Grant: Alliance Grants

This project creates a research partnership between the Clearwater River Dënë Nation (CRDN), Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, and two Canadian universities (the University of Ottawa and Queen's University). It is designed to create a decolonized and culturally diverse environment, providing treaty partners with an improved model to manage the environmental impacts and risks associated with uranium mines. This project aims to develop an evidence-based framework of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners to improve risk assessment and risk mitigation from north Saskatchewan's uranium mines. Our overall goals are to research the historical and current impacts of uranium mines on lakes near decommissioned, active, and projected uranium mines, and set the foundations for a Risk Management Committee consisting of community representatives, university researchers, regulators, and industry experts to determine and communicate risk to the public. Our research will consist of two parts: (1) We will assess historical impacts from past uranium mine activities using dated lake sediment cores to determine how uranium mines have affected aquatic ecosystems in the past when environmental monitoring was not as rigorous as today. Our team has pioneered methods to estimate changes in contaminants to waterways in previous decades from sediment archives, and linking them to biological responses, providing a historical context to the issue of contaminants from uranium mines. (2) We will examine the distribution of contaminants of potential concern (COPCs) in aquatic food webs near uranium mines and determine if the distribution of contaminants relates to food web structure. (3) We will form a Risk Management Committee comprised of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners to review risks from existing and projected uranium mines focusing on our Clearwater River Dënë Nation partner community.