Ghislain Lévesque has dealt with many contentious issues during the 12 years he's been mayor of Sept Îles. But nothing has stirred emotions in the regional hub, 650 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, like the proposal to mine uranium on the outskirts of the city.MARK CARDWELL, Special to The Gazette
Published: Saturday, February 07
"I've never seen people here get so worried and upset over a single subject," Lévesque said about the groundswell of public opposition to the project in recent weeks, included petitions, a demonstration, and a threat by most of the city's doctors to leave the region if it goes ahead.
"It's the only thing people are talking about around town these days, and almost everybody seems to be against it."
That's why, he added, city councillors voted unanimously in favour of a resolution on Jan. 26 asking the province to declare a permanent moratorium on uranium mining in its territory. By so doing, Sept Îles became the seventh municipality in Quebec - and the first on the North Shore - to make a similar request to government in recent years.
And it likely won't be the last.
That's because, after a 30-year lull, uranium is back on the radar of Quebec's mining industry. And that is raising concerns - whether real or imagined - among people who live in areas where there are known uranium deposits.
Although Canada is the world's biggest producer of uranium, accounting for roughly a third of the 100 million pounds that are sold on the global market each year, all of our production comes from three mines in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin, which contains the biggest and richest known deposits of uranium on Earth.
About 85 per cent of that production - worth some $500 million annually - is shipped to the United States, Japan and western Europe, where it is used to produce energy in nuclear reactors. The rest is used here at home to produce electricity, mostly at nuclear power plants in Ontario and here in Quebec, and to produce isotopes for cancer treatments and other medical purposes.
Quebec also has the capacity to be a major producer of uranium, a silvery-grey metal that is ubiquitous in nature and weakly radioactive, says Robert Marquis, director general of Géologie Québec, the office within the provincial Natural Resources and Wildlife Department that collects and studies scientific and field evidence of mineral resources and assesses their potential.
"Mining companies are always on the lookout for minerals and they have found many occurrences of uranium here over the years," Marquis, a geologist and past president of the Geologic Association of Canada, said from his office in Val d'Or this week.
Located mostly in four geographical areas - the Otish Mountains in central Quebec, Ungava Bay, Mont Laurier and the Ottawa Valley, and the North Shore - those finds contain relatively low-grade uranium that is not economically feasible to produce when commodity prices are low.
That has been the case since the 1970s, when the world soured on nuclear energy and commodity prices went south. But the price of uranium has been on a tear in recent years. Though it has fallen sharply in recent months due to the global financial crisis, a pound of uranium fetched a record $138 U.S. in June 2007, a tenfold increase over 2004.
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