Quercus Processing Plant
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- Figure 1 – The Quercus Plant
- Figure 2 – The Quercus Plant
Under the Co-operation Agreement, Berkeley has the right to use the Quercus uranium processing plant, which has been on care and maintenance since 2003, along with its associated infrastructure. The plant is permitted to produce 950tpa of U3O8 and is in excellent condition, albeit that it lacks a comminution circuit. It includes static and dynamic leach facilities and all necessary infrastructure and offers major capital cost and time savings over building a new plant.
The plant is a conventional uranium acid leach plant, with 8 x 90m3 agitated leach tanks and 5 x 30m diameter counter current decantation (CCD) tanks. Solvent extraction utilizes a solution of kerosene, Alamine 336 and iso-decanol, stripped using ammonium sulphate. Final product recovery utilizes ammonium hydroxide to precipitate ammonium diuranate (yellow cake), which is belt filtered and dried by atomization at ≈450°C.
The plant includes a tailings water neutralization circuit and other process water facilities.
The tailings impoundment at Mina Fe has remaining capacity of approximately 1.42m bcm of waste material. It is presently permitted only to hold tailings from the Sageras and Alameda resources and placement of tailings from any other area would require a change to the licence.
ENUSA operated the Quercus plant as a combined heap and dynamic leach circuit and there are a number of heap leach pads on site, with substantial remaining capacity.
A preliminary inspection of the remaining elements of the Quercus plant indicates that most could be re-commissioned. The major remedial work required is associated with replacing wiring, motors and other smaller components, rather than the larger components such as tanks and foundations, which appears to be in relatively good condition.
The Quercus plant and its ancillary facilities such as tailings and process water reservoirs, laboratories and offices are all on land wholly owned by ENUSA.