A new mining company is hoping to get a project going in Labrador that may sound familiar to some. Labrador Uranium Inc. announced last week it would be doing exploration in the Moran Lake area, near Postville, a small Inuit community that is part of Nunatsiavut, to look at the potential of mining uranium and vanadium in the area.
The company was spun out from Consolidated Uranium Inc. and is working in partnership with Altius, a Newfoundland and Labrador-based company, on the Moran Lake project, the Notakwanon project in northern Labrador and other work in the Central Mineral Belt of Labrador.
Stephen Keith, CEO of the newly formed company, said people don’t see Labrador as a uranium district but there were multiple historical resources discovered in the region, citing the neighbouring Michelin deposit, one of the largest uranium discoveries in North America.
“Michelin was 100 million pounds, so if you’re if your view is positive on uranium, if your view is that you can convert that to pure nuclear energy, and whatever you define as green energy, this is a great thing,” he said.
Keith said along the mineral belt people have discovered hundreds of occurrences of uranium, gold, copper and rare-earth elements, and there has been plenty of work done before.
“It’s great to come into an area that’s been well explored but no one has taken it to the end of their exploration.”
Keith said they’re focusing right now on raising capital for the project and moving forward on further exploration of the identified sites where uranium has been found, to get a better picture of what’s in the ground.
Looking for uranium in Labrador isn’t new. In the 2000s there were half a dozen companies actively pursuing it, with some significant deposits identified and a lot of money invested.
In 2008 the Nunatsiavut Government placed a moratorium on uranium mining in Labrador Inuit lands, which was lifted in 2011. The moratorium was controversial at the time and only passed in an 8-7 vote in the Nunatsiavut Assembly.
Keith said the moratorium spurred a lot of companies to leave the region at the time and, combined with the instability of the uranium market following the Fukushima disaster in 2011, attention shifted to other mineral commodities.
The federal government has been expressing more of an interest in nuclear energy in recent years as part of meeting climate-emission targets, which Keith said is part of why the company is looking at uranium now.
“I think we’ve going to see more people coming back to uranium,” he said. “I spent a lot of my career working in South America and other places, sometimes we’d be somewhere with much larger, richer deposits but it’s a regulatory and legal nightmare. So, coming to somewhere like Labrador, where you know there’s something there, you have a local partner like Altius, it just makes sense.”
Glenn Sheppard, who is currently the AngajukKak (mayor) of Postville and was Nunatsiavut’s minister of Lands and Natural Resources when the uranium moratorium was lifted, said at the time people were divided on the development of uranium resources in the area and he thinks they still are now.
People he’s spoken to are happy to see something for the region and money come in, he said, but they are still concerned about radioactive materials being mined near their town.
“People will say we’re happy to see exploration but when it comes to development, we may have a different story. It’s much the same as it was when the vote was taking place on the moratorium.”
When he last campaigned, some elders brought up uranium mining, Sheppard said, saying they were opposed due to environmental concerns.
People are right to have concerns, he said, and they have to make sure if the project moves forward it’s done in an environmentally safe way.
The company held a public meeting in Postville earlier this year, which Sheppard attended. Attendance wasn’t high, he said, far less than he remembered at previous public meetings on uranium, but he believes that’s mostly related to COVID-19 concerns. Nonetheless, he said he was happy to see them engage with the community.
“They’ve been very good letting us know what’s happening, what’s going on,” he said. “They’ve bene updating us every step of the way so now we’ll see where it goes and what people think from there.”
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