A company with a permit to prospect for uranium on the Little Missouri National Grasslands in Slope and Billings counties says it will wait until spring to start.

PacMag Metals of Australia has drilled test holes for uranium on private land in Stark County and now has approval to run a gamma counter on public land to see whether it detects uranium there, said Lonny Bagley, field manager for the Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM manages the mineral development program on all federal land, which in this case is for grasslands managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

The Forest Service attached conditions to the prospecting permit. One is that Formation Resources may only walk the 18,000-acre permit area to take readings.

The company applied to take shovel-sized soil samples, but the Forest Service says it wants more environmental information before allowing the survey to proceed to that degree.

The Australian company formed Formation Resources, of Bismarck, to do business in North Dakota.

Its spokesman, Jim Guilinger, said even though the company has the necessary federal permit to prospect on public land, after making the application this summer, it will wait several months to begin.

He said the snow cover acts like a shield against the relatively low gamma readings from uranium and also interferes with mapping land features.

PacMag may eventually open pits to extract the lignite that contains uranium, as well as molybdenum and germanium.

Germanium is an elemental metal with electronic properties and is as valuable in today's market as uranium, Guilinger said. Molybdenum, also an elemental metal found coincidental to uranium, has dropped dramatically in price, he said. It's used primarily to strengthen steel.

PacMag's most recent report says new tests from Stark County show mineralized germanium in lignite layers as deep as 120 feet, depths where uranium readings are low.

"The presence of high germanium grades at Sentinel (project in Stark County) is considered very favorable," according to PacMag's Web site. It says the high value specialty element is used in solar panels, fiber optics, infrared sensors and high speed electronics.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)