17/6/09West Australian Metals Limited is an Australia-based...

17/6/09

West Australian Metals Limited is an Australia-based company engaged in the exploration and evaluation of the Marenica Uranium Project located in Namibia. The Company’s projects include marenica uranium project, Scaddon Uranium Project, Northampton Base Metals Project and Dargo Goldfield Project,The Company's principal being asset is the Marenica Uranium Project, located in the uranium rich Damara Province in Namibia. The project covers 706sq km, with high prospectivity for both secondary and primary uranium deposits. The marenica uranium project project lies in the same uranium province as the Rossing and Langer Heinrich uranium mines and immediately north of the large Trekkopje Mine. Its subsidiaries include Bronzewing Gold Ltd and West Australian Metals (Namibia) (Pty) Ltd.West Australian Metal's strategy is to focus on the evaluation of the Marenica Project as well as to identify and acquire other uranium opportunities globally.
Investors liked the "encouraging preliminary results" received by international uranium developer West Australian Metals (ASX: WME) on mineralogical test work undertaken on ore samples from its 80% owned Marenica Uranium Project in Namibia.

The WME share price jumped a very tidy 8.7% on a day when the overall market was down 1.6%.

Well known consultancy group SRK Consulting Pty Ltd collected a full suite of samples for mineralogy and verification process test work while on site in May. Three styles of mineralization have been delineated on site by SRK, namely: a primary source; an oxidized source in bedrock (secondary); and calcrete-hosted uranium mineralization.

To date, 30 sections of Marenica ore have been examined – two primary, 19 secondary and surface rocks and nine calcrete. In the calcrete and secondary ores the major uranium phase is carnotite (in the order of 85% or more).

Based on the mineralogy of the ores collected to date and comparisons with other uranium ores from Africa, SRK believes that WME should be able to achieve better than 75% extraction from supergene ore types.

The Marenica Project currently comprises a large, bulk tonnage uranium deposit with a JORC compliant Inferred Resource of 111 million tones averaging 140ppm U3O8 for 34 million pounds of contained U3O8. However, WME has raised recently $9.9 million from Polo Resources (AIM: PRL) for an aggressive drilling program and to fast track the development of Marenica.

There is likely to be significant exploration news flow as a result of the exploration program in coming months. Investors may recall the Marenica deposit is immediately north of Areva's large Trekkopje mine and within the same uranium province at Rio Tinto's Rossing South mine and Paladin's Langer Heinrich uranium mine. Hence the excitement in some camps is palpaple and for WME, within EPL3287, to unearth a larger scale deposit given it is under-explored for hard-rock deposits.