Myriad Uranium drills Wyoming project derailed by Three Mile Island

Vancouver-based Myriad Uranium (CSE: M; US-OTC: MYRUF) has a new permit to expand drilling at a Wyoming project where a past owner spent $25 million ($100 million today) in the late 1970s before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident crashed prices for the heavy metal.

Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) railroad outlined six open pits in a study at the time for the Copper Mountain project that sought to tap 245 million lb. uranium oxide (U₃O₈). That might place it in the same weight class as the probable reserves at NexGen Energy’s (TSX, NYSE: NXE; ASX: NXG) Arrow project in Saskatchewan, although its historical study isn’t directly comparable with modern reporting standards.

Now Myriad CEO Thomas Lamb sees potential for scale and Athabasca region-style mineralization at depth on the roughly 38-sq.-km project 435 km southeast of Cheyenne. The junior is exploring beyond the Canning deposit where it drilled 34 holes last year, with plans for 222 holes across Lucky Cliff, Gem, Mint and Arrowhead starting in February.

“The plan lets us start with a focused dozen drill holes, then scale toward 30–40 holes as results come in,” Lamb told The Northern Miner on Monday. “We want to begin testing a district hypothesis that reaches well outside the historical open-pit footprint.”

Uranium hotspot

Myriad, which has a market capitalization of about C$25.5 million, has seen its shares pop 57% in the past month to 32¢ apiece in Toronto. It’s betting on resurging interest in nuclear plants for cleaner energy than fossil fuels, while Western nations strive to boost production untainted by Russian output or processing.

Wyoming has once more become a centre of activity for United States uranium, with operating in-situ recovery mines, licensed capacity and a regulator base accustomed to the commodity, Lamb said.

In context, Copper Mountain’s “district-scale test” that is to start soon will inevitably be read against the bar set by big uranium camps elsewhere. In Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin, unconformity deposits such as NexGen Energy’s Arrow (TSX, NYSE: NXE) and Fission Uranium’s Triple R (TSX: FCU) define development-class scale through very high grades, while Wyoming more commonly hosts ISR operations across roll-front sandstones.

Copper Mountain is different, Lamb said. It combines thick, shallow, granite-related mineralization that suits conventional mining with the possibility of deeper, structurally focused zones that were barely touched historically. That combination is what Myriad hopes to surface under the 222-hole plan.

The company is moving to simplify Copper Mountain’s ownership in a C$5.8-million buyout of partner Rush Rare Metals by year-end. The project was originally optioned in October 2023 from Rush on an earn-in to 75%.

Case for scale

The Copper Mountain story is a lost-and-found tale, Lamb said. Union Pacific, through its Rocky Mountain Energy subsidiary, drilled roughly 2,000 boreholes totalling 274,320 metres (900,000 ft) during its era.

The plan was to feed a centralized heap-leach operation to supply reactors for California Edison. The work paused as uranium prices fell following the 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown at a reactor near Harrisburg, Penn. While radioactive releases were limited and no immediate deaths occurred, it triggered sweeping U.S. nuclear regulatory reforms and stalled new reactor development for decades.

Challenges remain. The DOE-Bendix tonnage is historical and non-compliant under NI 43-101, meaning Myriad must prove it up with modern drilling, assays and metallurgy. The planned merger with Rush remains pending, leaving ownership simplification a near-term variable.

Winter drilling in central Wyoming is feasible but weather-sensitive, Lamb said, and scaling beyond an initial program will require fresh funding with bonding stepped up in phases. Any conventional mine plan would also demand new baseline studies, engineering and permits beyond today’s exploration approvals, while the deeper unconformity/thrust target – potentially the biggest resource mover – remains untested.

Myriad also owns the Red Basin project in New Mexico. It is a roll-front sandstone uranium deposit with historical work pointing to potential of up to 45 million lb. uranium oxide. Myriad is completing ground geophysics there ahead of follow-up drilling later next year.

Moving forward

Myriad’s current targeting keeps Union Pacific’s hub-and-spoke logic while probing deeper structures that historical programs largely ignored.

Two things make the district timely, Lamb argued. First, the company’s drill program last year verified parts of the Canning model and reported material grade uplift when chip and core assays were compared with probe readings, tightening grade shells that matter for engineering.

“On average, assays came in materially higher than our probe readings – up to roughly 60% at the top end,” Lamb said.

Second, a 2024 hole intersected uranium at about 456 metres (1,495 ft), below the old 600-ft “hard deck,” reviving a 1970s thesis that deeper unconformity or thrust-related traps could add a second style of mineralization akin – in geometry if not grade – to the better-known Canadian examples in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin.

“The unanswered question – and the one that could change the complexion of Copper Mountain,” Lamb said “is whether deeper structures below the 600-ft horizon return intercepts consistent with the unconformity/thrust concept associated with the Athabasca, that Anaconda and Union Pacific only began to test decades ago.”