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Uranium and Nuclear Power Industry

Excerpt from Sun Dogs and Yellowcake: Gunnar Mines – A Canadian Story – by Patricia Sandberg

To order a copy of Sun Dogs and Yellowcake: Gunnar Mines – A Canadian Story, click here: http://patriciasandberg.com/purchase-book/

Patricia Sandberg was formerly a partner at DuMoulin Black, a Vancouver law firm acting for mining companies listed on Canadian and international stock exchanges. Her clients had mining operations in Canada, the United States, China, and Latin America. Three generations of her family, including Patricia as a child, lived at Gunnar and her grandfather spent thirty years working at mines run by Gilbert LaBine, Canada’s “Father of Uranium.”

Shooting the Elephant

Re-enter Gilbert LaBine, some twenty years after his radium score and now sixty-two years old. LaBine, in his nominal positions as president and director of Eldorado, was well informed about Eldorado’s moves in the Beaverlodge area. He was also not averse to conducting a little business of his own.

His first foray was with a highly competent, experienced pilot named John “Johnny” Nesbitt, who had spent his life flying in Canada’s north country, including for Eldorado and its Great Bear Lake operations. When Eldorado switched its focus to Lake Athabasca, Nesbitt added the Beaverlodge operation to his flight path.

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Potential $1 billion work to clean up Arizona’s dangerous Navajo uranium mines – by Mike Sunnucks (Phoenix Business Journal – September 19, 2016)

http://www.bizjournals.com/

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is starting what could be a $1 billion, years-along process to clean up abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation land in northern Arizona. There are more than 500 abandoned uranium minds on the sprawling Indian reservation that cuts across northeastern Arizona as well as parts of Utah and New Mexico.

From 1944 to 1986, mining companies extracted more than 30 million tons of uranium from mines on Navajo land. The mining was fueled by the U.S. Cold War with the former Soviet Union and the super powers’s nuclear arms race.

Uranium is key to nuclear weapons and northern Arizona, in particular the Navajo Nation, had deep deposits. Private companies often hired Navajos to work at the mines.

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[Gilbert Labine, Eldorado Mine] Treasure Under the Arctic’s Rim – by Leslie Roberts (MACLEAN’S Magazine – July 15, 1936)

http://www.macleans.ca/

Men said Great Bear Lake mineral wealth was too far north to be developed — Now men fly that wealth to market

THEY CALLED it a madman’s pipedream. possibility They said that anyone who believed in the possibility of producing minerals 1,500 miles north of the most northerly transcontinental steel, ought to consult an alienist.

That was when the boys started prospecting the rim of the Arctic. Even when Gilbert Labine, hard-headed visionary, and E. C. St. Paul, his partner, discovered pitchblende on the shores of Great Bear Lake, May 16, 1930, the Jeremiahs continued to wail.

What was the use? You couldn’t get your machinery in and you couldn’t get your ore out. Fly it out? Faugh, the man is mad. That was in 1930.

Visualize now the shores of Great Bear Lake in 1936. Where Labine discovered radium-bearing rock in 1930, a modern mining plant is in constant operation. Shafts have been thrust down to depth. A concentrating plant capable of handling 100 tons of rock a day has been installed and is running full blast. A hundred men are permanently employed.

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‘They are absolutely huge:’ Wolves attack [uranium miners] in Northern Saskatchewan as animals lose fear of humans – by Tristin Hopper (National Post – September 15, 2016)

http://news.nationalpost.com/

From the dining hall, it sounded like a fight — a midnight scuffle between feuding workers at the Cigar Lake uranium mine.

A security guard hopped into her vehicle to break it up, and for a split second, her headlights illuminated a scene that was anything but a fist fight: a wolf with its jaws around the neck of a 26-year-old kitchen worker. The truck’s arrival spooked the wolf away and the security guard, who has declined media interviews, sprang out to provide first aid.

An adult gray wolf can easily bite through even the thickest moose bones; a fleshy human neck provides little obstacle. A few more seconds and the worker likely would have been dead instead of recuperating in hospital. “A single wolf basically pounced on him,” was what a mine representative told the press.

Wolf attacks aren’t supposed to happen this way, but wolves don’t exactly act as expected in Northern Saskatchewan.

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[PORT RADIUM’S ELDORADO] THE MINE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD – by Ronald A. Keith (MACLEAN’S Magazine – November 15, 1945)

http://www.macleans.ca/

A vivid first-hand report on Eldorado, the supersecret mine in the Arctic, which produces the raw material for atomic bombs

IT WAS cold and wet and eternally midnight. Our helmet lamps were bleared with rock dust as they flickered along the cavern walls, tracing bright patterns of ore stain against the black velvet of the perpetual darkness. The icy breath of ventilating air reminded us that this was no ordinary hard-rock mine but a cave under the floor of Great Bear Lake, within 26 miles of the Arctic Circle.

