Northern Uraniums HREE Browns Range Project Looks Promising

Published on Tuesday Oct 12 2010

Positive Early Results from HREE 

Browns Range Project

Northern Uranium (ASX: NTU) has rewarded shareholders who participated in last month’s renounceable rights issue with the conformation of mineralisation which identifies Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) at Browns Range/

The HREE anomalies will be tested by further exploration activities commencing later this month, along with proposed field work to more accurately define drill targets.

Rock chip samples have been collected from the Wolverine, Gambit and Area 5 North Prospects, to allow Northern to commence a small scale characterisation study of the mineralisation.

The study will investigate the separation and recovery characteristics of rare earths from the Browns Range xenotime mineralisation.

This information is essential in determining the viability of the project.

Northern said initial sizing results are favourable and indicate the liberation size of the mineralisation may be in the relatively coarse at the 100-200 microns range.

With the onset of the northern wet season expected in November, it is anticipated that drilling will commence at Browns Range in the first quarter 2011. 

KNOW YOUR RARE EARTHS

Light rare earths -- more abundant

Lanthanum (uses: hybrid engines, metal alloys)

Cerium (auto catalysts, oil refining)

Praseodymium, samarium and gadolinium (magnets)

Neodymium (laptop hard drives, hybrid engines, wind turbines)

Europium (provides red colour for TV, computer screens)

Heavy rare earths -- less abundant

Terbium (phosphors, magnets)

Dysprosium (magnets, hybrid engines)

Erbium (phosphors)

Yttrium (fluorescent lamps, ceramics, metal alloys)

Holmium (glass colouring, lasers)

Thulium (medical X-rays)

Lutetium (petroleum refining)

Ytterbium (lasers, steel alloys)

Geologist Analysis Of Browns Range 

HREE Formation

The rock formation at Browns Range is Arkose (pronounced arkous). 


1 Arkose is a detrial formed from particles of pre-existing rock through weathering and erosion. To be defined it must contain at least 25% Feldspar. Usually it is up to 60% plus quartz, which as we know is a crystal. In simple terms Arkose is a relatively soft sandstone rock generally surrounded by its own sand. Uluru is an Arkose rock.

2 The Feldspar group of minerals are a family of silicates of over 20 members, which occur in igneous rocks. Feldspars crystallize from magma (molten rock in the earth's crust) into the sandstone as veins and are readily identified in the photographs shown in NTU literature (clusters and light brown in colour). See photograph on Wikipedia. Xenotime is part of the Feldspar group.

3 Xenotime is a rare phosphate mineral whose major component is yttrium orthophosphate (ypo4). It forms into a solid solution and may contain traces of arsenic as well as silicon dioxide and calcium in its final composition.

4 The expressive secondary components of Xenotime are the heavy rare earths dysprosium, erbium, terbium and yterbium and may sometimes contain metal elements like thorium and uranium (all replacing yitrium). Occasionally gemstones are also cut from the finer xenotime crystals. NTU continually provide %-components of these HREE in their reports to shareholders.

FLOTATION BENEFICIATION TECHNIQUE

First of all think coal mining. The coal is removed from the mine and crushed. The dirt is separated from the coal using a water wash medium. Then through a series of processes using water chemicals carbolic acid an alkali metal or ammonium salt thereof the coal is cleaned. Flotation beneficiation has resulted in a better product freer of impurities and thus more marketable.

Northern Metals believe using a related process they can remove the xenotime from the arkose at the mining site and thus provide a concentrated material suitable for refinement - a compound of heavy rare earths that can be easily transported

For some ideas on how such a process would work, google the word HYDROCLONE and look at some of the engineered hydroclone systems from chemindustrial situations. The process and equipment is much more advanced to that used in the early days of coal cleansing.

Take special Note that early indications are that between 65-75% of Northern Uranium's Brown Range, Rare Earth Project consists of more valuable HREE(Heavy Rare Earth Elements)

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Northern Uranium Raise A$9.5m For Aggressive Exploration

Strong shareholder support has allowed Northern Uranium (ASX: NTU) to raise A$9.5 million for aggressive exploration on the rare earth projects at John Galt and Browns Range in Western Australia, and the Gardiner-Tanami uranium project in the Northern Territory.

The company can now follow up the high grade rare earth rock chip assays identified at Browns Range, with the company planning to continue ground based reconnaissance exploration and metallurgical testwork in the final quarter of this year.

Northern added funding has been committed to the John Galt project, which was acquired in April 2010, which displays similar geological characteristics as Browns Range, with indications of high value rare earth elements.

The funds raised comprised a rights issue with 96% shareholder acceptance, with the remaining 4% underwritten by the lead manager Patersons Securities.

The A$9.5 million included A$2.1 million from the conversion of listed options.

RC drilling is also scheduled for several uranium targets at the Gardiner Tanami Project which the company expects to begin this week.

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Orion Metals Rare Earth Explorer Surges 72% On REE Discovery

Published on Wed 15th September 2010

Orion Metals (ASX: ORM) has acquired the Killi Killi Hills Prospect from Mount Resources, which consists of two West Australian tenements, EL 80/4029 and EL 80/4197.

