“I review about 100 different projects a year, most of which go into the round filing cabinet on my floor,” said Tony Harvey, senior technical adviser at ESO Uranium (TSX: ESO), and a former senior manager at Wright Engineers. -Fluor Daniels, who participated in the design and construction of 14 mines around the world. Harvey quickly ticked off what’s necessary to get his attention: “I need to see the story. I need to see the signs before I’ll give it credit.” So why is he advising little-known ESO Uranium, after a long and prolific career?

“I think this one has a lot of history,” Harvey argued. “Not only do you have the Cluff Lake mine, which already confirms the presence of uranium, but you have the Shea Creek drilling intercepts that validate it. We have the drivers that come to our property. We have the rocks, which is also another pole of sign”. The boulders, referred to by Tony Harvey, are the six mineralized uranium boulders near the ESO Uranium project on the company’s Cluff property. Near those boulders, a promising drill hole from the 1970s indicated 0.85% U3O8 over 2.3 meters. It was almost forgotten until the recent explosion of exploration activity in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin, an area that has helped Cameco (NYSE: CCJ) grow to a company with a market capitalization of nearly $12 billion.

What the ESO Uranium geological team will look for on the company’s Cluff property are Cluff Lake-style uranium deposits in basement rocks with the Carswell Structure near the Athabasca Group sandstone unconformity. That was supposedly created by the meteor impact.

Drilling in the wake of the meteorite

“The value of the ore extracted at the Cluff mine, in today’s terms, would be equivalent to $2.6 billion,” explained Harvey. “That’s what was mined at the Cluff mine.” The company’s vice president of exploration, Benjamin Ainsworth, who is a senior geologist and mining engineer, helped explain Cluff’s structure. “Probably a meteor impacted this location and with enough force to break through the Athabasca sandstone layers on the surface. Upon rebounding, the basement rocks were lifted again. Upon rebounding, it also lifted the surrounding Athabasca rocks and flipped upwards , if you can imagine it, like a flower that opens”. As a result, the base rose to the surface and facilitated the search for and extraction of the uranium at Cluff. Ainsworth added: “The significance of that to me and our group is that it shows very high-grade uranium deposits on the western side of Athabasca.”

Drilling a property helps the geological team better understand the area. Since the Cluff property was mined two decades ago, additional scientific study has opened new doors. At the 67th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritic Society, professors of Earth Sciences from the University of Quebec presented a paper titled “A Reassessment of the Size of the Carswell Astroblem.” Montreal scientists concluded at the 2004 annual conference in Brazil: “The Carswell impact structure is therefore older and larger than previously estimated…the central uplift thought to lie beneath the annular dolomitic unit would suggest a basement crater size of 118 to 125 kilometers across.” While some believe the meteor struck around 478 million years ago, recent evidence suggests it may have been closer to 1.8 billion years ago.

Ainsworth warned that there is a lot of risk in drilling for uranium deposits. “The geometry of these things is damn small.” ESO President Jonathan George noted that the world’s richest uranium deposit, the McArthur River, which is home to around 400 million pounds of uranium, had half of its deposit in an area the size of half a football field. “I think it’s amazing,” he said, “that a $7 billion project is in such a small area.”

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