Communiqué

Behind the Scenes at Cluff Lake

Life at Cluff Lake is pretty quiet now that all the major decommissioning work is done. If not for the exploration crews using the camp, there would only be a five-person environmental monitoring staff onsite at any time.

Ongoing decommissioning: Claude open pit mine had been partially backfilled during operations.

Post-decommissioning: Claude pit back-filled and vegetated.

Tailings management area during decommissioning (Cluff Lake mill in background right).

Post-decommissioning tailings management area.

Yet according to Dave Hiller, manager of decommissioning for AREVA Resources as well as manager of the Cluff Lake project, this small number is deceiving.

"The number of staff working onsite is only a small portion of the people who are actually working on this project," Hiller says. "Most people don"t realize the huge amount of behind the scenes work going on. In addition to scientific and environmental work, we have safety, quality, regulatory, legal and administrative support."

The onsite team includes supervisors, an environmental coordinator and environmental technicians as well as maintenance people. There are also contractors and AREVA employees who fly up to Cluff to conduct specific environmental tests. The behind the scenes team is largely based out of the Saskatoon office. It includes geochemists, biogeochemists, radiation specialists, groundwater and hydrogeologists, hydrogeology modellers – in short, a cross-representation of various scientific fields.

Cluff Lake is the first modern uranium mine to be decommissioned in Saskatchewan, and the standards AREVA Resources has to meet are much more stringent than in the past. "Cluff Lake is an older mine, so it was not designed for closure. McClean Lake, on the other hand, is part of the new generation of mines that are designed for decommissioning. It has management systems and engineering controls in place to minimize the impact of any contaminants created during operation. New systems, such as progressively reclaiming the waste rock pile, integrate decommissioning into various phases of the mine"s life rather than leaving it all to the end," Hiller says.

The emphasis on integrating decommissioning during the design phase of a mine, before it is even built, has given rise to a whole new area of expertise – one in which Cluff Lake is making major contributions. "The things we"re doing at Cluff are helping improve the decommissioning process. For example, if the methods we"ve used to cover the tailings area and waste rock pile prove successful, they could be used elsewhere for other decommissioned mines."

In addition to day-to-day monitoring activities onsite, there are about ten separate environmental investigations currently being carried out on Cluff, everything from infiltration studies to modelling of groundwater flux of contaminants. "We need this kind of applied research to show that what we"ve done is working," Hiller says. Most of the investigations are expected to wrap up by the end of next year. At that point, the team will assess the success of the remediation efforts.

While work continues onsite and at the Saskatoon office, AREVA Resources continues to meet with Aboriginal groups and communities in the area to keep them up-to-date on our reclamation efforts and to seek their comments.

Together, the multi-talented team working on Cluff Lake shares a common goal. "It might be five, 10 or 15 years in the future, but our end goal is to return the Cluff Lake site to a safe and productive natural state for people and animals," Hiller says.