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RAPAPORT... Shore Gold Inc. completed core and large-diameter drilling programs on the Orion South kimberlite ahead of schedule. The core drilling team intersected 1,208 meters of Early Joli Fou (EJF) and Pense kimberlite, which Shore Gold said confirmed significant new intersections of kimberlite on the western flank and southern part of Orion South. The core will be logged by Shore's geologists and the results will be added to the project's existing geological model, expanding it accordingly.
The large diameter drill team sampled 1,027.48 meters of EJF and Pense kimberlite units within Orion South; 439 wet recovered tonnes of kimberlite, in 97 samples, were collected and are in the process of being shipped to Rio Tinto Canada Diamond Exploration Inc's. Thunder Bay Mineral Processing Laboratory. This program aimed to estimate macro-diamond grade information from strategically located drillholes and will eventually provide data to re-estimate the mineral resources on the Orion South kimberlite.
Shore Gold's senior vice president of exploration and development, George Read, said, "The large diameter drilling program has been completed ahead of the original schedule and more than three quarters of the samples have already been shipped to the Thunder Bay Mineral Processing Laboratory where processing has commenced. Shore Gold plans to re-optimize the open pit on Orion South using the updated mineral resource estimate and updated diamond prices. Thereafter, we aim to optimize the existing feasibility study with a revised mine plan, where Orion South is mined first. Preliminary calculations suggest that such an optimized feasibility study, with a new mine plan, can positively change the economic model for the project by increasing the mineral resource estimate and decreasing the pre-production capital costs and the time to achieve diamond production."
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