MINING:
Quick Facts
For information about mining development and impacts to the environment read here about:
Mineral Rights:
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Rights to mineral resources are accessible to anyone who stakes a mineral claim under The Mineral Resources Act. This involves marking and registering an area of Crown land and does not include the provision of any information on the economic value, or environmental impacts of potential development.
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Staking a claim can lead to a process where increasingly restrictive rights to land and resources are granted via mineral permits and leases, without any consultation or consent by local people or other interests. This may happen even if the areas staked are areas of high cultural significance, high environmental significance, or both. It may happen under lakes and rivers, and underneath other dispositions, such as outfitting camps, recreational and traditional use cabins, and even public infrastructure such as roads.
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Saskatchewan's "open-access" mineral rights allocation system is a holdover from two centuries ago in the 1800s. It allows anyone to stake a claim to public mineral resources practically anywhere, without consultation or advance warning. All other forms of resource rights allocation have been modernized long since, including oil and natural gas leases, forest tenures, outfitting and recreational cabin leases, trapping allocations, hunting and fishing licences, etc. In effect, the open-access mineral claim system leaves about 95% of the boreal forest perpetually facing the impacts of mineral exploration and development.
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| Mineral Development and its Impacts: |
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Once a mineral claim is staked and registered, the holder acquires a long term, low cost interest in the minerals. Access to the surface is virtually unfettered. While claim staking may be a low impact activity in most cases, it can be harmful in itself, and will often lead to a variety of other activities like roads, tails and clearcuts that are detrimental to ecological integrity and often specifically harmful to the environment. These activities will occur year round, but most often in the summer.
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If signs are promising, development activities can move into extensive test drilling, including "pin-cushion" drilling which may be undertaken on grids that cover significant areas with holes spaced only metres apart. In areas of special interest, there may be extensive test pits, and bulk sample removal.
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| Mining Operations and their Impacts: |
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The development of a mining operation occurs only in about a tenth of one percent of mineral claims. Currently there are only 5 operating mines in the boreal forest. And at this level of activity, environmental impact assessments are invariably required. Nevertheless, the impacts on the area of the mine are devastating, and long lasting, despite improvements in the way things are done.
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One of the major impacts of mine development are roads and power lines which will use and impact much more land than the mine itself. It is instructive to appreciate that the three major highways into Saskatchewan's boreal forest north of the Churchill River have all been built to serve the mining industry. Public and community access has been incidental. These highways, to Cluff Lake, Key Lake and Wollaston Lake, involve about 1,000 kilometres of road constructed largely at public expense to benefit the mining industry. Even the new road to Black Lake was necessitated by the closing of a mining operation, as the winter road and barge routes to Uranium City, that also served three other communities in the area, were closed down, leaving these communities without ground access to supplies.
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While the mine shaft and milling facilities may be small and localized, the impacts of waste rock, tailings and waste water storage are enormous. Waste rock comes from the need to tunnel into the ore body through non-ore bearing rocks, as well as low grade ore. This material ends up on the surface where it and runoff water must be managed. Tailings are a product of the milling process that extracts the metals from the ore. For even the best grades of uranium ore, only about 25 pounds of metal is taken out of the ground for every ton of rock mined. The other 1,975 pounds of rock, usually ground up to the consistency of fine flour and saturated in the chemicals used to remove the metals, is the tailings, and is the major waste handling problem of mining.
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The tailings are usually in a water borne chemical slurry, and are normally deposited in lakes, or open pits for storage. Because of their fine texture, they are more susceptible to leaching of heavy metal poisons, and acidification of the water. In the case of uranium mining, there is the added hazard of radioactivity to deal with. All these issues, including continual water run-off from tailings, pond liner failures, and dam breakages, lead to long term environmental impacts.
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| Mining's Environmental Aftermath |
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In Saskatchewan's boreal forest there are 78 documented abandoned mines, all with varying environmental and public safety risks. All of them need remedial action and all this will be at public expense, because the companies that created the problem no longer exist, and the mining industry takes no responsibility for this problem.
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Of the 78 abandoned mines, 73 pose some hazard to both public safety and the environment. The worst site, Gunnar Mine on Lake Athabasca, scored 28.5 out of 26 for environmental danger (bonus points were assessed for additional hazards).
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A total of 61 abandoned mine sites pose a significant risk to the environment, including:
a. persistent ponding and discharge of contaminated liquid
b. acid generating potential from waste rock and tailings runoff water
c. high radioactivity levels in waste rock and tailings locations
d. hazardous scrap materials and mill wastes exposed
e. direct hazards to wildlife: radiation, toxic chemicals, habitat contamination
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.All of these sites are now a public liability and ongoing stabilization, monitoring and clean up will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in years to come
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For more information see Mining in Remote Areas Issues and Impacts by MiningWatch Canada.
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| Forest Threats & Solutions |
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| The impacts of human developments in the forest. |
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| Mining in the Forest |
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| Learn more about mining in Saskatchewan and it's ecological impacts. |
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