Areva asked to fix up Kiggavik impact statement

The Nunavut Impact Review Board is asking Areva Resources to fix up the draft environmental impact statement for its Kiggavik uranium project before it will review it.

The NIRB says the changes must be made before it will undertake a technical review of the document.

Areva submitted the document to the board in December. The Kiggavik project is a proposed uranium ore mining and milling operation located about 80 km west of Baker Lake.

In a letter dated Wednesday, the NIRB said the format of the table provided to locate items in the 10,000-page document didn’t match its guidelines, and there were sections of the report that require clarification or additional information.

The board says its request is not unusual.

"I would say it's common. It certainly happens," said Ryan Barry, executive director of the Nunavut Impact Review Board.

"Given the size and the effort of putting together a document like this, I think it would be amazing if there were no sorts of deficiencies or no areas where something was missed.  

"The conformity review analysis that we do is really just a presence/absence check, so our goal with it isn't actually judging the quality of those 10,000 pages. It's to go through the guidelines that we issued and the conformity requirements within those and basically do a yes/no analysis to see if we can find the information that was requested."

NIRB’s letter says it was unable to locate information in the document using the table provided.  

"Given that it is a very large document, having that table properly formatted was a key issue for us," said Barry.   

"We also found that for some of the information, even just with a cursory review, there were some sections where we were concerned that the level of information that was being supplied might not meet with the expectations of the board and with the reviewers that would be looking at the document itself."

Barry McCallum, Areva's manager of Nunavut affairs, said the board’s request was not unexpected and the company is working to address the items of concern.

"We are going through them in detail and we will provide NIRB with a date when we expect to meet them," he said.

"The documents we prepared in fact are sound, but there are thousands of pages, and there are dozens of pages of guideline requirements. So, having met them all was not expected. At a minimum, we believe we will be providing a more detailed concordance table which we believe will meet some of the deficiencies. And we will meet all of the deficiencies before long.

"We've put a lot of work into this document. The document is sound. This is the first step in the review of the document and we look forward to all of the steps over the next year and a bit to get to the end."