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Elliot Lake

Why more than a dozen towns are considering hosting Canada’s high-level radioactive waste – by Tom Spears (Ottawa Citizen – December 16, 2011)

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/index.html

Who would want a pile of used fuel from nuclear reactors that will be radioactive for millennia? William Elliott does. Badly enough to fight for it.

The boss at the economic development corporation serving the Elliot Lake region sees the upside of something that usually provokes gut reactions of not-in-my-back-yard. “There’s the obvious economic impact of 700 to 1,000 permanent full-time jobs (and) $16 billion to $24 billion of direct investment,” he says.

“It’s going to be one of the biggest economic development projects in Canadian history.” Put that way, maybe it’s not so hard to see why Elliot Lake and its neighbours are campaigning to become the place where Canada buries all our high-level radioactive waste.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization is looking for a site to sink thousands of tonnes of used reactor fuel forever, replacing the temporary storage that Canada has used for 60 years.

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Canadian energy sector marches to its own drummer – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – November 29, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Mr. Edwards said the strategy is shifting to direct
communication with the public to win “social licence”
from one that had been focused on targeting politicians
to enable them to develop appropriate policies.
(Claudia Cattaneo – Financial Post)

It’s a measure of how much the Canadian energy sector marches to its own drummer that Murray Edwards, one of its top investors and entrepreneurs, regards building pipelines to new markets and improving its image through better communication as the top issues facing it next year.

The next two? Project execution to achieve higher productivity and manage costs, and commodity prices. It’s telling that the challenges are associated with managing growth, in contrast to worries now consuming the market, such as the eurozone crisis and fears of another global downturn.

Opening new markets for Canada’s oil and improving communication efforts shot to the top of the industry’s to-do list for 2012 as a result of this month’s announcement by the United States to delay a decision on whether to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in the U.S. Gulf Coast, said the influential billionaire, a leading investor and chairman or vice-chairman of companies such as oil and gas producer Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and oil services firm Ensign Energy Services Inc.

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The tortured future of Elliot Lake – by Lloyd Tataryn (Saturday Night, June, 1976)

This article was orginally published in Saturday Night (a Canadian general interest magazine that ceased publication in 2005) in the June, 1976 issue.

“The conditions in Elliot Lake are not the best conditions to work in to survive a normal life span. If anybody does not like to go to the hospital with lung cancer, he should have a very close look at the Elliot Lake situation before he signs on as an employee of either one of the companies. We believe that the companies should not have the right to expose people to conditions that will cause bodily harm. There has to be a clean-up programme before we can definitely advise people to seek employment in Elliot Lake.” (Paul Falkowski, United Steel Workers of America, Environmental Representative – June 1976)

The uranium miners there are dying of cancer at three times the normal rate. But what can a single-industry town do about it? Close down? Or live with death?

His voice broke in mid sentence. His eyes were red-rimmed and he fought back tears.

“I could be healthy, still workin. Now I have dust plus cancer. And the family is all upside down.  Dad’s gonna die maybe today, maybe tomorrow, we don’t know.” His voice broke once again. “And that’s the way it looks like. It’s bad. It’s very bad for a family. Family’s more hurt than me. Cryin’, you know. Disaster.”

It was the type of interview that makes a documentary a success. It was also the type of interview that makes a journalist fell parasitic. One is pleased with having captured an extremely moving moment on tape. But one also feels exploitative for having the presumption to ask a dying man to spill his emotions into your microphone.

Here was a forty-four-year-old man who had spent fifteen years digging and blasting a living in the Elliot Lake uranium miners in northern Ontario. The work was back breaking, the kind of work that makes a man tough and hard. Miners a proud of the strong, vigorous image they project. They don’t cry in public. They don’t cry, that is, unless they are overwhelmed by events and their defences have been destroyed.

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Uranium: Political Baby’s Growing Pains [Elliot Lake History] – by R. M. Baiden (April 29, 1961)

This article was orginally published in Saturday Night (a Canadian general interest magazine that ceased publication in 2005) on April 29, 1961.

Uranium: Political Baby’s Growing Pains

Who is hiding what?

Canada’s uranium industry was fathered by the military necessity and mothered by politics. Deserted by its father in childhood, it now faces adolescence with only a mother  – at least until mother can find a new husband among the world’s nuclear power stations, most of which are not yet built.

But until this happy union, estimated at perhaps a decade away, the future of this ailing child is tied by political apron strings. More than that, both the form and the fact of its very existence depend upon political decisions to be made soon in Ottawa: How to allocate among the various producing mines the recently publicized agreement to sell 24,000,000 pounds of uranium to Britain.

