The federal government is spending $4.5 million toward expanding the Onaping-area NORCAT Underground Centre by approximately 50 per cent.
Currently serving about 50 companies in the mining industry, NORCAT CEO Pejman Salehi said the expansion “will enable us to expand our capabilities, which means we’ll be able to accommodate more sophisticated state-of-the-art technologies, as well as larger equipment that industry needs to test and validate.”
The expansion is anticipated to take around two years to complete, he said, clarifying, “but we have a lot of work to do.”
The underground mine currently has a total of approximately three kilometres of drift (horizontal tunnel), but Salehi clarified that their 50-per-cent expansion doesn’t strictly represent square footage, but “the capacity for testing and development.”
Sudbury Liberal MP Viviane Lapointe headed a media conference at NORCAT on Oct. 30 to announce the expenditure on behalf of the federal government, through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario (FedNor).
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