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Communiqué

The Caribou Project

McClean Lake’s Sue Mine area with the Caribou mine area in the foreground.

The environmental assessment process on AREVA Resources’ Caribou ore body continues to move forward. The provincial public review of the Draft Project Specific Guidelines has been completed and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has held a one-day public hearing on the Guidelines. AREVA is now finalizing the Environmental Impact Statement for submission this summer.

“Caribou is a smaller deposit located 1.8 km northwest of the Sue B pit at McClean Lake where we are currently mining,” says Jim Corman, vice president of operations. “It was identified in 2002, but the market at the time was such that it wasn’t an economically viable project to develop. Now that uranium prices are up, we are taking steps to bring it on stream.”

The relatively shallow depth of the ore body, about 100 to 130 metres below the surface, makes it a good fit for open pit development. In terms of volume, Caribou is slightly smaller than Sue E, at approximately 7 million cubic metres.

The company is proposing to use McClean Lake’s existing JEB mill to process the ore and existing tailings management facilities to manage solid and liquid waste, with a new clean waste rock stockpile to be constructed next to the pit. Mine water will be treated and managed using the existing Sue water management system.

“Caribou is a small project on an existing site utilizing much of the existing infrastructure, so it is really an incremental addition to what we are already doing,” Corman says. “And it is a good bridging project between the current Sue B open pit mining and the proposed Midwest mine project. Pending regulatory approval, it would allow us to move our workers after the completion of mining at Sue B smoothly to Caribou and then to Midwest. There will be a bit of a gap after Sue B, but we will keep crews busy with ore haulage and onsite reclamation activities such as pushing the Sue E special waste deeper into the Sue C pit and recontouring of clean waste rock piles.”

Corman also sees Caribou as a good stepping stone for the mill. Estimates put the deposit at about 1,000 tonnes of uranium, enough feedstock for roughly six to eight months of milling at the current rate. “The ore is similar in composition to the Midwest deposit, so it will give us an opportunity to fine tune our milling process for when Midwest comes online.”