The cost to clean-up the Gunnar mine site in northern Saskatchewan is over 100-million dollars and counting.

The former uranium operation near the Northwest Territories border was abandoned in 1964, before monitoring and remediation regulations came into force.

Karin Glenn of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says the clean-up is in phase two of a four phase remediation and monitoring plan.

The Commission’s Director of the Waste and Decommissioning Division expects it will be another three to five years before phase two is complete.

That’s followed by monitoring the site for five to ten years before the process goes to the Saskatchewan Research Council for the province’s institutional control program.

Glenn claims uranium is the most monitored and regulated in the mining industry and says action is taken when contamination levels are still well below what is considered harmful to human health.