Canada is the world’s second largest producer of uranium, and more uranium has been mined in Canada than in any other country (as of 2014). Although current treatment methods meet regulatory requirements for inactive sites, there are opportunities to develop new treatments that achieve consistent effluent quality in a cost-effective and sustainable manner, and which should allow for recovery of uranium and other metals from tailings sites.
One of the largest barriers to treating mine waste using bioremediation has been the challenge in maintaining treatment efficacy. Ontario Genomics is investing seed funding towards the first steps to develop genomics-enabled technology that will do just that.
Drs. Susan Glasauer (University of Guelph) and Nadia Mykytczuk (Laurentian University) are partnering with Denison Environmental and US-based company, Inotec, to develop a microbial electrode technology to sequester uranium from mine tailings and remediate water to discharge standards.
The use of microbial electrodes for the remediation of some elements of concern, such as selenium and arsenic, has already been successfully implemented by Inotec using their electro-biochemical reactor (EBR) technology. With seed funding, the research team will design a system to optimize uranium removal and recovery and perform bench scale testing of the technology using water from a former Uranium mine in Ontario. It is anticipated that this will lead to an improved understanding of the microbial pathways involved in free electron use, which may be applied by the mining industry to sequester uranium for long-term sustainable and cost-effective treatment of sites.
