Standard Uranium Ltd (TSX-V:STND, OTCQB:STTDF) vice president of exploration Sean Hillacre joined Proactive to discuss positive drill results out of the company’s Atlantic project in the Athabasca Basin, Saskatchewan.
The explorer announced earlier this week that its 2024 winter drill program confirmed uranium mineralization in three drill holes, with elevated uranium levels found in sandstone and basement-hosted zones which alludes to a uranium-fertile system.
Hillacre told Proactive these findings are important for the company’s future work, as they provide a solid foundation for further exploration. Catch up on the full interview below.
Proactive: We talked at the beginning of the year about the work plan this year, and it was a very busy one. And that included the drilling of the Atlantic project, which is one of your joint ventures. So, the program, you're now out with a few of the results. Tell me what you saw there.
Sean Hillacre: It was our first drill program of 2024. You know, it's been a super busy year, like you said, with all the deals that we've managed to get done over the last 12 months. And we kicked it off really strong with the Atlantic project. This project is under option to ATCO (TSX:ACO.X) Mining. It was our first program on this project. It's one of our East side projects, about 11 km straight north of the Hurricane deposit, one of the highest grade deposits in the world that's undeveloped, so that's exactly what we're looking for. And we came out here to a brand new area with some targets that we developed back in 2022 and drilled them for the first time. And you know what? We came up with uranium in three of the five holes, as well as a bunch of alteration and really good-looking things that indicate that this is indeed a uranium-fertile corridor. So we're really excited about what we saw.
Was there a particular area that was better than others? I know you don't have the full assays back, so this is more analytical. But is it where you thought you should be working on?
This was kind of an untested area relative to all the exploration that's happened over here on the East side historically. There was one drill hole, kind of nearby, that Denison Mines drilled back in 2016, I believe. They had a really good target there, but they actually overshot the conductor, those graphite rocks that we're looking for that create the fluid highways for these uranium systems. They had some good-looking results in that hole. They had a little bit of a sniff of uranium in that hole. But they didn't really verify that big conductor they were looking for. They thought the target was actually probably to the south.
So, we did some modeling of the geophysics, did new geophysics in 2022, and came back to follow up along strike and stepped back a little bit and we actually hit that major structure in three of the holes, and that's where we had the uranium mineralization. We've confirmed that now: uranium both in the sandstone above the unconformity and related to those structures in the basement as well.
That's a really important distinction to make, I think, is having uranium both in the sandstone and the basement, and really verifying that structure that Denison was looking for a number of years ago. We're really happy that we identified that structure. It looks fantastic. Lots of graphite. It's been reused and reactivated. All of the ingredients we're looking for, for these high-grade uranium deposits.
This really lays a strong foundation for future work as well, because now you've got some questions that you were looking at answered. So, is the next stage to do a little more of the ground physical work?
That's right. Like I said, we've hit the structure. We've identified dravite alteration, which is a key pathfinder mineral for high-grade uranium. We've seen uranium by itself in three of the drill holes. So now we have a lot of room to grow from here. Like I said, it's a brand new area, first drill program ever. Super fantastic result to come out with out of the gate.
Now we can chase this thing, you know, up dip and along strike. Atlantic covers about 6.5 kilometers of this kind of East-West trend that's about 18 kilometers long. So we're surrounded by good neighbors in the area. IsoEnergy is obviously very active over here. Like I said, Hurricane’s nearby. And so there's a lot of room to run on this project. We're really looking forward to sharpening our pencils with a little bit more geophysical work. Like you said, we haven't drilled the middle claims of this project ever yet. We just focused on the Western claims for this first project. So we're really excited to get back there and do a little bit more groundwork and sharpen our pencils for phase two and phase three drilling.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style