The campaign will be focused on diamond drilling at the Wheeler River, Waterbury Lake, and Hook-Carter properties in northern Saskatchewan's uranium-rich Athabasca Basin, and which are considered to have high potential for near-term discovery.

At the flagship Wheeler River project, where Denison and its partners in December decided to proceed with the next stage of development of the project, focusing on an insitu recovery operation at Phoenix, the team will undertake 13,500m of drilling in 23 holes.

Denison said the programme was designed to evaluate high-priority regional target areas by focusing on initial testing of targets at the sub-Athabasca unconformity in the hope of finding more uranium deposits that might be amenable to the ISR mining method.

At Waterbury Lake, Denison said its geological interpretation indicated that the regional Midwest structure not only controlled the location of the Midwest deposits on the Midwest property (25.17% Denison owned) but also the J Zone and Huskie deposits on the Waterbury Lake property.

The 2019 programme includes about 7,300m of diamond drilling in 18 holes and will focus on testing other high-priority targets related to the interpreted Midwest structure - including following-up on basement-hosted mineralisation, discovered during the summer of 2018, where the Midwest structure is interpreted to intersect the GB trend.

Further, Denison intends to undertake about 3,900m of drilling in six holes where an initial group of reconnaissance drill holes, completed during 2018 along the Patterson Lake Corridor at Hook-Carter encountered favourable lithologies, structures and hydrothermal alteration. These targets were found to be analogous to the geological settings observed for the Arrow (Nexgen Energy) and Triple R (Fission Uranium) deposits located 12km and 20km southwest along strike, respectively.

"With our focus turning to the advancement of our flagship Wheeler River project through the environmental assessment process, our strategy continues to involve exploration of our portfolio of high-priority properties - where we have the potential to deliver Denison's next high-grade Athabasca uranium discovery," CEO David Cates said.

Denison's Toronto-quoted equity (TSX:DML) gained 6.15% or C4c on Wednesday to 69c, capitalising the company at $406.53 million. The stock last peaked at 89c late last year, but is 4.17% lower compared to a year ago.