July 21, 2014
"Ucore Rare Metals Inc. is the company I've followed the closest [in the REE space]. Its key play is on Prince of Wales Island, in a mining district just offshore of Ketchikan, Alaska. It's on top of an old uranium mine that once produced some of the richest uranium ore ever mined in the United States. The same mineralization that put that uranium in the ground also produced veins filled with REE mineralogy. There are dozens of different minerals that have to be crushed out of the ore and separated, many of which require their own special chemistry. Ucore has done tremendous back-office work in the laboratory to make this all work. It is addressing the chemistry, metallurgy, crystallography, grain size and other things that end users are looking for, all the way down the food chain. Ucore has a pipeline of news coming out this summer, from what I've heard, and I expect great things over the next 12 to 18 months.
Another strong economic factor in Ucore's favor is that the State of Alaska wants to move away from being such an oil-based economy. So the government of Alaska is issuing bonds to fund $145M of the capital expense Ucore needs to build its project. That took a lot of due diligence on the part of the state government, in a place that knows how to investigate mining projects. That is a ringing endorsement of Ucore."
www.theaureport.com/pub/co/409#quote
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