By Leah Borts-Kuperman, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Narwhal For decades, radioactive waste sat near the shore of Lake Nipissing. It looked like an innocuous pile of gravel in what was otherwise a stretch of forest. People began using it to backfill lots, fill spaces under decks and build fire pits. In the 1970s and ’80s, Nipissing First Nation began using it to build roads. It wasn’t normal gravel, though. It was mine tailings, containing the metal niobium, left there when the Nova Beaucage mine shuttered in 1956 after just seven months of operation. “The company just walked away and left it with no remediation at all,” Geneviève Couchie, business operations manager at Nipissing First Nation, said. Couchie led a project to clean up the tailings, which first started in…
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