Some 500 people participate in a March 2009 demonstration against uranium exploration on Lake Kachiwiss in northern Quebec. Photo: Olivier Noël
Comment: Great article and please click on the link below and read the entire article. The people of SEPT-ILES, QC are fighting uranium mining just like us in Virginia. We need to support each other and fight the nasty, evil Canadian uranium mining corporations! Demand all our state leaders to ban uranium mining and milling now! We do not need Nuke Power!
by Chris Scott
SEPT-ILES, QC—There is a region in northeastern Quebec that is renowned as a moose hunter's paradise: a country of blackflies, where outcroppings of billion-year-old granite poke through the veneer of trees and pristine rivers originating in the Labrador highlands tumble over escarpments to empty into the widening St. Lawrence.
In small, blue-collar urban centres such as Port-Cartier and Sept-Iles, it seems locals spend every free moment on the land. Ski-Doo travel is a preferred recreational activity in winter and on the shores of mountain-ringed Lake Kachiwiss, located 15km from downtown Sept-Iles, families on day trips stop to drink hot tea from thermoses.
But despite, or perhaps in light of, this popularity, Lake Kachiwiss has also become known as a point of interest for reasons other than Ski-Doo expeditions.
It is here that Vancouver-based mineral prospecting company Terra Ventures has been drilling the granite bedrock of the Saint Lawrence North Shore for uranium since 2008.
The procedure includes boring a 300-metre hole into the ground at a location previously identified by aerial survey as having uranium potential.
Environmental concerns related to the prospecting and potential mining of uranium tend to centre on the dispersal of radioactive residues into the air and water. The Lake Kachiwiss site lies just three kilometres from the banks of one of the North Shore's most important salmon streams. Also, Lake Kachiwiss has been shown to flow into Rapid Lake, which provides drinking water to Sept-Iles.
Activists fear the radioactive contaminants will follow these main watercourses and accumulate in the Gulf of St. Lawrence posing unacceptable, long-term, cancer-related health risks to residents of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.
Read more:
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/3226
