Gold
The Joyners Find and Brilliant Shear Zones exhibit a major structural control on the known gold mineralisation with the Wiluna project area. Mineralisation is most intense where shearing is adjacent to Banded Iron Formations producing both quartz reef and quartz stockwork style mineralisation.
Gold exploration undertaken recently successfully increased the resource at the Iron Monarch prospect and has identified a new resource at Eagle East. Nine gold deposits have now been identified for a combined Indicated and Measured resource of 788,000 tonnes at 3.5 g/t gold for 87,000 ounces of gold as summarised in table below.
Summary of Gold Resources - Wiluna West Project
| Prospect | Resource Type | Tonnage | Grade g/t Au | Ounces Au |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron Monarch | Indicated | 140,000 | 3.0 | 13,500 |
| Eagle East | Indicated | 102,000 | 3.7 | 12,000 |
| Hawk | Indicated | 42,000 | 2.5 | 3,400 |
| Iron King | Indicated | 163,000 | 3.3 | 17,300 |
| Iron Duke | Indicated | 143,000 | 2.6 | 12,000 |
| Goldfinch | Indicated | 72,000 | 3.0 | 6,900 |
| Bottom Camp | Measured | 21,000 | 7.6 | 5,100 |
| Indicated | 16,000 | 5.5 | 2,800 | |
| Brilliant North | Indicated | 59,000 | 4.6 | 8,700 |
| TOTAL | 788,000 | 3.5 | 87,000 |
No exploration has been carried out on the gold targets since the Company’s primary focus concentrated on iron ore. The gold resources will remain an asset of the Company and will possibly be commercialised in due course when mined in conjunction with iron ore mining.
Uranium
The most southern Wiluna project tenement is exploration licence 53/1159. This lease is located upstream from the Dawson Well, Hinkler Well, Centipede and Lake Way uranium deposits. These deposits, like the Yeleerie deposit (50,000 tonnes of contained U3O8), located 16 km south of the Company’s Project, are calcrete hosted style deposits.
A single stratigraphic traverse of RC holes (26 holes for 1,238 m) was completed to test a possible palaeochannel target within the Abercromby Creek system immediately upstream from the Dawson-Hinkler Well Prospects. Four metre composite samples returned anomalous values up to 74 ppm uranium. Further air-core drilling in early 2008 is currently being fully assessed, returned a maximum of: WWAC9024 3m @ 91.4 U from 4m.
ASX listed company U3O8 Limited has announced additional significant uranium mineralisation from drilling at its Dawson-West Prospect, downstream and contiguous with the eastern boundary of E53/1159. It has been noted that the westernmost traverse, through the Dawson Well zone, intersected a substantial zone of uranium mineralisation one kilometre wide and up to 5m thick, 300-700m from the Company’s eastern tenement boundary.