AT 2:11am on October 23 last year, Canadian miner Cameco announced its Cigar Lake uranium mine in northwest Canada had flooded after a "rock fall", jeopardising the world's richest undeveloped source of nuclear fuel. In the six months since, Cameco has said little about the circumstances behind a disaster that will delay production at its $US25.5 billion ($30.4 billion) claim for up to three years. The accident removed 10 per cent of anticipated supply from an already overstretched global uranium market, helping drive the ore to $113 a pound (0.454kg) today, double the October price.
Canadian government records and interviews with authorities reveal that blasting by Cameco workers may have triggered the flood at Cigar Lake, and that the company couldn't control the water because it didn't fulfil pledges to regulators to install more underground pumps there.
Those promises came after a similar accident at another of its Saskatchewan mines three years earlier. "We didn't have it installed quickly enough," Cameco chief executive officer Jerry Grandey said.
That statement is the first acknowledgment by Cameco that it might bear some responsibility for a disaster that has jolted the global nuclear fuels market.
"We'll find, I'm sure, that there was a combination of geologic factors and human error," Mr Grandey said. "It's that type of combination where you learn your lessons."
Cameco's November 10 accident report to its primary regulator, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in Ottawa, didn't mention October 11 blasting by its workers as a potential trigger for the leak.
That possibility was raised by Cameco's vice-president of safety, health and environment, John Jarrell, during a December 13 commission hearing.
"The first sign of instability occurred in a wedge failure which resulted from the October 11 blast sequence," he said.
Bloomberg
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