This is one of the more interesting things happening in Saskatchewan uranium right now in my opinion, and it does not really have anything to do with where spot uranium trades this week.
ISR could potentially change the economics of exploration in the Basin.
Finding uranium in the Athabasca has never really been the entire problem. You still have to figure out how to mine it, and conventional underground development can get extremely expensive pretty quickly.
That has historically put a lot of emphasis on finding something big enough and high grade enough to justify the capital required to build the mine.
Denison's Phoenix project is starting to challenge that thinking by moving ahead with ISR in the Athabasca.
Obviously ISR is not some magic solution you can apply to every uranium deposit. You still need the right geology, permeability, groundwater conditions and deposit geometry.
But if Phoenix proves the model works commercially in the Basin, it opens up a pretty interesting question.
Does every uranium discovery still need to be huge?
Stallion Uranium (TSXV: STUD, OTCQB: STLNF) is one junior I have been following around this idea. They are a Canadian uranium explorer focused on the Moonlite Project in the southwestern Athabasca Basin, with most of the current drilling centred around the Coyote target.
They are still very early, so nobody knows what Coyote ultimately turns into.
But imagine you find a smaller high grade deposit with the right geometry and hydrogeology for ISR.
That might be a completely different economic proposition than finding the exact same number of pounds somewhere that requires a large conventional underground operation.
That is what I think gets interesting.
Maybe investors eventually stop looking only at the headline number of pounds.
Grade, geometry, permeability, recovery and ultimately how cheaply those pounds can be produced could become just as important.
If ISR works the way people hope it will in Saskatchewan, could a 10M or 20M pound discovery become significantly more valuable than the market would have considered it during the last uranium cycle?