*originally published 12-12-22
The Athabasca Basin, as any uranium investor would tell you, is the top tier location for large, high-grade resources of U3O8. The grades aren’t just marginally better than other regions around the world but are often 10-100 times higher.
It’s no coincidence that most of Cameco’s resources discovered decades ago, became mines here to the East of the basin. Fast forward to this decade, and all the excitement for the present and future is actually in the west of the basin. Here we find Nexgen’s Arrow, Fission’s Triple R, and a hint that Fission 3.0 may be onto something extremely high-grade as the scintillometer’s readings are pointing to “off the charts” counts per second. I’m laymen’s terms: lots and lots of radiation usually associated with ridiculously high grade.
Davidson River is Standard Uranium’s (STND.V) flagship property, located in the southwest Athabasca uranium district of the Athabasca Basin, and features the inferred extension of the structural trend that hosts these discoveries. In a geological perspective, they’re quite close.
I’m going to link up an interactive web site you can go and play around with the different projects yourself, Standard Uranium’s Davidson River being highlighted here with a red border:
The company has been hard at work drilling the four main areas of the project for a few years and it seems they’re getting ever closer. Through geophysics and subsequent drilling, they’ve identified one major ingredient needed for these discoveries in the basement rock: graphitic-sulphidic structures. But uranium here is often found in such high grades that the actual footprint of the resource isn’t that big, or it may be deep, which makes it incredibly difficult to find. And that’s exactly what they’re aiming for: big risk, big reward.
The company used to have a very heavy retail base, but now I would guess that the bulk of the players long this stock are specialist funds. Retail investors don’t usually have the patience it takes to find what Standard Uranium is looking for, but Standard Uranium is doing the right thing: keeping their head down and drilling what they’ve got.
Speaking of which, to the northwest of the Basin, they also own 100% of a project called Sun Dog, which has promising mineralization at surface and will be drilled this coming winter. Shortly after, they will drill their projects to the East of the basin, Atlantic and Canary, for the first time in spring. After that, the company will concentrate once again on the flagship property Davidson River for summer and fall drilling. I like the board and management team, they are looking for something massive and with some patience and a little push from Lady Luck, they just might find it.
As I brought up recently on my 3-minute hit about the company about a month ago, someone clearly believes in what Standard is doing and they’re back in with gusto:
To narrow down on where exactly to drill, Standard is bringing in Goldspot Discoveries and their machine learning technology, which is a welcome addition.
At a 7c price and market cap of barely 12m CAD, if they hit, I can see this going multiples of this level in a matter of days as the shorts are forced to close their position. If they get but a sniff in the form of counts per second or a long intersection of high grade-uranium mineralization, since they are well-known in this space, it will be a bidding war to behold. If you believe the company has a shot and want to avoid being priced out in case they hit, I think this is a very reasonable entry point.
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