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Fission Uranium and Alpha Minerals discover Saskatchewan's next major uranium deposit by Edward Schiller PhD To 2008, more uranium had been mined in Canada than any other country – 428,000 tonnes, 18% of world total (World Nuclear Association) and the country is currently responsible for approximately 15% of world supply. Uranium mining in Canada commenced in the early 1930s at Port Radium, Northwest Territories, followed by mine openings in Ontario at Bancroft and Elliot Lake and in northern Saskatchewan at Beaverlodge (Uranium City) in the 1950s. The value of northern Saskatchewan's Athabasca sedimentary basin as a potential host for uranium was an outcome of uranium discoveries in the Colorado plateau in the Western US. In the late 1960s, a Calgary-based consortium of junior oil companies undertook 18 www.resourceworld.com a regional airborne radiometric survey of the Athabasca Basin using the Colorado deposits as a model. The implementation of airborne radiometric surveys was a new application of geophysical investigations at this time. These surveys led to the discovery of the Rabbit Lake deposit on the eastern edge of the basin in 1968 and discoveries of the Cluff Lake deposits in the late-1960s to early-1970s on the western side of the basin. Further discoveries turned up in the mid to late 1970s of the Key Lake, Midwest Lake, McLean Lake deposits on the east and southeast edges of the basin, and in the 1980s, the Cigar Lake and McArthur River deposits on the eastern side of the basin. Due to their unique origin, the Saskatchewan uranium deposits became what are now known as unconformitytype deposits – formed at or near the contact between Proterozoic sedimentary rocks and underlying Paleo-Proterozoic/ Archean metamorphic and igneous rocks. Prior to 2007, exploration favoured investigations over or immediately adjacent to the basin until anomalous radon or other radiometric investigations targeted what is now the Patterson Lake South (PLS) Project of Alpha Minerals Inc. [AMW-TSXV; E2G-FSE] and Fission Uranium Corp. [FCU-TSXV; FCUUF-OTCQX] south of the southerly boundary of the basin were recognized. Work by Canadian Occidental, an oil company in the late-1970s indicated that there were radon anomalies located november 2013