The best part of sitting through conference presentations is when, all of a sudden, you realize this speaker is fresh, vital, intelligent, and has something new to tell. You have just sat through, or dodged, those jaded presentations by old professors bewailing the absence of students, funding, or acceptance of their ideas. You have just sat through, or dodged, those ghastly commercial presentations where an adequate speaker from the company tells you no more than you can find in magazine ads or websites. And you look up and here is a speaker telling you something that is cutting-edge and comes from a sharp mind. This happened at the CIM when I chanced into a presentation by Davide Elmo from Simon Fraser University. With an engaging accent and certain confidence, he proceeded to tell of a cooperative investigation of block caving between his institution, Diavik Diamond Mine, Rio Tinto, and the University of British Columbia.

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We take no pleasure in seeing a mining venture fail. We can admire the courage of those who admit to failure. We cannot but wonder why it took so long to notice the failure and come clean. I refer, of course, to the recent admission by Gerald Grandey, Cameco’s chief executive that mistakes were made at the Cigar Lake mine. He said that Cameco “failed to fully appreciate the degree of risk of working in less than ideal conditions at the mine in northeastern Saskatchewan.”

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