Each one in plain English, with the numbers worked through for a shareholder.
29 Apr 2019regulatory community update▲ GoodMajor
Canadian and Saskatchewan regulators (the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the provincial Ministry of Environment) accepted NexGen's Project Description for Rook I, which starts the formal environmental assessment of the proposed Arrow mine and mill, run as a joint process. NexGen also filed an initial licence application with the CNSC for a licence to prepare the site and construct. This is the first regulatory step toward permitting after the 2018 prefeasibility study; the release gives no approval date and no approval has been granted.
The first twenty holes of the feasibility program, 8,216.5 m, hit nineteen of nineteen A2 sub-zone targets. These are radioactivity readings rather than assays: intervals such as 10.15 m and 12.55 m of composite off-scale radioactivity above 10,000 counts per second, with several metres of massive pitchblende. Hitting every target at 9 to 16 metre spacing is what converts indicated tonnes to measured.
NexGen began its largest-ever drill program, a minimum of 125,000 m with 10 rigs at Arrow. About 71,000 m was to convert Indicated resources to Measured and 54,000 m to convert Inferred to Indicated, feeding a feasibility study due in H1 2020.
The announcement that the prefeasibility technical report has been filed on SEDAR, effective 5 November 2018. Paperwork supporting figures already published.
The prefeasibility technical report, effective 5 November 2018, filed with the SEC together with its qualified-person consents. The record's title was taken from one of the consents rather than the report.
Twenty-nine holes for 20,482 m, drilled to characterise the rock in Arrow's footwall and to site the underground workings rather than to grow the resource; the results went into the prefeasibility study published two weeks earlier. Mineralised intervals found in the process were not included in the updated estimate.
The Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada named NexGen the recipient of its 2019 Environmental & Social Responsibility Award, which it gives for protecting the environment and building community relations during exploration or operation. It follows the 2018 Bill Dennis Award for discovery; the release also says 2019 will bring the largest drilling campaign since the company was incorporated in 2011, which continues the 125,000 m program launched with the November 2018 study. No financial or resource figures change.
The prefeasibility study and a resource update land together. Indicated resources rose 43% to 256.6 million lb U3O8 in 2.89 Mt at 4.03%, including an A2 high-grade core of 181.0 million lb in 0.46 Mt at 17.85%, with 91.7 million lb inferred. Because the study uses indicated material only, the mine life falls from 15 years to 9, but the head grade rises from 1.73% to 3.09% and average annual after-tax cash flow rises 64% to C$909 million; after-tax net present value is C$3.7 billion at 8% with a 56.8% return on C$1.25 billion of capital. A 125,000 m, ten-rig program - the largest in the company's history - is launched to take Arrow to feasibility.
A smaller summer program - 20,400 m on four rigs for $8.3 million - with three jobs: follow up AR-18-208c1, the last hole of the winter which found a possible new zone 160 m northwest of the A0 shear, step out from known mineralisation, and drill footwall holes to site the shafts. The results feed the first prefeasibility study, due late in the third quarter.
A 25,000 m winter program with eight rigs begins, aimed at defining the A3 high-grade zone, testing the large untested ground around the A1 to A5 shears, and drilling ranked geophysical targets on the Arrow, South Arrow and Mirror conductors.
The last 28 holes of the summer program pushed mineralisation outside the resource boundary in several places: one hole returned 13.0 m at 20.74% U3O8 within a wider interval, 25 m outside the estimate in the A3 High Grade Domain and described as the best hole yet drilled in that shear; another gave 5.0 m at 11.72% 15 m outside it; and high-grade material was confirmed northwest of the A1 shear for the first time with 8.0 m at 1.43% including 4.5 m at 2.51%.
South Arrow, discovered six months earlier, turns out to be a real zone rather than a one-hole curiosity: thirty-one holes returned results such as AR-17-166c1 with 20.5 m at 1.19% U3O8 including 3.5 m at 6.21%, plus a second interval of 24.5 m at 1.46%; AR-17-160c1 13.0 m at 2.18% including 4.0 m at 6.79%; and AR-17-178c1 11.0 m at 2.17% including 3.5 m at 6.73% only 142 m below surface. Shallow, stacked and outside the Arrow resource.
The same technical report filed with the SEC in full - a 3.5 MB document accompanied by six one-page qualified-person consents, one of which the record's title was taken from. No new information beyond the September filing announcement.
The technical report behind the July economic study is filed, effective 1 September 2017 and prepared by six qualified persons from RPA and elsewhere. It is the paperwork that makes the July figures usable in a prospectus.
NexGen bought the 40% of the Dufferin Lake property it did not already own from Rainmaker Resources and Eagle Trail Properties for 111,110 shares, about $320,000 at a deemed $2.88. It had held 60% since a 2011 option agreement. A small tidy-up of a satellite property, not a change to the Arrow story.
The maiden economic study on Arrow, from Roscoe Postle Associates: an after-tax net present value of C$3.49 billion at an 8% discount rate, a 56.7% return, payback in 1.1 years and pre-production capital of C$1.19 billion, at US$50/lb uranium. Average output of 27.6 million lb a year in the first five years at an operating cost of about US$4.42/lb over that period. It is built on the December 2016 estimate of 179.5 million lb indicated at 6.88% U3O8 and excludes over 66,000 m of 2017 drilling.
The first two exploration holes of the summer program found a new zone of off-scale radioactivity, over 61,000 counts per second in massive pitchblende veins, about 400 metres south of Arrow on a parallel structure that is almost entirely undrilled. The intervals are narrow but sit inside a wide envelope of the same hydrothermal alteration that surrounds Arrow, and South Arrow is open in every direction.
Final winter assays: step-out hole AR-17-136c2 cut 13.5 m at 9.58% U3O8 including 5.0 m at 23.49%, forty metres outside the resource boundary in the A3 shear. In the Southwest Gap, ground excluded from the March 2017 estimate, AR-17-131c3 returned 21.5 m at 2.51% including 7.0 m at 4.68% and AR-17-131c4 22.5 m at 1.67%, joining the 180 m Southwest area to the Arrow deposit. Two holes 300 m southeast of Arrow returned only anomalous values.
25 July 2017capital raising announcement▲ GoodMajor
A US$110 million financing with CEF Holdings closed: US$50 million of shares, 24,146,424 of them at C$2.70, and US$60 million of five-year unsecured convertible debentures at a 7.5% coupon converting at US$2.69, two-thirds of the interest payable in cash and one-third in shares. CEF's chairman Warren Gilman joins the board. It is a large cheque for a company that has not yet published an economic study on Arrow - that comes ten days later.
Winter 2017 assays from Arrow, where NexGen's cached record begins - the deposit was found in 2014, before this database's coverage. Twenty-five holes returned intercepts such as 33.0 m at 4.58% U3O8 including 11.0 m at 8.78%, 49.0 m at 2.93% including 12.0 m at 10.35%, and 62.0 m at 1.27% including 12.0 m at 5.13%, against a standing estimate of 179.5 million lb U3O8 indicated in 1.18 Mt at 6.88%. A 25,000 m summer program with seven rigs starts, six of them on Arrow and one on a new target 300 m to the southeast.
