The Nicholson Mine: Saskatchewan’s First Cold War Uranium Mine

The first discovery of uranium in Saskatchewan was at Nicholson Bay, in a remote northern location on the shore of Lake Athabasca. Uranium was first noted at what became the Nicholson site in 1929 when uranium was only of interest as an indicator of radium potential. When uranium ores became of strategic national interest in about 1940, a cross-Canada search was launched to find uranium deposits. The first to be found and developed was in the Northwest Territories. The second arose from a return to exploration at the Nicholson site in the Beaverlodge area in 1944. The Nicholson mine was the first uranium mine to be developed in Saskatchewan and, in 1949 was the only active uranium mine in Canada outside of the Northwest Territories. By 1959 the Nicholson ore body had been essentially depleted, but the Nicholson mine had played its role in helping Canada become one of the largest uranium producers in the world. It produced about 12,800 tonnes of uranium ore, yielding about 50 tonnes of uranium (as U3O8), and an estimated 60- to 90 thousand m3 of waste rock. Following closure in 1960, the Nicholson site was abandoned with little remediation and no reclamation being done. Forty-five years would pass before the governments of Saskatchewan and Canada reached an agreement to fund the remediation (clean-up) of the Nicholson site, and contracted the management of the project to the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC). At the time of writing this book the clean-up was about to begin, with several years of clean-up activity anticipated, and then a period subsequent monitoring activity, before the site is expected to be released into a long-term management and monitoring program.

Dr. Laurier Schramm has over 35 years of R&D experience spanning each of the industry, not-for-profit, university, and government sectors. He is currently President and CEO of the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC). His interests include technological innovation, management and leadership, colloid & interface science, and nanotechnology. He holds 17 patents, and has published 15 books and over 400 other publications and proprietary reports. He has served on many expert advisory panels and Boards, is co-founder of Innoventures Canada Inc. (I-CAN), and co-founder of Canada's Innovation School(TM). He has received national scientific and engineering awards for his work, and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada and an honourary Member of the Engineering Institute of Canada. Patty Ogilvie-Evans was born and raised in Saskatchewan, and her interest in earth processes led her to pursue a career in Geological Sciences. She graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 2006, and has been working as a Geologist in Saskatchewan for the past 12 years. She has a mining background with experience in gold and uranium underground and open-pit mining, diamond exploration and several years of uranium exploration. She is currently a part of Saskatchewan Research Council's (SRC) Environmental Remediation team, working with abandoned legacy sites in Northern Saskatchewan. The history of the abandoned sites is of particular interest to Patty and she greatly enjoys the challenges of finding, locating and recreating abandoned mines to provide a better understanding to assist in the ultimate remediation of these sites.