At current shipping rates, this represents 13 months additional production for the three Canadian mining areas of Elliot Lake, Bancroft and Beaverlodge. Upon wise allocation of this order depends not only the ability of some mines to stay in business, but also the ability of the industry as a whole to take quick advantage of developing civilian demand in the 1970s.

It was undoubtedly, in recognition of the critical importance of this order that the federal government decided that allocation would be a political decision and not a decision by its agent, the Eldorado Mining and Refining Co. In short, allocations of this order, and possibly some reshuffling of existing contacts, must be based upon the national interest, not on strictly economic factors.

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Stephen B. Roman (1921 – 1988) – 1989 Candian Mining Hall of Fame Inductee

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame was conceived by the late Maurice R. Brown, former editor and publisher of The Northern Miner, as a way to recognize and honour the legendary mine finders and builders of a great Canadian industry. The Hall was established in 1988. For more information about the extraordinary individuals who have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, please go to their home website: http://mininghalloffame.ca/
 
It was not for nothing that The Northern Miner, the weekly journal of Canada’s mining industry, in 1977 chose Stephen B. Roman as its first Mining Man of the Year.

He received the title, the newspaper said at the time, “because Stephen Roman has graphically shown that Canadian money and expertise can compete very successfully with anyone in the world.”
At that time, he had engineered, through his already big and fast-growing company, Denison Mines, the largest-ever uranium sales by a uranium producer.

A Slovakian immigrant who began his working life in Canada as a tomato picker. Roman subsequently took control of a penny mining stock in 1953, and from this built Denison into one of the country’s largest mining and resource empires, rising from the foundation of the company’s sprawling uranium mines at Elliot Lake, Ontario.

That globe-spanning empire now includes, in addition to its uranium interests, coal mining in British Columbia, potash mining in New Brunswick, and oil and gas production in Greece, Egypt, Spain, Italy and Western Canada.

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Elliot Lake Uranium Mining History – Our Wild Atomic City – by Alan Phillips (Originally Published in Maclean’s Magazine – May 25, 1957)

Denison Mine was the largest uranium deposit in Elliot Lake, Ontario.

Here’s a Graphic Picture of Ontario’s Elliot Lake

A billion-dollar order for uranium
A $300-million spending spree to fill it
A lawless horde of transients
A Communist struggle to control mine workers
A serious outbreak of disease

Just off the Trans-Canada Highway skirting Lake Huron’s north shore, a buried vein of ore snakes north through the Algoma Basin in the shape of an upside-down S. It curves for ninety miles beneath the pineclad granite knolls, a mother lode that is spawning eleven giant uranium mines in the greatest eruption of growth since gold gave birth to Dawson City.

The hub of these mines is a chaotic city-to-be called Elliot Lake. Twenty-two months ago it was just a stand of timber dividing two lakes, so wild that a bulldozer leveling brush ran over a large black bear. Today it’s a prime example of a boom town, familiar symbol of dynamic growth – and trouble.

For a couple of months this spring Elliot Lake made headlines that had nothing to do with uranium. An outbreak of jaundice packed ninety victims into nearby Blind River’s 59-bed hospital. About three hundred cases were reported before the disease began to wane early last month. Provincial health officials insisted that the outbreak did not rate as an epidemic while union officials were demanding the mines shut down until the sewage system was improved.

Infectious disease is an age-old bugbear of the boom town, which has its other ageless features. It is the nation in miniature with its time span speeded up as in a silent movie.

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Excerpt from Michael Barnes New Book – More Than Free Gold: Mineral Exploration in Canada Since World War II

Pronto Mine, Rio Algom - Elliot Lake 1958The World Wants Yellowcake (Uranium)

Among some people uranium gets a bad rap due to its use as the explosive material for atomic weapons and yet these folks tend to forget that it has most beneficial uses for mankind, principally as the fuel for nuclear reactors which deliver about 15% of the country’s electricity. Canada is currently the largest producer of uranium in the world, although Australia has the larger proportion of the world’s known deposits. In 2006 of the seventeen countries that mined the element, Canada produced 28%, followed by Australia with 23%. The term ‘yellowcake’ was originally given to uranium concentrate, although the colour and texture today can range from anything through dull yellow to almost black.

Early interest in uranium in Canada took a back seat to the work of Gilbert and Charles LaBine who discovered radium at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories in 1930.

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