CANADA: Billion-Dollar Empire

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...