By paNOW Staff

Jet-boring temporarily stopped at Cigar Lake mine

Jul 16, 2014 | 12:05 PM

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, Cameco has temporarily stopped jet-boring at its Cigar Lake uranium mine.

“What we’re doing is we’re pausing jet-boring operations to allow the mine to freeze a little bit more,” said Rob Gereghty, a spokesman for Cameco.

In order for the mine to produce ore, they have to bore 410 to 450 metres into the ground.

To bore that deep, they have to make sure they stabilize weaker rock formations and the way they do that is by freezing some areas underground.

“The ground needs to be frozen for a couple of reasons. One is to prevent water from coming into the production area and also to provide stability so that we can actually do mining operations underground,” Gereghty explained.

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He said that the freezing hasn’t advanced as quickly as they would have liked.

“As the ground becomes more stable with additional freezing it just makes it a more safe and secure environment.”

Due to the freezing issues, and the fact that McClean Lake mill hasn’t started processing ore from Cigar Lake, Cameco has temporarily stopped their jet-boring.

“We have been delivering ore to McClean Lake … they aren’t prepared at this point, they’re still doing some work on milling operations so the ore is just being stored. This is an opportune time to pause, allow the freezing to take place and then pick up production when the mill is able to process our ore.”

Gereghty said they would be providing an update on production on July 31 as to any impact this will have on their production target as well as any impact on the time of delay.

He expects is will only shift production by a couple of months.

“Cigar Lake is one of the most technically challenging mining projects in the world and these challenges were expected.” 

news@panow.com

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