Lake Superior Mining News

by Gabriel Caplett

Headquartered in Saskatchewan, Canada, Cameco is the world’s largest producer of uranium, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the global supply.

The company has earned a reputation, in recent years, for contaminating the Great Lakes, as well as groundwater and aquifers in Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Saskatchewan, with radioactive waste.

Below are a few examples of Cameco’s operation failures…

The Oglala Sioux Nation, along with other petitioners, recently filed a legal claim against Crow Butte Resources (CBR), a subsidiary of Cameco. The petitioners maintain that CBR’s in-situ uranium operations are contaminating private wells and the Brule, Arikaree and High Plains aquifers, major sources of freshwater stretching from Texas to South Dakota that supply irrigatable water for growing vegetables, grains and raising livestock.

At a January 2008 hearing, petitioners maintained that CBR’s operations have violated the Tribe’s rights under US law and federal and international treaties.

In April 2008, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) formally recognized that the case should be considered further, including concerns that the State of Nebraska issued a uranium mining permit to a foreignowned company, a possible violation of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.

The NRC also agreed to consider a Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality letter critical of geological information provided by Cameco that disregards the possibility for underground faults and fractures to allow mine waste water to contaminate underlying aquifers. According to the NRC, Cameco’s request for an aquifer exemption demonstrates “a lack of relevant knowledge about faults and fractures that might allow for the mixing of the water in different aquifers.”

In July 2001, Cameco detected a radioactive leak at its nuclear fuel conversion plant in Port Hope, Ontario. Contamination was discovered, again, in June 2007. In May 2008, authorities discovered that radioactive uranium, arsenic and beryllium (from the plant) had reached Lake Ontario.

Cameco’s massive McArthur River uranium mine caved-in and flooded the mine with radioactive water in April, 2003, stopping production for three months. Cameco admitted that a consultant’s report had warned of caving and flooding as the mine did not possess adequate water pumping and treatment capacity or proper contingency plans in the event of an accident. Cameco also conceded that their engineering used non-standard methodology and could not relate to standard industry practice.

Cameco’s Cigar Lake mine flooded in October 2006. Cigar Lake is the world’s largest undeveloped underground uranium mine and was expected to begin supplying one-sixth of the world’s uranium by 2008. Cigar Lake flooded, yet again, on August, 12, further delaying the project.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:16 pm and is filed under cameco, indigenous, Michigan, public land, uranium, water pollution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.