Image from a quicklink (Image by Unknown Owner) Details DMCA | Cleanup costs at a single northern mine next to Great Slave Lake are ballooning so high they are forcing Ottawa to rethink plans for thousands of contaminated sites across the country.
Documents obtained by northern environmentalists show the government expects the cost of cleaning up the Giant Mine just outside Yellowknife to be nearly a billion dollars -- perhaps the largest single environmental cleanup in Canada and paid for entirely by taxpayers. Initial estimates for safely dealing with the huge site, which includes a toxic smorgasbord of buildings, tailings ponds and a quarter-million tonnes of arsenic stored underground, were about $488-million. A federal progress report on the project says costs have increased as more has become known about the scale of the problem. |