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First Uranium is looking for growth in North America - Gordon Miller, CEO In an interview on ClassicFM @ 18:25 on 19 August 2008 [miningmx.com] -- SIMMER & Jack subsidiary First Uranium is looking for opportunities to diversify its geographical spread to dilute risk, CEO Gordon Miller said. Miller is now living in Canada but the two companies he heads are operating in South Africa in the gold and uranium sectors. "To be a price maker in the uranium market you’re effectively selling to very large utilities and the quality of your product as also the source of where your product comes from are important considerations for utilities when they buy uranium," Miller said on Classic Business, a week-nightly radio broadcast. "So we have a diversification strategy where we’re going to diversify our geopolitical risk as far as uranium production is concerned, and to do that we’re focused in North America, so a large part of my portfolio is looking for growth opportunities in Canada and the US," he said. The Simmers' mines and its 63% held First Uranium operations have both been affected by the power shortage in South Africa, which shut down mines for a week in January this year. "Obviously the Eskom situation has had an impact on our cost structure so we’ve seen quite significant increases in unit costs," Miller said. "We took a number of months to study the Eskom situation and came to the conclusion that there will be situations where we may be required to generate additional power and for that reason we bought diesel generators. We now have significant amounts of diesel-generating capacity, some of it connected in already in the event that we need to load shed." Simmers is doubling the capacity at tailings treatment operation Mine Waste Solutions and that should be commissioned early in 2009. "We’ll hopefully commission that early next year which will increase our gold output significantly and reduce unit costs, and at the same time we’ll be commissioning a uranium plant at the Mine Waste Solutions facility which is also under construction presently," Miller said. "At the Ezulwini mine we commenced production in July - we’ve commissioned our new gold plant - and we’ll be commencing uranium production in October of this year. So we expect a significant ramp up of revenues from the Ezulwini project," he said. "If you look at Simmers wholly owned subsidiaries - we’ve got the Buffelsfontein gold mine. The key focus there is the No 5 Shaft which isn’t producing very much at this point in time but we’re looking to ramp up production from No 5 Shaft significantly into the future," he said. "And at TGME we have a number of surface tailings and oxide ore heap leach projects that are in construction or being developed at this point in time and we are looking to get gold production from those in the not-too-distant future as well. So we have a significant growth profile at all of our operations."
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