Chinese owner of Manitoba mine revives talk of draining lake to reach more cesium
CBC
The Chinese owner of the Tanco mine in eastern Manitoba has revived talk of partly draining a lake in order to extract more cesium from one of the world's few deposits of the critical mineral.
Sinomine Resource Group is musing about a long-term redevelopment of its mine it purchased in 2019 along the shore of Bernic Lake, a small Canadian Shield body of water located between Whiteshell and Nopiming provincial parks.
The goal is to reach cesium that can not be mined right now because it's embedded in vertical columns that hold up the roof of the underground mine.
"There's a type of mining called 'room and pillar' where you mine a big cavern underground, but you leave pillars which are like poles of rock that support the ceiling. If you don't have them, the whole mine collapses," said Christopher Ecclestone, a mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company in London, U.K.
"When Tanco was mining this thing for decades, they left these pillars to support the roof. And the Chinese are talking about taking them out."
The push to mine what's left of Tanco's cesium stems from the worldwide scarcity of the element, which is used in drilling fluids for oil and gas wells, medical imaging and maintaining time in atomic clocks, among other uses.
In its pure form, cesium is liquid at room temperature, may burst into flames in air and will explode in contact with water.
In nature, it's usually locked up far more safely in a rock called pollucite. Nowhere on Earth has as much of this mineral as the Tanco mine, which once possessed two-thirds of the planet's easily accessible pollucite.
In June, the general manager of Sinomine's North American business division told the Globe & Mail the company could extract more cesium from the Tanco mine by replacing the existing rock pillars with artificial supports for the roof.
The Beijing-based company's preferred option for the Manitoba mine, however, would be to partly drain Bernic Lake in order to reach cesium from the surface, Sinomine's Frank Wang told the Globe in a story published June 17.
"The final goal definitely is we want to have open-pit mining," Wang told the Toronto-based newspaper.
While Sinomine declined subsequent CBC News requests for interviews, Tanco general manager Joey Champagne confirmed the parent company is weighing several ideas for redeveloping the mine.
"We are currently evaluating various options for the long-term development of Tanco, each of which requires further assessment. Any potential expansions will undergo a rigorous review process and be in compliance with applicable Canadian laws," Champagne said in a statement this week.
"At this stage, we do not have any additional information to share until we have more concrete plans in place."
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