Our oilskins were beaded with moisture; everywhere was the drip of seepage, the silent flow of water underfoot, the trickle of subterranean streams and the clean cool smell of wet rock. Suddenly, our tunnel halted against a rugged face of pre-Cambrian rock. There, jet-black and glistening in the torchlight, was a broad vein of ore. “That” said Joe Belec, “is it!”

We stood there in the Eldorado mine, 1,000 ft. below the surface of the largest subarctic lake in the world, and gazed thoughtfully at what might have been a seam of coal, but what we knew to be the black magic of pitchblende, the source of uranium, the earth-quaking substance of atomic power.

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‘A very particular time and place in Canada’s history’: New book recalls Saskatchewan’s forgotten uranium mine – by Alex MacPherson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix – September 12, 2016)

http://thestarphoenix.com/

Almost nothing is left of the Gunnar uranium mine. What didn’t decay after the mine on the north shore of Lake Athabasca was abandoned more than five decades ago was later hauled away as part of a massive — and massively over-budget — cleanup operation. Patricia Sandberg, whose father and grandfather worked for Gunnar Mining Ltd., and who spent eight years of her childhood at the northern Saskatchewan mine, worries it will be forgotten altogether.

“It is a part of Canadian history that most people don’t know about, and I think it’s really important,” said Sandberg, whose new book, Sun Dogs and Yellowcake, chronicles the mine’s history and records the stories of the people who lived and worked there.

The Gunnar uranium mine, located about 800 kilometres north of Saskatoon, was discovered by prospectors working for Gilbert LaBine, the Ontario-born explorer who is widely considered the father of Canada’s uranium industry.

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Uranium mining contributes small fraction of total nuclear power emissions, study says – by Alex MacPherson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix – September 8, 2016)

http://thestarphoenix.com/

Despite critics’ claims that mining and milling uranium is a hidden cost in the comparatively clean nuclear fuel cycle, extracting the radioactive material produces only a small fraction of the process’s total emissions, according to the author of a new study.

“There were some gaps in our understanding about what the actual emissions from the full nuclear fuel cycle were,” University of Saskatchewan engineering graduate student David Parker said of the idea underlying the study.

“One area with a lot of gaps that critics was pointing to was mining and milling. The thought was this gap in our understanding of greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining and milling might be a significant contributor to total emissions.”

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ELLIOT LAKE’S GLAMOROUS RISE AND BITTER FALL – by McKenzie Porter (MACLEAN’S Magazine – July 16, 1960)

http://www.macleans.ca/

This is a candid portrait of the hundred-million-dollar boom town that was built on uranium—the mineral with sex appeal— and of the mesmerized thousands who learned the hard way that it was just another mining camp after all

ELLIOT LAKE IS the most elaborate mining camp ever built, and until recently it was the luckiest. Although it is buried in the northern Ontario bush, half way between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie, it looks like a metropolitan suburb.

Moose, bears and wolves peep nervously down from majestic heights of rock and pine upon a hundred million dollars’ worth of fluorescent lights, crescent streets, split-level homes, three – story apartment blocks, cantilevered shopping plazas, breeze-way schools, wide-screen movie theatres, picture-window hotels, functional churches, a lakeshore community centre and the finest hospital north of Lake Huron.

Ed Gibbons, a former editor of the Elliot Lake Standard, once described the town as “a frontier monument to the architectural theories of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright,” and he spoke more in wonder than in jest.

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The Congo and the Cold War – by The Conversation (Economy Watch.com – September 1, 2016)

http://www.economywatch.com/

In late 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb, to the profound shock of the US and Britain. Neither of the two had any idea that the Soviet atomic weapons programme was so well advanced. The US had beaten Germany in the first atomic arms race. In addition, for four years, it had enjoyed an absolute monopoly on atomic weapons. Now, a second atomic arms race was under way – and the Cold War heated up dramatically.

The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga had been reopened in March 1945. It was fully in operation, supplying America with fresh stocks of high-grade uranium ore. As a result, observes Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congo was an important element of Washington’s geopolitical strategy in the context of the Cold War.

Despite strenuous efforts by the US to find alternative sources of rich ore, Shinkolobwe remained its greatest single source in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1947, according to figures from the US Atomic Energy Commission, the US obtained 1,440 tons of uranium concentrates from the Belgian Congo. It obtained none from its own territory and only 137 tons from Canada.

