Creighton Mine is an underground nickel

Nickel

Nickel is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile...

 mine, owned and operated by Vale Inco Limited (formerly known as CVRD Inco) in the city of Greater Sudbury, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. It is currently the deepest nickel mine in Canada.

History

Production at Creighton Mine began in 1901, and as of August 2004 there was an estimated 20 years of reserves left.

Production

In 2005 the mine produced an average of 3,755 tons per day on a 6 days per week schedule. Ore is processed off site at Vale Inco's Clarabelle Mill.

Future Outlook

Creighton Deepening Project: Two projects are underway to allow deeper mining at Creigton Mine. The first is an $8-million, four-year diamond drill exploration program that will allow for ore tonnage to be defined down to the 10,000-foot level. The second is a $48-million expansion project that will establish production ore at the 7,810-foot level and bring 1.8 million tons or high-grade ore into production from 2006-2011.

SNOLAB

Creighton Mine's 6800 foot level is the home of the world's deepest (2070 m) underground physics laboratory. Originally excavated for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is a neutrino observatory located 6,800 feet underground in Vale Inco's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The detector was designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water. The detector turned on in May 1999,...

 (SNO), it has been expanded into a general-purpose facility called SNOLAB

Snolab

SNOLAB is a Canadian underground physics laboratory at a depth of 2 km in Sudbury, Ontario in Vale's Creighton nickel mine. The original Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiment has ended, but the facilities have been expanded into a permanent underground laboratory.SNOLAB is the world's...

.