Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The largest and highest grade uranium deposits in the world occur in ancient sedimentary basins, particularly in Saskatchewan, Canada, and the Northern Territory, Australia. Uranium deposits occur in these basins near the unconformity, which is the boundary between much older basement rocks and younger sediments that overlie them. The recent surge in uranium prices and the realization that known uranium resources soon will be exhausted has prompted exploration in other ancient basins in Canada in which uranium showings occur. Two such basins, the western Thelon Basin in Nunavut and the older Otish Basin in Quebec, are currently being explored by two Canadian companies, Cameco Corp and Uravan Minerals Inc. These basins have been under-explored, and there is a need to decipher the character and timing of the fluids that created the showings and evaluate their similarities, if any, to the large unconformity-type uranium deposits in Saskatchewan. ) The research we are proposing will be a collaborative effort that includes 1 PDF, 2 PhD students, 3 Research Associates, 2 faculty and several personnel at Cameco and Uravan who will evaluate how the showings formed, where the fluids that formed them originated, what was the driver for fluid flow and what properties of these showings can be exploited in exploration for economic uranium deposits. The research has an applied component to understand how uranium mineralization in other basins in Canada formed and to provide data and geochemical techniques to refine exploration strategies for uranium. It also has a pure research component in evaluating how concentrations of uranium have formed in Paleoproterozoic basins of different ages, what is the likely source of the uranium and whether the character of fluids in basins have changed through time.