Lake Enon Celestite
Barite was first recognized in the Loch Lomond area of Cape Breton by the Geological Survey of Canada in 1877.
Nothing came of it for most of the next century until the early 1960s when Nova Scotian prospector Avard Hudgins collected samples in a nearby brook of what he assumed was barite. The samples sat on his desk for several years until Nova Scotia’s Department of Mines offered to do a free analysis as part of a government goal of doing a minimum number of such assays (tests) each year.
(Another version of the story says Hudgins obtained the samples while doing exploration with a Montreal-based company called Lura Corporation, and that it was the Quebec government that did the assays.)
Either way, the analysis showed that the samples contained significant levels of strontium, which indicated they were actually celestite, a mineral very similar to barite.
This spurred exploration for celestite in the area and in 1962, Lura Corporation discovered a deposit at Lake Enon. Lura spent the rest of the decade exploring the site.
Demand for strontium was growing in the 1960s because it was used in the glass of TVs with picture tubes. As electrons sweep across the screen to make an image, they produce X-rays. Glass with about 8.5% strontium oxide (and various other things) was effective at protecting viewers from radiation.
Kaiser Celestite Mining bought the property from Lura in 1969 and opened a celestite mine in 1970.
In 1973, Kaiser found the MacRae celestite occurrence nearby, adding to the company’s reserves.
Mining eventually took place at four pits that were separated by about two kilometres. A small amount was also mined underground via a 135-metre decline tunnel. The work was contracted out to local construction contractors.
Kaiser extracted 272,000 tons of ore and ran it through a concentrator with a capacity of 500 tons per day at Enon. This upgraded the ore from an average of 50-55% strontium sulphate to 90%, which was necessary because the deposit was relatively low grade. Other celestite producers around the world mined deposits that were naturally 90% and did not need to do this concentrating.
The concentrate was trucked to the company’s chemical plant in the Sydport industrial park where it was converted to several strontium compounds.
Strontium gives off a red flame when it burns and is used to make red fireworks. For this reason, it is also used in things like flares and tracer bullets, so strontium from Enon was likely used in the Vietnam War, which increased demand for strontium in the 1970s.
Strontium compounds have many other uses, including as a radioisotope in cancer treatments, to generate electricity for space vehicles, remote weather stations and navigation buoys, and as an ingredient in toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
The Kaiser mine closed in 1976 due to deteriorating market conditions for strontium and competition from Mexico - perhaps not coincidentally, not long after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
The Kaiser concentrator/mill was purchased by Yava Mines Ltd. which used it to process ore from its nearby lead mine in Silver Mine.
After the Kaiser mine closed, the Department of Mines asked the mine’s geologist, Steve Forgeron, to document everything about the site that a potential future operator would need to know to reopen the mine. About 1.9 million tons of ore are estimated to still be in the ground.
In his 1977 report, Forgeron wrote that the mine’s closure “marked the termination of one of the all too few non-government industries in Nova Scotia.”
Half a century later, the government sector still dominates Nova Scotia’s economy. According to the Fraser Institute, “Nova Scotia has the largest government sector in Canada. Government spending (federal, provincial and local government) represented 60.2 per cent of the provincial economy in 2019, nearly 20 percentage points above the national average” (https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/nova-scotia-needs-much-more-privat...).
Industries like mining and quarrying are essential to paying for government programs like health and education, and to creating economic opportunity for our growing population. We need more private sector jobs for Nova Scotians, more tax revenues and more economic activity to keep Nova Scotia strong.
