Uranium mining by country largest Canadian mines are located in the Athabasca Basin of northern Saskatchewan. Canada's first uranium discovery was in the Alona Bay area, south of Lake Superior Provincial Park in Ontario, by Dr. John Le Conte in 1847. The Canadian uranium industry, however, really began with the 1932 discovery of pitchblende at Port Radium, Northwest Territories. The deposit was mined from 1933 to 1940, for radium, silver, copper, and cobalt. The mine shut down in 1940, but was reopened in 1942 by Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited to supply uranium to the Manhattan Project. The Canadian government expropriated the Port Radium
Ida Noddack a predetermined result. According to Kenna and Kuroda technetium content expected in a typical pitchblende (50% uranium) is about 10 g/kg of ore. F. Habashi pointed out that uranium was never more than about 5% in Noddacks' columbite samples, and the amount of element 43 could not exceed 3 × 10 µg/kg of ore. Such a low quantity could not be weighed, nor give X-ray lines of element 43 clearly distinguishable from the background noise. The only way to detect its presence was to carry out radioactive measurements, a technique the Noddacks were not able to employ, but Segrè and