) outlay, however, earlier this month HNC said it had sold half its holdings for $A4.10 ($US3.60) share and Compass said it was disappointed as HNC had disposed of them at below prevailing market prices.Cohen said HNC has met every obligation under the joint venture agreement, and it was understood HNC has entered into a six month lock-up of its remaining shares.


Rum Jungle’s earlier mine era was between 1950-71 with a total of 863,000t treated at grades between 0.28-0.41% for 3,530t U308. One of the pathfinder companies was Consolidated Zinc Ltd, a forerunner to CRA Ltd which was later absorbed by its parent, London-based Rio Tinto plc.