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Clean-up costs at the abandoned Giant Mine near Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, could increase by millions and delay work by years if the federal clean-up team is forced to address the 27 conditions imposed by a northern review board in June.
In a report discussed in the legislature Monday, Canada’s federal government said six of those recommendations are of “significant concern”, CBC reports:
For instance, the government estimates that moving Baker Creek away from the mine site would cost between $25 and $45 million, having an oversight group could cost up to $800,000 a year, and conducting a human health assessment could take three to four years. They say the delays could cost up to $100 million, on top of the nearly billion-dollar price tag.
The main environmental hazard at the deserted gold mine is the 237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide dust stored in 15 underground chambers, a by-product of decades of gold mining.
Experts say the amount is so high that it would be enough to kill every human in the world. Consequently, clean-up work is so dangerous that buildings will have to be sealed off as they are demolished, while workers would have to wear full hazmat suits and breathe supplied air.
Now is up to the federal minister of Aboriginal Affairs to decide how the clean up should proceed.
The Giant Mine remediation project is funded out of a federal program for contaminated sites. Beginning in 2005, a total of $3.6 billion over 15 years has been earmarked for the program.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
2 Comments
chris goodwin
Millions, or billions ? Thousands of years? – i.e. NOT cleaned up, but left as a ticking time-bomb; to be “watched” ??? Is this just sensationalist ‘elf and safety make work, or just that nobody has thought through what has to be done ? Looks like the asbestos panic, all over again.
Yellowknifer
Well, the government’s plan is to freeze the arsenic trioxide underground–forever. No long-term funding, no ongoing research and development into something more permanent and no independent oversight. The claim now that implementing the Review Board’s recommendations will cost millions more, rings a little hollow. Continual mismanagement forced the project into a five-year long environmental assessment where virtually all the delays were caused by government. Now the people in charge of the project want to do an end-run around the sensible recommendations for the Review Board that provide a reasonable path forward.