Drag to turn the globe

Mines/Canada

Cigar Lake mine

Cigar Lake mine, Canada. Producing, underground, mining uranium since 2014.

Why Cigar Lake is famous

High-grade uranium mine in northern Saskatchewan, mined about 480 m down with a jet-boring method. It was commissioned in 2014 and began commercial operation in May 2015. Cameco reports 174.5 million lb of U3O8 produced since commissioning and an average grade of 16.33% U3O8 at the end of 2025.1,2

Story cards

What kind of deposit

Unconformity-related uranium

Cigar Lake today

Where uranium is mined todayMining in Canada

Where next

Mines

Same kind of depositMcArthur River / Key LakeBoth Saskatchewan uranium mines: Cigar Lake at 480 m, McArthur River at 530 to 640 m.1

Deposit types

An example ofUnconformity-related uraniumHigh-grade uranium mined by jet-boring, in the unconformity type.1

Sources

  1. Cigar Lake operation page Cameco Corporation
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

Keep exploring

Stories with these minerals

Uranium drill-hole columns over the Athabasca Basin on a satellite map of SaskatchewanData storyUnder SaskatchewanDrill holes · SaskatchewanHistory of miningUranium: from silver mine waste to the atomic age1789-2025Lessons from historyFrom discovery to production: the long road to a mine1922-2027The Super Pit gold mine at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, at sunsetMining historyGold rushes, then and nowGold and lithium · Worldwide

All mining storiesThe world runs on rockAll mineralsMining by country

Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Super Pit, Kalgoorlie by Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: The laboratories of Marie and Pierre Curie, Paris: room where experiments on uranium ore took place. Photograph, ca. 1900., Unknown (Wellcome Collection) (Public Domain Mark 1.0); Elektrisk malmletning. Undersökningar på Billiton, 1920., Okänd / Europeana (Public Domain Mark 1.0).