Kenney’s Coal ‘Review’ Is Just One More Betrayal | The Tyee
At the same time, Environment Minister Jason Nixon proposed to amend the Oldman River Basin Water Allocation Order to take water set aside for irrigators and conservation and give it to Aussie coal miners such as billionaire Gina Rinehart, who owns the proposed Grassy Mountain project.
Billionaires leading push for nuclear reactors in Canadian mining
With Gates and his billionaires’ nuclear club backing KoBold, it’s likely that their off-grid mining projects would welcome government financing for small modular reactors.
When asked about the situation, Mining Watch Canada’s Jamie Kneen told me by email:
"On the one hand, the mining industry faces so much risk in the markets that it’s unlikely to add to that risk by jumping on an unproven technology [like SMRs]. On the other hand, the mining industry is used to leaving masses of toxic waste behind for others to deal with – and getting away with it – so it’d be a perfect fit.“
BMC Minerals, the Vancouver-based company behind the project, hopes to extract 1.8 million tonnes of zinc, 600,000 tonnes of copper and 350,000 tonnes of lead from the Kudz Ze Kayah mine over a 10-year lifespan, after which a 26-year closure and reclamation process will take place.
The federal government’s order comes on the heels of a letter from Stephen Charlie, Chief of Liard First Nation, which states the assessment board “erred in law” when recommending the project move ahead for government approval without a full review under the territory’s assessment act.
In its screening report for the project the executive committee acknowledged the mine would have “significant adverse effects” on water, traditional land use and wildlife and will contribute to the “likely decline” of the Finlayson caribou herd, a subsistence food resource for the Kaska Nation, comprised of five Dene-speaking First Nations spanning the Yukon and British Columbia border.
The Kaska nation’s traditional territory encompasses 24 million hectares — equivalent to the size of the state of Oregon — stretching across B.C., Yukon and the Northwest Territories.
Source: Kudz Ze Kayah mine stokes tensions between Canada, Yukon, First Nations
How growing global electric car sales could be a boon for Alberta | CBC News
“There’s
a lot of opportunities for lithium in Alberta,” said Roy Eccles, a
senior consultant with Apex Geoscience in Edmonton, in an interview with
CBC’s Radio Active.
Eccles
says exploration in the last decade by companies of the Devonian-aged
oil and gas reservoirs — between 1,600 and 3,330 metres below the
surface — has confirmed the accompanying salt-water brine is enriched
with lithium.
The Leduc Formation, the source of Alberta’s first
big oil boom, is also a rich lithium deposit. There are about 10.6
million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent identified in the
province, according to the Canadian Lithium Association, and
the potential could be even higher.
Photo by David Hoffman (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Morrison, who used to work in oilsands reclamation in the north before moving to the southern Alberta region to take up her current position with CPAWS, explained the process of how open-pit mining works.
“Explosives and machinery are used to access the coal deposit,” she said. “There are various coal seams throughout the mountain, and they take off the overburden, the soil and rock, to get to those coal seams. That creates a lot of waste rock which essentially piled in adjacent valleys. Water is used to wash the rock and process the coal through, and then that water is put in sediment containment ponds. So essentially the mountain comes down, the valley comes up, and you are left with a sediment pond often filled with contaminated water.”
Morrison said those were the immediate visible impacts of this type of mining, but there were also longer-term health consequences for those working in or living near these mines.
Citing a health study from the Appalachian region of the United States where this type of coal mining is more common, Morrison outlined some of those health risks, which include higher rates of cancer, higher heart and lung disease rates, higher kidney disease rates, higher rates of birth defects, and higher levels of impaired functioning due to chronic health problems.
Source: ‘You can’t rebuild a mountain’: fallout of open-pit mining discussed
The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada has a report, ‘Environmental hazard assessment of Benga Mining’s proposed Grassy Mountain Coal Project’ written by A. Dennis Lemly. He states, “A scientific analysis of environmental hazards of the project reveals numerous flaws in both the projected environmental performance of the mine and its regulatory control. From both environmental and economic perspectives, the proposed mine will do far more damage than can be reasonably justified on any level.
Is it worth sacrificing people’s health and contributing to global warming for the sake of a job? [Read more]
