The Athabasca Basin

The highest-grade uranium district on Earth.¹
Nothing else comes close.

Athabasca deposits run at grades 10 to 100 times greater than the world average for uranium ore.¹

Grade is the whole argument. A deposit ten times richer needs a tenth of the rock moved, milled and processed for the same pound of uranium, which is why a basin covering a small fraction of the world’s prospective ground produces a fifth of its uranium. It is also why exploration here is worth doing at all: a small, high-grade body can matter more than a large, poor one.

Everything happens at the unconformity.

The Athabasca Basin is a bowl of sandstone laid down on much older basement rock. The surface where the two meet is called the unconformity, and it is where the basin’s uranium collects: uranium-bearing fluids moving through the sandstone meet reducing conditions in the basement, and the uranium drops out of solution.

That is why exploration here is a search for structure rather than a search for rock. Faults and conductive graphitic units in the basement channel those fluids, so the work is finding where the plumbing runs, with electromagnetic and gravity surveys, and then drilling the intersections.

Depth to the unconformity drives cost. It sits 400 to 800 metres down across much of the basin, but only 0 to 200 metres at the basin margin, where our Zoo Bay property lies. At C$250–400 per metre, the difference between a 200-metre hole and a 600-metre hole is the difference between testing many targets and testing a few.