Exploration

Our exploration program is focused on replacing mineral reserves as they are depleted by our production, which is key to sustaining our business, meeting our commitments, and ensuring long-term growth. Our exploration activity is adjusted annually in line with market signals and at a pace aligned with Cameco’s mining plans and marketing requirements. In recent years, as we began to bring back our tier-one production, we also increased exploration spending, all in response to the positive momentum in the nuclear fuel market, which has provided a clear signal that more uranium production will be required in the next decade, setting the stage for a renewed exploration cycle.

Our position as one of the world’s largest uranium producers and our continued growth across the nuclear fuel cycle has been driven by decades of experience and our history of exploration, discovery and mining successes. Our land position totals 754,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) that cover exploration and development prospects in Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and the US that are among the best in the world. In northern Saskatchewan alone, we have direct interests in 660,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) that cover many of the most prospective areas of the Athabasca Basin.
 

Northern Saskatchewan

Our well-established infrastructure includes fully licensed and fully permitted uranium mills and mines in the eastern Athabasca basin, along with a supporting network of roads, airstrips and electricity supply.  that not only underpins the potential development of our advanced exploration projects, but also supports:

• our ongoing work to both delineate existing prospects and deposits,
• ongoing work to identify undiscovered uranium potential
• our decades of work to establish a positive corporate reputation by prioritizing our relationships with northern Saskatchewan Indigenous communities, confirms our long-term commitment to continually engage and provide ongoing benefits to the people that call the region home

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The well-known uranium endowment of the Athabasca Basin, where we are involved in 45 projects (including partner-operated joint ventures, previously 39 projects in 2023), is the result of its unique geology, creating a remarkable mining jurisdiction that hosts the highest uranium grades and some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. On our projects, numerous uranium occurrences have been identified, along with several prospects and undeveloped deposits of variable grades and sizes which have progressed through multiple stages of evaluation. Depending on the potential deposit size, ore and ground quality, evolving mining technologies and the uranium market environment, some of these prospects are expected to become viable, economic deposits in a uranium market and price environment that supports new primary production and provides an adequate risk-adjusted return.