AREVA is downplaying fears that a proposed plan to fly uranium over Athabasca territory could pose undue dangers to the environment.
Recently, the Athabasca Denesuline Authority penned a letter to the Nunavut Impact Review Board saying they hadn’t been consulted about the plan in a meaningful way.
The letter cited concerns over impacts on caribou numbers and the environment.
Under the proposal, uranium would be mined and milled in Nunavut and then flown to Points North in steel drums.
From there, it would be trucked south.
AREVA spokesman Jarret Adams says transporting uranium through the air has been done before:
“First of all, transportation of uranium by air is not a new process. They transported uranium safely for decades through the 50’s to the 1980’s from Uranium City, so transportation by air has been done safely for quite some time in Canada.”
Adams says the plan was also identified in a project proposal, as well as the environmental assessment.
He adds AREVA has carefully examined any risks associated with the plan:
“But looking at the potential for accidents, those have been carefully studied in our draft environmental impact statement and the effects of such a thing would be temporary in nature and contained within the local areas of an incident in most cases.”
He also says the proposal is many years away from becoming a reality, so nothing has been finalized.