JOHANNESBURG (Dow Jones)--First Uranium Corp. (FIU.T) has begun hoisting ore at its Ezulwini Mine in South Africa, where a gold plant is scheduled to be commissioned in April and a uranium plant in June next year, the company said Tuesday. First Uranium, which is majority owned by South Africa's Simmer & Jack Mines Ltd. (SIM.JO), bought the Ezulwini project in 2006 and began underground development in February. The company said its first priority was to rehabilitate the main shaft, and the first phase of this work has been completed. Ezulwini is an underground mine that has two separate ore bodies about 400 meters apart, the Upper Elsburg which is gold bearing only and the Middle Elsburg which is a gold and uranium deposit. The mine produced gold from the 1960s until 2001 and uranium between 1982 and 1997, but in 2001 commodity prices declined to the point where mining wasn't economical and it was shuttered. The company also said its board has approved an $11 million capital program to raise the mining rate at its Buffelsfontein gold project to 630,000 metric tons a month from 500,000 tons a month. It said it will proceed directly to a full feasibility report for the project by November, bypassing a pre-feasibility report. The acceleration follows the acquisition in June of the adjacent operations of Mine Waste Solutions. "The progress we have made to date gives us greater confidence that the Ezulwini Mine and the Buffelsfontein tailings recovery project will meet their production targets on schedule and on budget," Gordon Miller, president and chief executive of First Uranium, said.
