Toronto-listed uranium heavyweight IsoEnergy, fresh from snapping up ASX-listed Toro Energy, has unveiled spectacular drilling results from its flagship Larocque East project in Canada’s revered Athabasca Basin.
The company's summer drilling blitz successfully tagged widespread and strongly elevated radioactivity over a 600-metre strike length, with some of the strongest results to date coming from outside the existing resource boundary of its world-class Hurricane deposit. The exploration program was expanded to 10,159m across 26 holes to follow up on encouraging winter results.
Of the 26 holes drilled, 18 returned intervals at or above the company’s radioactivity cut-off, with 13 holes returning 1000 counts per second (cps)or greater. Three holes returned over 35,000cps, including the strongest radioactivity ever drilled on the Hurricane South Trend. Radioactivity measured in cps with a handheld spectrometer is a common proxy for uranium grade ahead of laboratory assays.
One standout hole was drilled 75m east of a previous winter drill hole and, importantly, outside the existing Hurricane resource footprint. It intersected a stunning 11,075cps over 3.5m, including an eye-watering peak of43,160cps over half a metre. A second hole, drilled 11m west of a previous intersection, hit 14,135cps over 3m, including a 1-metre section going an impressive 36,292cps.
The recent merger with Toro has given IsoEnergy two very different shots at the uranium market. Toro’s Wiluna project in Western Australia is a vast, shallow and lower-grade affair suited to bulk open-pit development, while Hurricane in Canada packs extraordinary grades into a far more compact deposit at depth. While both feed the same nuclear fuel cycle, their mining propositions are poles apart, offering strategic diversity across exceptional Canadian grade and Australian bulk-scale potential.
The prize in the IsoEnergy portfolio is undoubtedly the Hurricane deposit, which the company says is the world’s highest-grade published indicated uranium resource. It already packs 48.6 million pounds of U3O8 at an incredible indicated grade of 34.5 per cent uranium oxide, with mineralisation at a relatively shallow depth of 325m. To put that in perspective, many of the world’s operating uranium mines consider grades of one to two per cent to be high-grade. A figure north of 30 per cent is pretty well in a league of its own.
The project is positioned in a tier-one neighbourhood. It sits on the Larocque Trend, a regional structure that hosts other notable high-grade occurrences, including those on the neighbouring Dawn Lake joint venture held by uranium titans Cameco and Orano. It also benefits from excellent infrastructure, being just 40km from the McClean Lake uranium mill.
Adding another layer of operational maturity, IsoEnergy has recently secured a formal agreement with the Kineepik Cree Nation, ensuring local members and businesses can participate in and benefit from the company’s activities as its uranium push steps up.
The backdrop of a resurgent uranium price, which has more than tripled in the past three years amid a global pivot back towards nuclear energy, only adds to the significance of IsoEnergy’s exploration success.
For those who previously held Toro Energy shares, the tie-up with IsoEnergy appears to have delivered exactly what was promised on the tin: a slice of a much larger, well-funded uranium player with a truly world-class asset. With Hurricane spitting out these huge numbers, the question is no longer the deposit's quality; it's how much bigger it can become.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Murray Ward
