Juniors rush the Athabasca Basin

Vancouver – Focusing its sights on the world’s premier uranium producing area, the Athabasca Basin of northern Saskatchewan, Harry Barr’s CanAlaska Ventures (CVV-V) has acquired a significant land position in the region that has been garnering serious market interest.

With the metal now over US$20.00 per pound, CanAlaska recently announced the acquisition of 48,000 hectares of uranium prospects on the eastern side of the Basin.

In outlining the company’s upcoming exploration plans, Peter Dasler, President of CanAlaska, stated “We are just talking to Fugro now about some airborne (geophysics), that’s the initial thing, there are aircraft up there, but we also have a ground crew ready to go in on some of the pieces of ground, so we are not very far from road access on most of the stuff.”

Dasler continued, “Over the last two months now, we’ve been able to pull a lot of stuff (data) out of the Saskatchewan Government, there’s a lot of digital material that we’ve been able to put together.”

Exploration in the Basin had quieted in conjunction with the sag in U3O8 prices from the late-1990s, down to the US$7 per pound level, until mid-2003 when prices began their current rally to the plus US$20-level.

Commenting on the availability of prospective land in the Basin, Peter Dasler further stated “most of the ground that we’ve been acquiring has been held, up until a few years ago, by Uranerz and Cameco (CCO-T), so the majors have had this ground. We’re very pleased with one large piece of ground very close to McArthur River, down dip in the Basin.”

The soaring price of the reactor fuel and investor interest has not gone un-noticed amongst other junior explorers. Another group that has recently jumped into the rush is Consolidated Abaddon Resources (ABN-V) who have staked about 6,000 hectares, also on the eastern edge of the Basin. The newly acquired Huard Lake project is located about 12 km. north of the Cameco’s McArthur River deposit, the world’s largest high-grade uranium deposit containing proven and probable reserves of 437 million pounds of U3O8 with an average ore grade of 25% U3O8.

As of the latest figures, CanAlaska reports 27.3 million shares outstanding with the issue seeing a rally from the 15 per share level to the 35 level on very strong volume with investors hungry for uranium juniors. Consolidated Abaddon saw its market light up on announcement of the property acquisition, gaining over 40%, or 5.5 to 19 per share on very high volume, the company’s shares outstanding position is reported at 7.6 million.