Feds in a hurry to freeze arsenic (NorthernNewsService)

Study on freezing not part of overall assessment of Giant Mine clean-up

Terrence McEachern
Northern News Services
Published Friday, December 3, 2010

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - With the freezing of 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide set to begin at Giant Mine in January, a former city councillor is questioning how the project was able to proceed two years ago without undergoing an environmental assessment.


"In my view, it showed the project wasn't ready to move ahead if they didn't really know if the technology would work or not, and that allowing this to go ahead was really what you might call 'project splitting' - where you start to do the project before you have it approved," said Kevin O'Reilly, a former city councillor who has been a regular voice on environmental issues in the North through his work with groups like Alternatives North.

The issue came up during a media briefing last week by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC) on the remediation of Giant Mine.

Martin Gavin, the department's manager of the Giant Mine Remediation Project, explained that given the lengthy environmental assessment process, and a goal to complete the clean-up of Giant Mine "as soon as possible following the (environmental assessment) process," the department asked for an exemption on assessing its plan to freeze the arsenic buried under Giant Mine.

"We asked the board to consider allowing INAC to proceed with an optimization study so that we could gather some design that we would need or we would want to utilize in the carrying out of the remediation plan - the idea being if folks had some 'real time, made in Yellowknife' data that we could actually feed them back," said Gavin.

He insisted that even though the freezing study wasn't required to undergo an environmental assessment, the freezing process is "absolutely" safe to both the public and the environment.

FULL STORY HERE

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