Residents of Nairn Centre and surrounding rural areas say they're fed up that Ontario has not resolved the concern of trucking niobium tailings into the site of a former uranium mine, located north of the community.
Some residents and community leaders of the town, west of Sudbury, are wondering if public demonstrations would be needed to confront the truckers before the material is dumped.
Roughly 100 residents were packed into the Nairn and Hyman Township Hall on July 14 to get an update on how Ontario's Ministry of Transportation (MTO) appears to be moving ahead with the plan to dispose of 34,000 tonnes of material from Nipissing First Nation, just west of North Bay.
Details were outlined by township mayor Amy Mazey who told the meeting the issue was first raised roughly one year ago, when the township was first informed that the unwanted material from Nipissing First Nation would be trucked to an area just north of Nairn Centre known as the Agnew Lake Tailings Management Area (ALTMA).
The mayor recounted several of the questions first raised by township residents after a public meeting held last Sept. 11, 2024.
The plan, devised by MTO, is to use large tandem dump trucks hauling along Highway 17, to the Agnew Lake Tailings Management Area (ALTMA), located roughly 25 kilometres north of Nairn Centre.
The materials would include the old niobium tailings along with a quantity of dirt and gravel excavated from a former gravel pit, at the First Nation site, owned by MTO.
Some of the material in the disposal plan is made up of old tailings from a former niobium mine that operated near Lake Nipissing in the 1950s.
The site was turned over to the Ontario government in the 1990s.
Ontario's Ministry of Mines (now called Ministry of Energy and Mines) has determined that the old material — such as the Nipissing material — would be suitable as a new ground cover for the Agnew Lake site, where uranium tailings are stored.
One of the key reasons for this is because some areas of the uranium tailings site have become exposed to the environment. Measurable amounts of radioactive emissions have been detected by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CSNC).
Although the Ontario government holds the licence for the tailings site, CSNC is responsible for the safety of the site.
The safety commission wants the areas of exposed uranium tailings to be repaired and covered over with new material, which is why MTO came up with the trucking plan. If the uranium tailings have to be covered anyway, the niobium material from Nipissing FN could be used for that, said the Ministry of Mines in 2024.
The CSNC has stated it is not concerned about the niobium tailings, which are classified as a Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM), a very low-level form of radioactive material.
Dana Pandolfi, a senior project officer with CSNC, told a previous town hall meeting held in Nairn Centre (Sept.11, 2024) that niobium is not something her agency is concerned about.
Pandolfi said the main concern at Agnew Lake is the issue of covering up those eroded areas, where uranium radiation has been discovered.
"If for whatever reason the niobium project doesn't go through, we at the CNSC want to make sure that the areas where the radiation doses are higher are still covered at the end of the day," Pandolfi told that meeting.
New Twist
While that may have answered the question of the relative safety of niobium, a new twist occurred this past week, when the township received an email from MTO saying that not all the tailings from Nipissing First Nation are being trucked to Agnew Lake.
"We just received an email last week from the MTO that part of the niobium tailings are going to the Clean Harbors radioactive waste facility near Sarnia, and that is why these sites are designed to receive dangerous materials," said Nairn CAO Belinda Katchabaw.
"So it asks a very interesting question. If some of the tailings need to go there, why don't all the tailings go there?" Ketchabaw asked.
Katchabaw said the whole issue now has two many unanswered questions, such as why are some of the tailings being sent to the hazardous waste facility in Sarnia.
Another question she said is what will happen if the niobium waste product is dumped on top of the old uranium tailings at Agnew Lake.
She worries the added weight of new ground cover might somehow upset the ground water balance in that area, perhaps causing leachate from the uranium tailings to migrate outward in the surrounding watershed.
Despite government officials explaining at a previous meeting the history of the uranium tailings site and how it was engineered to limit and manage seepage, Ketchabaw still said other unanswered questions fall into the category of "missing science". Ketchabaw said there was a lack of biological monitoring at the site.
"The ministry's risk assessment did not include fish tissue sampling, aquatic vegetation uptake studies or macro-invertebrate assessments, despite that these are very routine components of an environmental risk evaluation, and this omission is particularly problematic because cadmium and selenium bio-accumulate, which means they build up over time. Fish and vertebrates take up these heavy metals and they serve as prey or food for other birds, mammals, even humans," said Ketchabaw.
After the presentations and updates, members of the audience were invited to ask questions or comment. Most of the comment was wondering how or why the government would allow the process to move forward without resolving all the unanswered questions from the township.
Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas, who has attended all the Nairn Township meetings on the issue, told the audience she wasn't surprised at the seeming lack of attention by the Ontario government or the mines ministry.
She told the crowd the example of the outstanding concerns Sudbury residents have with the tailings problem at the Long Lake Gold Mine, where "a tailings delta" has formed at the south end of the lake, because of leachate from the former mining operation.
Gélinas said residents have been complaining about the fact that arsenic levels in the water exceeded provincial standards and the health unit had even advised residents not to drink water from certain parts of that lake.
Gélinas said she was told the clean-up at Long Lake has been Ontario's No. 1 mine clean-up priority for the past 14 years. But very little has been done, said Gélinas.
A couple of residents said if the dump trucks start heading along the back roads leading to the tailings site, they might be faced with a blockade.
"We're not going to recommend civil disobedience. That is not what we're going to suggest," the mayor responded.
Some other residents suggested that a public demonstration might be more appropriate. Another participant, who said she was a former teacher, recommended a mass email campaign to government ministers and bureaucrats to send out the message that Nairn Centre residents are not happy with the MTO trucking plan.
Another suggestion was that area residents could donate funding to hire a lawyer to file injunctions and other court orders hoping to stop the plan, or at least hold it up long enough that more studies could be done.
As the meeting closed, mayor Mazey said she could not provide a clear answer on what would happen in August, when MTO had intentions to move forward with the trucking plan. Mazey said government officials had not been responding to questions or concerns put forward by the township.
She said she and council plan to have further discussions and she is hoping the province will back off on the trucking plan until all the concerns of the residents are resolved.
Len Gillis covers mining and health care for Sudbury.com.
