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Equinox Minerals is delaying construction of a uranium processing plant at its Lumwana copper-uranium mine in Zambia, due to low uranium prices and difficulty raising financing, the Canadian company said on Wednesday. Equinox began copper production at Lumwana -- considered Africa's largest open-pit copper mine -- in December, and plans to eventually produce uranium to use as a cost offset. The company said it expects to produce 170,000 tonnes of copper concentrate at a cost of $1.15 a pound in 2009, which is in line with past estimates. But it said it will have to wait to move ahead on the uranium plant, which had been expected to start operations in 2010.

Zambia has enacted a law for mining, storage and export of uranium which bars the diversion of the mineral for use in making nuclear weapons or devices, mines minister Kalombo Mwansa said on Monday. Mwansa said he had signed a law to pave the way for uranium mining in the country following the discovery of huge uranium deposits in several parts of the mineral-rich southern Africa country.

THE Government is now ready to issue uranium mining licences to two of the four investors who applied for them under the new legislation, Mines and Minerals Development Deputy Minister Boniface Nkhata has said. According to online mining news publication Miningmx.com, Mr Nkhata said at the ongoing Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town that the two licences would be granted before the end of the current quarter.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has approved regulations to guide Zambia's uranium mining activities, Zambian Mines Minister Kalombo Mwansa said. The regulations encompass the proposed mining, milling and transportation of uranium and other radioactive minerals in the country, he said in the Southern province of the country.