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Amid threats, security efforts on the rise at African mining sites – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – August 29, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

JOHANNESBURG — Canadian mining firms, lured to West Africa by low taxes and friendly governments, must now grapple with an emerging new risk: the rising threat of attack by Islamist radicals in the region.

Canadian gold miners have been among the biggest investors in many West African nations in recent years. But after a wave of terrorist assaults on hotels and tourist sites over the past year, along with a report of a rocket attack on a French uranium mine, West Africa is becoming a more dangerous place for foreign investors.

In a sign of the new anxieties, Burkina Faso announced this month that it will deploy more than 3,600 soldiers and police to protect the nation’s 18 mining sites from the escalating threat of attack by Islamist extremists who have already struck at targets in the country.

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How Joe Hirshhorn Hit the Uranium Jackpot – by David MacDonald (MACLEAN’S Magazine – October 29, 1955)

http://www.macleans.ca/

Even when geologists said there couldn’t be uranium at Blind River this brash and bouncy little financial wizard tossed in $30,000 and struck a spectacular bonanza. He wasn’t surprised. “Making money comes easy to me,” he says, “ — like breathing”

ALONG Toronto’s Bay Street, the frenetic mining capital of North America, veteran prospector and minemaker Gilbert A. LaBine had long been acknowledged—until recently—as the uranium king of Canada. The reason was obvious. It was LaBine who had found the continent’s first pitchblende, at Great Bear Lake, in 1930; LaBine whose Eldorado mine helped usher in the atomic age over Hiroshima; and LaBine who, in the northern wilds of Saskatchewan, came up with Gunnar, Canada’s first truly big uranium strike.

Today—for reasons equally obvious—the top man in uranium is no longer LaBine, a conservative grey-haired elder of the industry, but Joseph H. Hirshhorn, a flashy fast-talking little mining promoter from the borough of Brooklyn, N.Y., whose exploits on Bay and Wall Streets have won him millions of dollars and a gambler’s reputation for playing long shots.

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[Uranium City] ATHABASKA’S ATOM BOOM – by Ronald Schiller (MACLEAN’S Magazine – March 1, 1954)

http://www.macleans.ca/

Uranium City, Sask., can’t afford the time to develop the social graces— companies are formed in the beer parlor, women are outnumbered fifty to one, there’s no plumbing, and every man you meet wants to let you in on his own private bonanza

ONE DAY in the summer of 1952 Gilbert LaBine, the almost legendary Toronto mining millionaire who discovered the original deposit of pitchblende on Great Bear Lake, received a radiogram in Toronto from young geologist Albert Zeemel at Lake Athabaska in northern Saskatchewan. “Come quick,” the message read, “I’ve shot an elephant.”

Although LaBine is aware that there are no elephants in the northern wilds, he chartered a plane immediately and flew to Lake Athabaska. Zeemel strapped a Geiger counter to his boss’ hack, clapped a set of earphones on his head and conducted him to Crackingstone Peninsula. There LaBine heard a crackling roar in his ears like a thousand eggs frying in a pan.

Wherever he walked -for three days the sputtering continued, sometimes fading to a whisper, sometimes rising to a howl, but never stopping. Finally he look the phones from his tingling ears and exulted: “It’s an elephant, all right! Biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

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Coalition pushes for greater environmental protections for the Grand Canyon – by Megan Janetsky (Arizona Republic – August 24, 2016)

http://www.azcentral.com/

The eve of the 100th birthday of the National Park Service was not met in Phoenix with chipper choruses of “Happy Birthday” but rather with calls by local and national organizations to protect the Grand Canyon by halting uranium mining in the area.

Members of Environment Arizona and the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club, which together form the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument Coalition, gathered Wednesday in downtown Phoenix to announce their petition to take action on uranium mining and old-growth logging in the Grand Canyon.

With the support of 500 local businesses and a half-million signatures, groups like Environment Arizona and Sierra Club are banding together to send a petition to the Obama administration to create a Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument. Some 6,000 of the signatures were gathered in the past week in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, according to the groups’ spokesmen.

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Story of a forgotten town – by Alex Browne (Peace Arch News – August 5, 2016)

http://www.peacearchnews.com/

South Surrey writer Patricia Sandberg admits she has mining in her blood – although she claims her former career as a securities lawyer for mining companies came about more as a matter of accident, than design.

The fact remains that both her grandfather, Fred, and father Jack, were both deeply involved in the construction end of the mining industry and had an extended working relationship with 20th century Canadian prospector and mining pioneer Gilbert LaBine, first president of Eldorado Mining and Refining from the late 1920s until 1947.

The uranium boom of the late 1940s led LaBine to discover deposits of the metal on the shores of Lake Athabaska in Northern Saskatchewan. In the early 1950s he established Gunnar Mines there – and the company town that was built around it.

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