Environment committee  Certainly those are the risks that challenge the reclamation people. Letting that water move out by erosion has to be prevented. There are a number of issues in reclamation involving that topography that will impact water. And water does impact the topography as well. That interc

Environment committee  Certainly, it changes it. I guess I would put it another way. I would ask whether there are certain benefits to engineering certain types of change. For example, the groundwater research was undertaken in the hopes that remediation of the toxicity would occur during groundwater f

Environment committee  I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm saying that we have to—

Environment committee  Well, I don't know. We haven't seen it yet. We have to re-engineer. We have no choice. You have options in re-engineering. I look at it that way. It's not comparing yourself against nature, other than in the mandated way. I don't think there's any inclination of restoring the lan

Environment committee  Although it's in the early stages, we would imagine an annual workshop in Alberta, of one to two days, at which research would be presented in some organized fashion. There would be quite a few poster displays so graduate students could expose their research to people. The worksh

Environment committee  I think that's partly correct. The other aspect is there's a possibility that some of the trace metals may exist in the aquifer itself and are taken out of the aquifer, put into water, and delivered to the surface water. We haven't seen evidence of that occurring either.

Environment committee  And I've never been involved in any EIAs.

Environment committee  Yes, it's actually both.

Environment committee  The dikes are constructed mainly of sand. To my mind, it is a bit of an engineering feat to construct dikes that work out of sand, and they do. They are constructed out of sand, and the sand is delivered to the dike with process-affected water from the tailing stream. The pore wa

Environment committee  In the best studied example, and the oldest one, which is Pond 1, Tar Island dike, the modelling suggests that about 3% of the water might be coming from the pond and 97% from the dike.

Environment committee  We've done a small study for one of the companies on one of their existing dikes. From that, we identified that in fact process-affected water was able to get beyond their ditch, which was their collection system. Fortunately, they had another ditch further out that seemed to be

Environment committee  I actually can't remember how long, but I've been a member of one of Suncor's review boards for about nine years. We meet at Fort McMurray three times a year. So I'm very familiar with Suncor's operation. I have two graduate students working in that area as well at the moment.

Environment committee  In terms of the groundwater component, groundwater moves relatively slowly. For us, 40 years isn't a long time. The record, as it exists now, in many areas is not much different than it was 40 years ago, as long as we're away from the active operations.

Environment committee  In terms of groundwater impacts, we have a toolkit, so we know how to address the local impacts. I think the cumulative impact is an important issue, and perhaps that's something Dr. Dixon can address better than I can.

Environment committee  Yes, and I think it's recognized, as I understand it, by the province and the federal authorities that this baseline needs to be upgraded quickly. My sense is that it's much more critical in the in situ operations for hydrogeologists, because they are in the hydrogeological envir