Langham Rezoning (+nuclear power plant/EV metals necessity)
Odds on this? The oldest news I could find on this 3 years ago showed many, but perhaps not a majority of residents were against the refinery (likening it to nuclear power... as if nuclear power isn't safer than almost anything else (including some renewables) in terms of price, lives and yes, even land. Now it's probably not as safe as the lesser Holy Grail of renewable energy, fission, but the safety and environmental plans look good), and a small minority were crazed coffe-table spilling fanatics. Fortune Minerals and the government has had four years to convince the residents the cyanide trucks aren't likely to spill, be cleaned up if they are, and that the safety systems for the contaminants work. Does anyone know what level of support the fanatical NIMBY "environmentalist" (local environmentalists, certainly not global ones) have? Because the kind of people with such strong opinions aren't necessarily the ones who care about proof, as the guy who said he couldn't care how many and how safety measures they had because "(stuff) happens" to nuclear plants, so they might still be making trouble. It's sad really, the world needs these refineries, and the crippling of nuclear plant expansion and even retraction in recent years has has a massive effect CO2 emissions. I'd be perfectly at ease living next to a 4-th generation nuclear power plant, and while I'd be at less ease living with a few kilometers of a heavy metals refinery I'd still be proud of it and accept it. I guess they could ask to build a refinery elsewhere in a more remote place if all else fails, bur with Canadian red tape that could take a few years. But it's not like this refinery is really necessary, there'll be a good price for concentrate, I truly do believe if there's a huge unmet demand for cobalt refining that China can relatively quickly throw up some more refineries while fast tracking their much more limited regulations (perhaps too limited, even a few years from now, though thankfully they're cleaning but their act) and get even closer to a monopsony on buying cobalt concentrate. And that way we could have a waaaay smaller CapEx.