Toro Energy Limited announced that the first phase of the re-engineering study at its Lake Maitland Uranium Deposit has progressed with the vanadium resource currently being integrated into the uranium resource block model ready for optimisation. The Lake Maitland Uranium Deposit is part of Toro's environmentally approved Wiluna Uranium Project, located near Wiluna along the Goldfields Highway, some 710km NE of Perth in Western Australia. The re-engineering follows on from the success of research into beneficiation of the potential Lake Maitland uranium ore and the subsequent redesign of the processing flowsheet for a stand-alone Lake Maitland mining and processing operation. The work is also necessitated by the excellent vanadium recovery achieved from the scoping level testing of the potential Lake Maitland ore, which may produce a valuable V2O5 by-product for a Lake Maitland mine. The first phase of the re-engineering work is to integrate the recent vanadium (as V2O5) resource estimation into the block model of the Lake Maitland uranium (as U3O8) resource, so that the Lake Maitland deposit can be re-optimised for mining. Previously, the Inferred V2O5 resource was estimated within the U3O8 resource mineralisation envelope and reported at various V2O5 cut-offs without creating a block model for mining purposes. In order to accommodate the economics of dual-processing uranium and vanadium in the newly proposed processing circuit in preparation for a potential re-optimisation of the proposed mining operation, every block in the Lake Maitland U3O8 resource block model will have an estimated average grade of both U3O8 and V2O5. The re-optimisation of the uranium mine will then be able to take into account the added net value of the V2O5 production as well as all of the cost efficiencies that have been created from the recent research into beneficiation and the downstream changes and improvements in the processing stream. Ultimately, it is anticipated that the re-engineering study will result in a lowering of the optimised mining cut-offs and therefore more of the resource being processed over the life of the mine, which may result in a significant increase in the Wiluna Uranium Project's value. The re-engineering study will assume a stand-alone mining and processing operation at Lake Maitland as it represents a proportionally large amount of the Wiluna Uranium Project's resources of U3O8, some 42% of the total at a 200pmm U3O8 cut-off at 26.4 Mlbs U3O8, and is the most amenable of the Wiluna uranium deposits to the proposed new screening and cycloning beneficiation method. Toro considers a stand-alone Lake Maitland operation provides the Company a substantial degree of optionality with its significant uranium and vanadium resources. The successful scoping level research and improvements achieved at Lake Maitland to date also highlight opportunities within the broader Wiluna Uranium Project given the potential improved economics at Lake Maitland. The Lake Maitland studies act as a testing ground for methods that may have the potential to be applied to the entire Wiluna Uranium Project.