The company said the prospect is near Northern Uranium's (ASX: NTU) Browns Range Heavy Rare Earth Element Project.

Total consideration is $55,000, which includes $30,000 in cash and the issue of 500,000 ORM ordinary shares at $0.05, with the possibility ORM will pay a 1% future royalty of the gross sales (capped at $100,000) to Mount.

Tenement E80/4029 covers 32.3 square kilometres over 10 blocks and tenement E80/4197 is 9.7 square kilometres over 3 blocks, for a total of 42 square kilometres.

The tenements are located on the Northern Territory border, approximately 10km north of the Halls Creek - Alice Springs road on the northern edge of the Tanami Desert, approximately 300km south-east of Halls Creek.

A field inspection was conducted in July as part of the due diligence and 45 rock chip samples were collected in the immediate area of the 2 radiometric anomalies previously identified, with the indicated uranium mineralisation confirmed by spectrometer.

Orion anticipates a complete set of lab results for each sample and a petrology report will be available within the next 7 days.

Exploration in 1969 confirmed low order uranium occurrences in a flat-dipping Upper Proterozoic basal conglomerate overlying Lower Proterozoic basement.

Limited analysis at the time indicated the presence of Rare Earth Elements (REE), particularly yttrium and the 'heavy' members of the REE suite.

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Northern Uranium China Deal May Face Australian Regulatory Hurdles

SYDNEY (Dow Jones)--Plans by a government-controlled Chinese company to invest in a Western Australian uranium explorer may face significant hurdles before winning regulatory approval in Australia, according to lawyers and takeover experts.

Northern Uranium Ltd. (NTU.ASX) Monday said it has signed a binding letter of intent with Chinese mineral explorer Jiangsu Eastern China Non-Ferrous Metals Investment Holding Co., a unit of the East China Mineral Exploration and Development Bureau, or ECE, a mining agency owned by the Jiangsu provincial government.

Under the terms of the letter, ECE would acquire 51% of Northern Uranium for A$15.7 million.

But foreign investment by Chinese state-owned companies--particularly in sensitive commodities such as uranium and rare earths being explored by Northern Uranium--have run foul of Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board in recent years.

"FIRB doesn't have a rule book for this," says Simon Price, director at Azure Capital, a Perth-based advisory firm that has worked on Chinese resource takeovers. "They used to have fixed principles for investments by state-owned enterprises but they have replaced them with more general concepts."

"The key thing is whether the (suitor) has a standalone governance structure," said one lawyer familiar with FIRB decisions. "The closer they are to the government, the more likely they may be seen as a conduit for gathering information, rather than as an independent mining house."

The FIRB took just a month to approve privately-held Sichuan Hanlong Group Co.'s purchase of a 55% stake in Moly Mines Ltd. (MOL.AU) last November, but state owned companies face a higher bar.

"If this is directly controlled by Jiangsu province, so there's not a lot of separation, that's going to be a factor," said Price.

The level of control in Australia also makes a difference. In a speech to the Australia China Business Council last year, FIRB's executive director Patrick Colmer said the government was "much more comfortable" with foreign investments in new projects below 50%.

China Nonferrous Metal Mining Co.'s proposed A$500 million bid for a 51% stake in rare earths explorer Lynas Corp. Ltd. (LYC.AU) last year collapsed after FIRB insisted China Nonferrous lower its stake below 50% and take less than half of the board seats.

Northern Uranium, however, may have a strategy in place to get around this issue.

George Bauk, Northern's managing director, said the 34.5 million options outstanding on the company would be able to dilute ECE's stake down to 41%.

The options, expiring in March and September 2012, can be exercised for 15 cents and 20 cents respectively, compared to Northern's current price of 10 cents.

"They were looking for a placement of 51% but should the price go up above 15 cents 20 cents there's a mechanism for them to go under 50%," he said.

Under the current proposal, ECE would have three seats on Northern Uranium's nine member board and would choose two more independent directors in cooperation with the current board, Northern said.

But the biggest hurdle may well come down to the nature of the materials being mined.

Uranium's potential military use makes it the subject of close scrutiny, and Australia's exports to China are governed by a cooperation agreement restricting use to civilian power stations overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But the level of regulation may make uranium deals easier, as evidenced by state owned China Uranium Development Company Ltd.'s purchase of a 70% stake in Perth based uranium explorer Energy Metals Ltd. (EME.AU) for A$100 million last
year.

A person familiar with the deal said that uranium was expected to be "not particularly sensitive", especially as Northern already has an agreement to market all its uranium through French nuclear utility Areva S.A. (CEI.FR).

Northern's rare earths interests may be a bigger concern, said the lawyer familiar with the FIRB.

China holds around 90% of the world's resources of rare earth metals, which have growing uses in electronics, lasers and hybrid car technology.

ECE already holds 22% of Arafura Resources Ltd. (ARU.AU), which is exploring the Nolans Bore deposit north of Alice Springs, one of the world's top half-dozen rare earths resources outside China.

