Elevate Uranium Confirms Full Operation of U-pgrade Beneficiation Pilot Plant in Namibia

Elevate Uranium (ASX: EL8) has confirmed that all five stages of its U-pgrade uranium beneficiation pilot plant in Namibia are now in operation, using ore samples from its neighbouring Marenica project.

Benchscale test work reported by Elevate in 2013 demonstrated that when beneficiating ore from Marenica, the U-pgrade process could produce a final concentrate grading approximately 5,000 parts per million triuranium octoxide (equivalent to 4,240ppm uranium).

The excavation of ore in 2012 to generate samples for benchscale testing was followed by substantial additional drilling and re-evaluation of the Marenica resource including a doubling of its grade.

The Namibian plant is designed to convert this historical benchscale performance into continuously operating, scalable data and confirm that U-pgrade can remove gangue waste material to produce a low-mass, high-grade concentrate before leaching.

This data is then expected to establish U-pgrade’s technical suitability for commercialisation, with the results used to directly inform upcoming scoping and feasibility studies for Marenica.

Upgrading Marenica Ore

Pilot plant operation is reported to be rejecting 88% of the bulk ore mass and upgrading the ore from 89ppm to 590ppm before it reaches the final concentration stage.

The results have been achieved through an upgrade ratio of seven times using Stage 1 through to Stage 4, which is in line with the ratio achieved at the equivalent point in historical benchscale tests.

Importantly, Stage 4 calcite flotation removed the primary acid consumer from the leach feed, producing a feed that can be simply leached in acid at ambient temperature in a residence time of around six hours.

Ambient temperature leaching removes the heating requirement and lowers the residence time (compared to 36 hours) is reported to reduce the leach circuit volume required for a given throughput by a factor of six.

Elevate has excavated new ore samples at the increased resource grade for the pilot plant campaign to determine the effect of increased grade on mass and uranium distributions.

‘Major Structural Advantage’

“That single outcome fundamentally changes the size, energy demands, operability and operating costs of a leach plant utilising the U-pgrade process – which is a major structural advantage we have regardless of the final concentrate grade,” said Elevate managing director Murray Hill.

Combined with the mass reduction achieved from Stage 1 to Stage 4, this is expected to facilitate a materially smaller and simpler leach circuit than conventional treatment of this ore type would require.

Stage 5 uranium flotation is the final concentration step that could potentially deliver the largest incremental grade uplift and results of this step are expected to be generated before year end.

“We knew that U-pgrade would work, we were just not certain how the results from the benchscale testwork would translate to a pilot plant,” Mr Hill said.

“The low volumetric flows of a pilot plant produce operating challenges that are not evident in a full-scale operating plant—this has resulted in several challenges that our team in Namibia has now resolved.”