[LINK] "Northerners debate uranium mine and caribou effects"

[rfmcdonald]

Bob Weber's Canadian Press article is almost stereotypically sad and depressing and entirely believable in its depiction of the treatment of the North and its people.

Hilu Tagoona was just a girl the first time uranium miners proposed to develop a massive deposit of the radioactive metal near her home town of Baker Lake, Nunavut.

“I was about 11,” she says. “I spent many an hour listening to (presentations), spending time at the hearings.”

Now, at 37, she’s about to relive her childhood as final hearings begin Monday before the Nunavut Impact Review Board on a second proposal to eventually build a mine on the tundra. As a spokeswoman for the anti-uranium group Makitagunarningit, her opinion on it hasn’t changed.

“Our big concern is the caribou and their calving grounds.”

French nuclear giant Areva is proposing to build one underground and four open-pit mines just west of Baker Lake, on the edge of the calving grounds of one of the North’s great caribou herds and near the largest and most remote wildlife sanctuary on the continent.