Fears about Beijing's hold over the global rare earths market are likely to have played a part in FIRB's decision over Lynas, which has the most developed resource of the metals outside China.

However, Bauk said that Northern's interests in those commodities were not advanced. "There's some really encouraging rockchip samples but we're in such an early stage there, a lot of work has to come into that."

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Lynas Corporation acquires key stake in Northern Uranium

Rare earths developer Lynas Corporation (ASX: LYC) has popped up on the share register of Northern Uranium (ASX: NTU) acquiring 9,509,366 shares in on-market purchases in three tranches at $0.12 to $0.135 per share on 19 August 2010.

The share purchases provide Lynas with a 9.44% stake in Northern Uranium.



Interestingly, on 9 August, 2010 Northern Uranium announced it had signed a binding letter of intent with Jiangsu Eastern China Non-Ferrous Metals Investment Holding Co., Ltd, an affiliate of East China Exploration & Development.

Results achieved to date by Northern Uranium at its heavy rare earths project have been very encouraging.

Subject to approval from Northern Uranium shareholders, ECE will invest about A$15.7m in Northern Uranium at a share subscription price of A$0.145 per share.

Northern Uranium owns the Browns Range Rare Earths project which previously formed part of the Gardiner-Tanami Project, but since 2009 has become a focus for the company’s rare earth element (REE) exploration program.

The project consists of two granted exploration licenses and one tenement application. The tenements cover an area of 400 km2 within Western Australia, located adjacent to the WA/NT border approximately 150 km southeast of Halls Creek.

A total of 59 rock chip samples were collected from the Browns Range area, with 11 returning assays with TREE+Y greater than 1% and up to a maximum of 7.95% TREE+Y.

REE distribution is dominated by high value Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE), with 65-75% of REE’s being Heavy REE for all except one of the anomalous samples.

Based on the results and the latest Rare Earth prices for oxide FOB China, the range of value of the Brown Range xenotime mineralisation from the above table is US$547 per tonne to US$5,727 per tonne. This is largely due to HREE being over ~70% of all REE in samples.

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Australian Uranium Explorer Northern Uranium Discovers Prized Heavy Rare Earth Elements

Rare Earths

Rare earths are a particular class of elements in the Periodic Table that were once difficult to extract and purify. They are used in many high-technology applications including magnets, rechargeable batteries, electronic displays, lasers, superconductors, catalytic converters, smart bombs, and wind turbines. China supplies about 95% of world production. Given the strategic importance of rare earths, China has been stockpiling them and restricting exports. A Chinese government report has recommended an outright ban on exporting the scarcest of these elements.


NORTHERN URANIUM - NTU

Northern Uranium (ASX: NTU) has followed up December discoveries of significant rare earth elements targets at its 100%-owned Gardiner-Tanami project, with today's news of high concentration of heavy rare earth elements (HREE) in the mineralization.

Heavy REE's have a significantly higher market value on a per pound basis than the more common light REE's.

NTU identified unusually high concentrations of HREE in hydrothermal quartz-xenotime mineralisation in the Browns Range Dome area at Gardiner-Tanami.

NTU has targeted rare earths exploration as a significant focus in 2010 at at the Gardiner-Tanami project, bordering the Northern Territory and Western Australia, in tandem with the company's core uranium project.

The results of an age-dating study pointed to the possibility of large scale HREE ore-deposit potential in the area.

The company's HREE discovery represents an interesting value-adding component for NTU investors and shareholders.

Executive chairman Kevin Schultz said that a further study of the HREE bearing mineralisation at the company's tenements showed that at current REE prices it has extremely high in-ground value.

In fact, analysis to date indicated it has an estimated in-ground value of US$1,270 per tonne.

Xenotime (a yttrium and rare earths bearing phosphate mineral) was first identified in the western Browns Range Dome area in the 1980s by Japanese nuclear energy organization PNC Exploration while exploring for uranium.

PNC named the area of quartz-xenotime mineralisation “Area 5 Prospect” and one of the larger quartz-xenotime veins gave extremely high grade results up to 16% yttrium, 0.2% uranium, 0.5% light Rare Earth Elements (LREE) and 12% HREE.

Then in 2009, previously unknown quartz-xenotime mineralisation was encountered by NTU - 4km to the northnortheast of Area 5 Prospect during Northern Uranium’s uranium exploration program.

These newly discovered hydrothermal xenotime-quartz stockworks, referred to as “NNE Prospect”, are similar to the Area 5 occurrences. Xenotime concentration was recorded as being up to 3-4 wt-%.

Interestingly, the rare earths and Yttrium distribution from assay results of the quartzxenotime mineralisation at NNE Prospect at typical current market prices for rare earth metals, demonstrates NTU's HREE's at Browns Range compares favourably with other major global REE deposits.

The Browns Range Dome area could conceivably become an important new province for highgrade Yttrium-HREE mineralisation.

NTU will proceed with the HREE exploration program, in conjunction with the 2010 uranium exploration programm including review and re-processing of airborne mapping data and airborne radiometrics.

An extensive rare earths target zone has been identified by NTU at the project.

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