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Areva's long road of process Darrell Greer Northern News Services Published Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Areva Resources Ltd. submitted its draft environmental impact statement to the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB) concerning the uranium project on Dec. 21. An environmental impact statement lists the specifics of a project, outlining what a company's going to do and how it's going to do it. The statement also identifies potential impacts to the environment, assesses the significance of those impacts, and details how a company proposes to mitigate them. Areva manager of Nunavut affairs Barry McCallum said the statement contained about 10,000 pages. He said it's a significant document that took a number of years to produce. "The baseline work on the statement actually started in 2007," said McCallum. "The statement is now on NIRB's website and anybody can download and comment on it." NIRB gathered community input and issued Areva its final guidelines in May of 2011, from which the company was to submit its draft environmental impact statement. After receiving the statement, NIRB began a conformity determination to ensure it did, in fact, meet those guidelines. Areva should find out today if it moves forward to the next step of the process, or does more writing to address concerns identified by NIRB. McCallum said if there's no concerns with the statement, the next step will be for Areva to distribute the document to everyone on a list given to it by NIRB. He said from there, more questions await. "There will be an information request, as well as the company's technical comment on particular technical questions. "There's specific time frames for these to be completed, and then NIRB will come back to us and respond to the comment. "Then a technical meeting will be held to look at residual comment, which is anything we haven't answered. "That will be held somewhere in the Kivalliq, as yet to be determined." Once that's taken care of, a pre-hearing conference will be held for a comments update and then a public forum will take place this coming June. NIRB will issue a pre-hearing conference report to give Areva the guidelines to finalize its environmental impact statement. After another compliance determination, technical review and a final hearing, NIRB will issue a final report to the minister of Northern Development for a decision. McCallum said the company put a lot of work into how this project should be carried out, did a lot of consulting, and listened to what people had to say. He said Areva's confident it has a solid, robust plan in place, as well as solid mitigative measures. "We're confident whatever questions come our way will be answered appropriately, and we'll end up with a certificate to carry out the project. "With time to complete the environmental assessment and permitting process, we don't believe we'll be constructing before 2015. "But once there, we'll be looking at three or four years of construction and about 14 years of operation based on the deposits we now have. "Add on a few years of decommissioning and follow-up monitoring, and we would expect a significant workforce for about 20 years unless we find more." At present, Kiggavik has a resource of about 130 million pounds of uranium. McCallum said Areva would like to increase the resource, making project economics more favourable when the development decision is made in a few years. He said Areva plans to drill 10,000 to 12,000 metres each year for the next two to three years. "Exploration will focus on increasing the resource at known deposits already in the proposal, and finding new deposits for future development by exploring promising geological and geophysical targets or areas. "The company also has a meeting scheduled with the Kivalliq Inuit Association for the last week of this month, as we plan to start negotiating the Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement this year."
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