Mining town balks at uranium

Ghislain Lévesque has dealt with many contentious issues during the 12 years he's been mayor of Sept Îles. But nothing has stirred emotions in the regional hub, 650 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, like the proposal to mine uranium on the outskirts of the city.

MARK CARDWELL, Special to The GazettePublished: Saturday, February 07

"I've never seen people here get so worried and upset over a single subject," Lévesque said about the groundswell of public opposition to the project in recent weeks, included petitions, a demonstration, and a threat by most of the city's doctors to leave the region if it goes ahead.

"It's the only thing people are talking about around town these days, and almost everybody seems to be against it."

That's why, he added, city councillors voted unanimously in favour of a resolution on Jan. 26 asking the province to declare a permanent moratorium on uranium mining in its territory. By so doing, Sept Îles became the seventh municipality in Quebec - and the first on the North Shore - to make a similar request to government in recent years.

And it likely won't be the last.

That's because, after a 30-year lull, uranium is back on the radar of Quebec's mining industry. And that is raising concerns - whether real or imagined - among people who live in areas where there are known uranium deposits.

Although Canada is the world's biggest producer of uranium, accounting for roughly a third of the 100 million pounds that are sold on the global market each year, all of our production comes from three mines in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin, which contains the biggest and richest known deposits of uranium on Earth.
About 85 per cent of that production - worth some $500 million annually - is shipped to the United States, Japan and western Europe, where it is used to produce energy in nuclear reactors. The rest is used here at home to produce electricity, mostly at nuclear power plants in Ontario and here in Quebec, and to produce isotopes for cancer treatments and other medical purposes.

Quebec also has the capacity to be a major producer of uranium, a silvery-grey metal that is ubiquitous in nature and weakly radioactive, says Robert Marquis, director general of Géologie Québec, the office within the provincial Natural Resources and Wildlife Department that collects and studies scientific and field evidence of mineral resources and assesses their potential.

"Mining companies are always on the lookout for minerals and they have found many occurrences of uranium here over the years," Marquis, a geologist and past president of the Geologic Association of Canada, said from his office in Val d'Or this week.

Located mostly in four geographical areas - the Otish Mountains in central Quebec, Ungava Bay, Mont Laurier and the Ottawa Valley, and the North Shore - those finds contain relatively low-grade uranium that is not economically feasible to produce when commodity prices are low.

That has been the case since the 1970s, when the world soured on nuclear energy and commodity prices went south. But the price of uranium has been on a tear in recent years. Though it has fallen sharply in recent months due to the global financial crisis, a pound of uranium fetched a record $138 U.S. in June 2007, a tenfold increase over 2004.

"When prices get that high," said Marquis, "uranium production here has the potential to be profitable."
That's what prompted Terra Ventures, a small, publicly-traded Vancouver mining company that is involved in uranium projects in the Athabaska Basin, to stake a claim over a 2,166-acre property around Lac Kachiwiss in March 2007.

Located 20 kms north of Sept Îles on high hills that are sparsely covered with trees, the site was first drilled for diamonds in the 1970s. Instead, it was found to be chock full of low-grade uranium, with an estimated 5 million pounds of the material locked in the granite rocks that cover the area.

According to Terra Ventures geological director, Mike Magrum, the company spent about $3 million at the site last year diamond drilling 12 holes totalling 4,000 metres. The results of those assays, which were announced in January, suggested the site "is of similar character" to Rio Tinto's Rossing mine in Namibia, which produced seven per cent of the world's uranium.

"To get the uranium out we'd need to build a standard mill with a leeching process in which an acid dissolves the uranium, which is then extracted," explained Magrum. From a practical operating point of view, he added, the low grade of the ore means it would be no more dangerous to handle and process than iron ore, a commodity that is already heavily mined in the area and is important to the local economy.

Sept Îles is Canada's second largest bulk port, after Vancouver. Iron ore made up roughly 85 per cent of the 23 million metric tonnes of cargo shipped from the facility in 2008.

"We're still a long way from a mine but we're interested in pursuing the project," said Terra Ventures's Magrum. "But we want to work with the community and we are sensitive to social concerns."

Those concerns were first heard last summer, when local media began reporting on Terra Ventures's exploration efforts around Lac Kachiwiss.

"I couldn't believe it," said Marc Fafard, an engineer by training and a father of four who lives with his family in the old English school on the now-closed military radar station at the mouth of the Moisie River, just west of Sept Îles.

The Terra Ventures project would be a disaster for the region, says the self-described social activist who read up on uranium and uranium mining. In addition to creating unsightly mountains of crushed rocks, Fafard said, a uranium mine would necessarily result in the concentration and release of the metal's radioactive particles, called radon, which could contaminate underground aquifers and end up in rivers and drinking water.
"We live in a natural paradise here," said Fafard, who complained to city hall about the project and condemned it in letters to local media. "Why risk all that?"

