Roughrider East shows robust potential

The latest drill results from Hathor Exploration‘s (hat-v) Roughrider uranium discovery on the Midwest Northeast project in Saskatchewan’s prolific Athabasca basin are literally off the scale.

“This is a globally significant discovery in terms of grade,” Michael Gunning, Hathor’s chief operating officer, told The Northern Miner. “The grades we are seeing are real at Roughrider.”

While testing the heart of the newly discovered Roughrider East zone, hole 648 cut 63.5 metres of 7.75% U3O8, starting from a downhole depth of 237 metres. The intercept included 17.5 metres grading 24.28% U3O8, with individual assays as high as 87.2% U3O8.

“This is a spectacular hole,” says Gunning. “Not only is the grade continuity at Roughrider the best-of-breed on a global scale, it is more continuous than people think.”

Hathor believes the 63.5-metre-long intersection is close to the true structural thickness of the zone. Two higher-grade sections of 42 metres averaging 11.06% U3O8 and 18.5 metres of 1.48% U3O8 are separated by a 3-metre wide zone of less than 0.05% U3O8.

The intercept starts from approximately 10 metres below an unconformity at the contact between Paleoproterozoic basement metamorphic rocks of the Wollaston Group and overlying sandstones of the Athabasca Group.

Hole 648 was an infill hole designed to test a 40-metre gap between holes 613 and 610, which were drilled earlier this year during the winter campaign. Spotted 20 metres down-dip from 648, hole 610 hit a previously reported 12 metres of 22.51% U3O8 in an upper 61-metre-long zone of lower grade mineralization averaging less than 1% U3O8.

Hole 613, drilled 20 metres up-dip of hole 648, intersected a previously reported 4.5 metres of 1.17% U3O8 in an upper 39-metre-long lower-grade zone, pus 16 metres of 1.24% U3O8 in a lower zone.

Hole 648 is the first hole to be released with complete assay results from a summer’s drilling campaign that targeted the Roughrider and Roughrider East zones with an additional 18,840 metres in 52 holes.

Roughrider East was discovered last year at the end of the summer program in an area 200 metres east of the original Roughrider zone. Roughrider was conservatively estimated in 2009 to contain an indicated 116,000 tonnes grading 2.57% U3O8, plus an inferred 83,000 tonnes grading 3% U3O8, for a combined total of 12 million lbs. uranium oxide.

The discovery hole into Roughrider East intercepted 28 metres grading 12.71% U3O8, starting from 302 metres down-hole. Since then, Hathor has put some 50 holes into the new discovery, defining 220 metres of strike length.

Hathor is working on a geological model for Roughrider, which will be used to start the resource model once all assay data from the summer program is in hand. An updated resource estimate for the Roughrider deposit is also expected in the coming months.

Hathor owns 90% of the Midwest Northeast property, while Terra Ventures (tas-v) owns a 10% carried interest through to the completion of a feasibility study. Hathor is trading around $2.25 in a 52-week range of $2.34-1.35, with 107 million shares outstanding, or almost 118 million fully diluted.

Terra was up 5.5? on the day at 37.5?, in a 52-week trading range of 60-25?. The junior has 54.2 million shares outstanding.