How Prairie pacifists halted a 1976 plan for a Sask. uranium

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How Prairie pacifists halted a 1976 plan for a Sask. uranium refinery

Group opposed plans for refinery north of Saskatoon near Warman

Phil Tank < https://www.cbc.ca/author/phil-tank-1.7646940 > · CBC News · Posted: May 20, 2026 5:00 AM CST | Last Updated: May 20

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EXCERPT: "Jake Buhler reflected recently on the paranoia that gripped him and others 50 years ago as they mounted a campaign against a proposed uranium refinery near Warman, Sask.

"We were certain that our phones were tapped — with no basis in fact, but that's what happens when there is so much pressure on you," Buhler recalled in an interview this month at his Saskatoon home. "You imagine that they're tapping your phones."

In June 1976, plans for a uranium refinery east of the then-town of Warman became public after the Saskatchewan Economic Development Corporation (SEDCO), an arm of the provincial government, started buying options on farmland in the area.

The NDP provincial government of Allan Blakeney was assembling land on behalf of Eldorado Nuclear Ltd., a federal Crown corporation that eventually became Cameco, to build a $100-million refinery to convert yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride for use in nuclear reactors.

At the time, Buhler was 33 and working as the principal of a school in Martensville, just north of Saskatoon. He and his wife Louise also farmed land owned by her parents just east of where the refinery would be located.

They had a one-year-old daughter, Sarah, who is now a law professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

The Buhlers and others were hardly planning a five-year campaign to stop the refinery from being built about 21 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon.

Eventually, they found their group was up against the federal and provincial governments, as well as the councils of Warman, Saskatoon (though just barely) and the Rural Municipality of Corman Park where the refinery would be built. These governments all supported the refinery.

But the establishment forces found themselves facing a formidable group of polite, mostly Mennonite farmers, who opposed the project chiefly on moral grounds because of the connection between the nuclear and weapons industries. . . . . "