A-Cap Energy Limited has started a 1,500m (PQ) diamond drill core program over 25 holes at its Letlhakane Project in Botswana, host to one of the world's top 10 undeveloped uranium resources. The program is expected to take up to six to eight weeks and will collect approximately 2 tonne
of mineralised material for beneficiation, leaching, and metallurgical testwork already underway. In conjunction with a ramp up of activities on the ground at Letlhakane being led by new country manager, Mr. Peter Sheehan, metallurgical studies comprising mineralogy and ore characterisation will supplement the beneficiation program. To increase Letlhakane's profitability, A-Cap has engaged technical partners with world-leading expertise in uranium ore sorting and processing that specialise in increasing the ore feed grade to the mill as well as removing acid consuming gangue. Work has begun on preliminary beneficiation testwork based on historic composite ore samples recovered from storage at Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, (ANSTO) which was excess to previous column leach tests conducted in 2014. 90kg of composite ore material from Gorgon South, Kraken and Serule West was supplied to mineral processing leaders Nagrom in Perth for sample preparation before being sent to magnetic separation company Steinert for sorting/beneficiation testwork utilising radiometric, XRT, and hyperspectral sensors as well as beneficiation techniques by gravity separation using spiral and dense media separation. Steinert have been highly successful upgrading uranium ore with sorting programs for other clients in recent years2, using radiometric information to pre-classify the ore into product and waste for their program development. Once they have a "pre-classified" ore and waste fraction, they process these fractions through a sorter with multiple sensors and record all the information from the sensors available on this sorter (colour, laser, induction and XRT). Subsequently they use proprietary software to detect variations in sensor data between the ore and waste fractions either in: density, colour or any of the other sensors in combination. There are over 200 parameters recorded and they use multiple sensor combinations to find the best potential sorting algorithm to sort the specific ore. These results will be used to optimise design of the sorting/beneficiation testwork for the PQ core samples. Acid consumption is a major operating cost in the proposed process route set out in
Letlhakane's 2016 Feasibility Study. Metallurgical consultants MinAssist found that the ANSTO samples from previous Acid Soluble Uranium (ASU) properties test work were ideal for mineralogical classification by Quantitative XRD analysis to provide the following insights: Identify the acid consuming minerals in ASU head samples; Determine the mineral dissolution rate of each acid consuming mineral by analysis of head and residue samples, to provide estimates of acid consumption by mineral (this extends on total acid consumption value from ASU test); and Infer mineralogy and acid consumption for the entire body using machine learning by linking geochemistry, lithologies, and location to mineralogy characterisation. This information can then be used to better inform the geological block model with acid consumption parameters and in generating orebody geometallurgical domains, which can be used to optimise the resource to minimise acid consumption and drive down costs. 48 samples were sent to Bureau Veritas (ADE).