Hathor continues to hum (July 09, 2008)

Hathor Exploration (HAT-V) wants to attract major interest in its Midwest NorthEast project in the Athabasca, and with its latest drill hole it continues to do just that.

While an assay still has to be done on this the first hole of its summer program, Hathor reports it has hit upon 69.2 metres of uranium mineralization. The number is not a true width.

Hathor’s president and chief executive, Stephen Stanley, credits the intersect with beating expectations.

“A lot of people doubted whether the summer program would add much value,” he says. “So we’re pretty excited to hit on the first hole. We ended up (finding mineralization) where we were targeting.”

The markets reaction bore out Stanley’s thesis, as the company’s stock jumped roughly 14% or 35 to $2.90 on roughly 2.1 million shares traded.

The hole was drilled as a 15 metre step-out targeting the northeast strike of the Roughrider zone at its 90%-owned Midwest Northeast project — Terra Ventures (TAS-V) owns the remaining 10%.

The zone was discovered in February of this year and the company plans to spend roughly $8 of its $12 million exploration budget for the year at the zone.

The intersect occurred at roughly the 214 metre level and ended in fresh, unaltered, non-uranium-bearing granitic rocks at a drill core length of 419 metres.

At this early stage, Hathor is relying on readings from a scintillometer to measure radioactivity.

Scintillometer readings are a preliminary indicator of radioactive materials and are not directly related to uranium grades.

Hathor says 19 individual zones of highly radioactive mineralization were encountered within broader zones of elevated radioactivity of up to 20.7 metres.

As for when assay results can be expected, Stanley says a time schedule is complicated by the difficulty of drilling. The company plans to drill 8 to 12 holes in its program and normally sends off groups of four to six holes for sampling.

The angle and the length of the holes being drilled means it can take between seven to 14 days to finish drilling one. Stanley’s ballpark estimate was two to three months for assay results from the first hole.

Hathor has 11 projects in the Athabasca region and more than $25 million in cash with which to prove them up. Stanley says the company plans to add a second drill to the Roughrider zone and a third to target other projects in the area.

Its sizable cash position means it doesn’t plan to turn to the market for more funds any time soon as it tries to add heft to its uranium story.

“Our exit strategy here is that in a perfect world there would be a bidding war some time north of a year from now,” Stanley says. “So what happens now doesn’t affect us as much. We’re more focused on the goal of creating something that multiple companies would want to own.”