North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Ucore Rare Metals Inc. July 8 reported that it has commissioned the construction of a pilot plant that will test the use of molecular recognition technology for the separation of rare earth elements at bulk scale.

Ucore has contracted with IBC Advanced Technologies Inc. for the design and construction of the plant, targeting completion before the end of 2015.

The test plant, "SuperLig-One," will be constructed at IBC facilities in American Fork, Utah.

Once complete, the unit will then be relocated to a third party facility for an independent review of pilot scale test procedures.

"We anticipate that the SuperLig-One unit will be a high-value asset for Ucore," said Ucore President and CEO Jim McKenzie.

"The intention is for the unit to be a test mule, capable of accepting pregnant leach solution and bulk concentrates from multiple prospective REE feedstock locations around the world.

Ucore confirms that it has entered into agreements with various REE feedstock providers, and will be securing test material from a variety of locations over the next six months as construction is under way.

One high-priority source of pilot scale test material will be the Bokan-Dotson Ridge project in Southeast Alaska." Ucore said the SuperLig-One unit, currently being designed at IBC, will be modular and portable.

This will make the plant capable of transport to remote testing sites as required.

Columnar units within the plant will contain customized proprietary SuperLig® products that are designed to selectively separate the metal being targeted.

To optimize utility, the unit will be customizable over time, with capacity for treating varying ratios of metals in different feed solutions.

At a bench scale, the SuperLig platform successfully separated the entire suite of rare earths.

Ucore said the SuperLig-One unit is being designed to deploy this achievement at pilot scale, refining each of the lanthanides with the exception of promethium, plus yttrium and scandium to uniformly high purity.

In addition to REE separation, IBC has an extensive inventory of pre-existing SuperLig products capable of selectively targeting a range of valuable metals, such as platinum group metals, gold, silver, uranium, bismuth, copper, cobalt, nickel, indium, and rhenium, as well as a host of nuisance materials.

Ucore has an exclusive agreement with IBC for the use this technology for all metals in the tailings processing sector, as well as all processing applications related to rare earths.

Ucore's mid-term objective is to have the SuperLig-One unit serve as a prototype for a full sized separation plant to be located in North America.

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Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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