Development of favorability evaluation system for uranium exploration and its applivation to Australian uranium field.

Abstract

It has become common to use computers in resource development. Most common among those is to use a computer as a numerical calculation tool. The others are utilizations as a tool to assist engineers in judgement for technical questions. They are called an expert systems or some expert systems are reported in last 10 years and a number of systems are in actual use. We have attempted to develop an expert system to evaluate the favorability of the uranium exploration projects using the "Data directed Numerical method" (MCCAMMON et al., 1986). The system was implemented on the Macintosh personal computer and was designed so that the users can easily make the most of the iteration of trial and error process of the method.
In this paper, the application examples of the developed system are described for Alligator Rivers Uranium Field in Australia. The Alligator Rivers Uranium Field is one of the famous uranium provinces in the world. Five exploration parameters were selected by a statistical analysis of the relationship between the exploration parameters and the presence of the known uranium deposits and occurrences. The favorability evaluations were performed for four different cases of two types of uranium deposits, namely the Jabiluka-Type and the Nabarlek-Type.