Namibia : Deep Yellow turns to U-pgradeTM for efficiency on Tumas uranium

Deep Yellow Ltd, owning uranium exploration advanced projects in Namibia, will apply U-pgrade^TM process in the Tumas project (photo) to potentially achieve over 82% of uranium recovery.

A binding technology licence agreement has been reached, that for, with Marenica Energy Ltd, incorporated in 1978 in New South Wales, the Australian listed company on 12 September said.

“This landmark agreement giving us access to the U-pgrade^TM process will enable us to accelerate the Project’s development leveraging off the potential to capture significant cost benefits as a result of the application of this technology,” Greg Cochran, Deep Yellow’s Managing Director said.

According to Deep Yellow, test-work program demonstrated that U-pgrade^TM process has the potential to reject up to 98% of the mass in processing Tumas ore.

Meanwhile, the technology leads to recovering over 82% of the uranium, thus presenting the potential to dramatically reduce both capital and operating costs and enabling Tumas to be developed at a lower uranium incentive price.

Deep Yellow Ltd, also listed on the Namibian Stock Exchange, operates in Namibia through its wholly owned subsidiary Reptile Uranium Namibia (Pty) Ltd.

The Tumas deposit has a strike length of approximately 16 km with an average width of around 400 m and extends to a maximum depth of 47 m.

It has 14.8Mt of resources at 366 ppm U3O8 for 11.9 Mlbs U3O8 and Deep Yellow is confident the project is "ideally positioned" to become Namibia’s next uranium mine.