Others felt the same. One was Rasvan Popescu, a local engineer who immigrated to Canada from Romania. A former employee in an old Soviet-era nuclear generating station who says his mother and other family members died from the fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in nearby Ukraine, he made headlines last fall with a public call for a permanent moratorium on uranium prospecting on the North Shore.

Popescu said he is aware of the water contamination caused by the uranium mines that operated in Elliot Lake, Ont., until 1996. And, he notes, even during exploration, the drilling breaks through aquifer lines, contaminating water tables.

He said he has heard talk in the mining community of plans for as many as a half-dozen uranium mines along the North Shore, including one at Port Cartier.

"It would be a disaster for all of us. It would change our way of life," Popescu said.

In December, 31 doctors in the city of 25,000, which is already struggling with a doctor shortage, signed a public letter also calling for a moratorium on the Terra Ventures project - and threatening to leave if a uranium mine is developed. "I chose Sept Îles for the quality of the environment," pneumologist and letter author Bruno Imbeault told a local journalist. "(But) if I'm going to be poisoned like I would be (living in) Montreal, I'll leave."

Around the same time, Fafard launched a one-man movement - Sept-Îles sans uranium 2009 - that he said received 3,000 phone calls, Christmas cards and emails of support from local residents. He also started a petition that was copied and circulated across town, calling on the city council to declare a moratorium. "After that," he said, "everything just kind of snowballed."

In response, the council held a closed-door meeting on Jan. 19 with public health and mining officials to learn more about the potential effects of the uranium project. Among other things, the city councillors were told the risks posed by uranium exploration were almost non-existent and that actual mining, when done according to the stringent rules and regulations set down by the Quebec and federal governments, would also be relatively safe.

"There really is no danger," says Dr. Rénald Cloutier, director of public health for the North Shore. He attended the meeting and later issued a public advisory in the region that gave detailed information about uranium. It concluded that risks associated with the project were "controllable," but that it was "legitimate for the community to weigh the socio-economic benefits and socio-environmental costs and ethical questions about the commercial and military uses of uranium."

In an interview, Cloutier said: "The most worrying thing is how people in Sept Îles are so worried. That's why we issued (the release), to try and defuse some of the tension and bring some balance to the debate."
Sept Îles Mayor Lévesque agrees there's probably no danger but, he says, people's preoccupation with the project became his main concern.

"Who are we to say whether they are right or wrong to be worried?" he asked. "We want mining, we're a mining town. But we don't want something that is so divisive."
- - -
On Jan. 26, the day the council voted on the resolution asking the province to declare a permanent moratorium on uranium mining in its territory, Fafard organized a noontime march through downtown Sept Îles. Despite frigid temperatures, some 300 people showed up. About 100 also attended a late-afternoon vigil outside city hall and cheered the announcement that the council had voted in favour of the moratorium.

The resolution has been sent to the Quebec Natural Resources and Wildlife Department, where it joins similar ones made by seven other municipalities across the province since 2007, including Cantley, Chelsea and La Pêche in the Outaouais region, and Lac St. Paul, Chute St. Philippe, Rivière Rouge and Ferme Neuve in the Laurentians.

"The government of Quebec has a role to protect people from projects that threaten them," junior minister Serge Simard told The Gazette.

"And the people of Sept Îles aren't the only ones who are worried about uranium."

Simard refused to speculate on when, where or if the Liberal government might pass a moratorium on uranium mining. Instead, he said, there will be more public debate on the matter, beginning with a forum of North Shore mayors later this year.

"We want people to well understand all the issues that are involved with uranium," Simard said. "Transparency is the key."

Though concern over the project has subsided in Sept Îles since last week's council vote, Fafard says people remain wary and they are not letting their guard down.

"We don't want to talk about or debate the pros and cons of uranium exploration and mining," he said. "We don't want a uranium mine here, period."
- - -
Mining industry employs 50,000 in Quebec

Only a handful of the 270,000-plus claims currently staked in Quebec will ever develop into working mines, says Robert Marquis, director general of Géologie Québec.

According to government figures, mining companies spent $430 million on exploration in Quebec in 2007, almost three times more than in 2003. Including the activities of the 20 mines and dozens of quarries and sandpits that extract commodities like gold, iron, copper and salt from Quebec bedrock, the mining industry employs some 50,000 people across the province.

Often ranked No. 1 in the world by the Fraser Institute for its favourable mining policies and mineral potential, as well as the quality of its training facilities and labour pool, Quebec is doing all it can to keep the industry churning. "Our objective is to diversify," said Marquis. "That's the key to success."

Because investment follows market forces, money tends to flow to projects aimed at finding and developing minerals with the hottest stock prices. "There tends to be a flavour-of-the-month approach," said Marquis.
"A decade ago it was diamonds. Today it's gold and uranium.