Canada, keep your mining companies at home
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B.C. shuts door on uranium projects
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April 25, 2008
VANCOUVER -- British Columbia has slapped an official moratorium on uranium exploration and development in the province, reinforcing a long-standing informal ban on the nuclear fuel and dashing the hopes of companies that hoped to take advantage of soaring prices for the commodity.
The ban, announced yesterday, makes B.C. a no-go zone for uranium and confirms a moratorium put in place in 1980 by a previous government responding to anti-nuclear sentiment in the province. That moratorium lapsed in 1987 but subsequent governments did not move to update it, as companies focused their exploration campaigns on other metals and because there was a widespread view that uranium production would be unpopular in the province.
The government's decision comes as a surprise and contradicts assurances Boss had received that it would be able to take its project to public hearings, Boss spokesman Rupert Allan said
yesterday.
"We did not know this was coming," Mr. Allan said, saying the decision makes the company's Blizzard deposit worthless. The company had described it as containing up to $1-billion worth of uranium.
There is no uranium mining in B.C. Uranium exploration is under way in other provinces, but the only producing mines in Canada are in Saskatchewan.
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"Defenders of the Black Hills is a group of volunteers without racial or tribal boundaries whose mission is to preserve, protect, and restore the environment of the 1851 and 1868 Treaty Territories, Treaties made between the United States and the Great Sioux Nation."
Speaking about radioactive fallout, the late President John F. Kennedy said,
"Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby who may be born long after we are gone, should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent."
July 26, 1963 upon signing the ban on above ground nuclear tests
