Wyoming uranium deposits are roll-front uranium deposits as defined in the “World Distribution of Uranium Deposits (UDEPO) with Uranium Deposit Classification”, (IAEA, 2009). Uranium deposits in the Gas Hills were formed by the classic Wyoming-type roll-fronts. Rollfronts are irregular in shape,roughly tabular and elongated, and range from thin pods and a few feet in width and length, to bodies several hundred or thousands of feet in length. The deposits are roughly parallel to the enclosing beds but may form rolls that cut across bedding. Roll-front deposits are typified by a C-shaped morphology in which the outside of the C extends downgradient in the direction of historic groundwater flow and the tails extend up-gradient of historic groundwater flow. The tails are typically caught up in the finer sand and silt deposits that grade into over and underlying mudstones, whereas the heart of the roll-front (higher grade mineralization) lies within the more porous and permeable sandstones toward the middle of the fluvial deposits.

The Gas Hills uranium deposits are present in an arkosic sandstone facies, the Puddle Springs member of the Wind River formation (e.g. King and Austin, 1966; Armstrong, 1970). Knowledge of the distribution of this member is of great importance in the search for uranium deposits, as permeability determines whether a rock is a favorable or unfavorable host. Fine-grained, only slightly permeable rocks are unfavorable hosts. Highly porous conglom ........

Azarga plans to use the ISR mining technique with a low pH lixiviant at the Project. There is no excavation of ore and no mining dilution with this method. Only minerals that can be taken into solution are recovered.

This mining method utilizes injection wells to introduce a lixiviant into the mineralized zone. These advantages include potential for higher recovery, shorter leaching duration, lower lixiviant and oxidant requirements, constituent-specific advantages during groundwater restoration, and a higher degree of natural attenuation than alkaline lixiviant. The lixiviant is made of native groundwater fortified with a complexing agent such as sulfuric acid. The complexing agent bonds with the uranium to form uranyl sulfate, which is then recovered through a series of production wells and piped to a processing plant where the uranyl sulfate is removed from solution using ion exchange. The groundwater is re-fortified with the complexing agent and recirculated to the wellfield to recover additional uranium.

The most fundamental component of ISR mine development and production is the production pattern. A pattern consists of one production well and multiple injection wells which feed lixiviant back to the production well. Injection wells are commonly shared by multiple production wells. Header houses serve multiple patterns and function as both distribution points for injection flow and collection points for production flow. The processing or satellite ........

- subscription is required.

- subscription is required.