CANADA: Billion-Dollar Empire

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Along Lake Huron's rocky northern rim, where the Canadian Pacific railroad and the Trans-Canada Highway skirt the jack pine forest, blue smoke from smoldering brush fires hangs lazily in the hot, still air. In a raw new clearing the bright steel of a mine headframe cuts an angular pattern against the sky. From the smooth blacktop highway trucks laden with lumber and machinery waddle off toward mine sites deep in the bush. A scattered army of engineers, diamond drillers, airplane pilots, and hardrock miners is turning 900 square miles of lake-pocked wilderness into a billion-dollar empire: the Blind River uranium development.

Burst of Prosperity. The uranium rush burst two years ago upon the declining old lumber town of Blind River, Ont. (pop. 2,500) with the news that Toronto Promoter Joseph Hirshhorn (TIME, Feb. 21) had quietly staked 1,400 claims covering 56,000 acres of choice mining prospects. On the map, Hirshhorn's claims formed a giant Z with its horizontal bars 30 miles apart. Within weeks, other prospectors poured in feverishly to stake another 8,000 claims. Land prices soared; Blind River's four "beverage rooms" added new tables, took on hefty waiters able to cope with bush-happy prospectors with fat bankrolls and big appetites for excitement. Job seekers, claim speculators, boomers arrived on every train, sifted in through the fire escapes of the Harmonic Hotel to bed down in bathtubs and corridors after all the rooms were taken.

Blind River is past its early frenzy, but now it is pulsating with the deeper excitement of proved riches and the pell-mell drive to get them out of the ground. Geologists have declared that there may be uranium ore reserves of at least 150 million tons in the 900 square miles. Already the shafts are being sunk and mills built for four huge mines. One of them alone, Algom, will be capable of producing more uranium than all of the 600-plus uranium mines in the U.S.

Blind River's big camps:

¶Promoter Hirshhorn's Pronto Uranium Mines, from which the government-owned Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. contracted to buy $55 million of uranium concentrates. Pronto will start hoisting ore in September, for a while will be the free world's biggest uranium mine, with a daily capacity of 1,500 tons of ore.

¶Algom Uranium, another Hirshhorn company, which will top Pronto when it starts producing in 1956 at the rate of 3,000 tons of ore a day from each of its two mines, one at Quirke Lake and the other at Nordic Lake. With ore reserves reckoned by some geologists at 75-100 million tons,* enough for 34 years at the planned rate of production, Algom has contracted to sell five years' output to the government company for $207 million.

¶Consolidated Denison, south of Quirke Lake, which has a 6 square-mile claim, and indicated ore reserves comparable to those of Algom's Quirke Lake and Nordic Lake combined. Its contract with the government may well rival Algom's.