The province has designated three sites for uranium exploration in Pictou, Annapolis and Hants counties.

Starting on Wednesday, they’re looking for companies to explore sites in Louisville, East Dalhousie, and Millet Brook.

In the request for proposals, the province says they’re looking for companies with a good safety track record and experience in the industry.

However, they do not need to go through an environmental assessment during the exploration stage, but that depends on how they are exploring.

Mining could still be about a decade away, even if a company finds a large amount of certain minerals, because of the lengthy process to get a mine set up.

The applications will be available online on Wednesday through the NovaROC website, the province’s site for managing proposal requests.

The province announced they wanted to lift a ban on uranium exploration before the last sitting of the legislature, in March, and during that session, they passed a bill to lift the ban, after significant backlash from environmentalists.

Along with the designation, the province has updated their list of critical minerals.

The critical designation is for a variety of reasons, including how much the province relies on imports, the concentration of the minerals in the region, the geopolitical significance, and whether there are any substitutes for those minerals.

The province has designated four new materials as ‘critical.’ That includes:

• uranium used for nuclear energy and health applications
• high purity silica used for solar panels and semiconductors
• silver used for solar panels and thermoelectric devices
• tellurium used for solar panels and thermoelectric devices

The federal government has their own list of 34 critical minerals, but the province says they took a more focused approach. The four newly designated minerals brings their list to 20 critical minerals.

More to come…