Eagle Industrial Metals wants to be reprocessing tailings at the former Whitehorse Copper Mine site by next spring, says the company's owner.

Chuck Eaton explained in an interview prior to Monday evening's open house for the public the company has completed its submission to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB).

Eagle Industrial is awaiting YESAB's recommendation. The company is expecting to deliver its application for a Type A water licence to the Yukon Water Board this week, he said.

"We are hoping to get our water licence by the end of the year, which means we could build our little plant and do everything we need to do to get ready to begin reprocessing in the second quarter of 2013.”

Eaton said as part of the proposal, he is talking with the White Pass and Yukon Route about the possibility of establishing a rail link for his ore from Carcross to Skagway, a proposal, he maintains, has many benefits.

The company president and owner – and janitor, as he puts it – estimates Eagle Industrial is approaching $1 million so far invested in the proposal, which surfaced publicly in 2010 with a target of being operational by now.

The environmental screening process has taken longer than originally thought, he said.

The public comment period on the application to YESAB closed last week, and the board's Whitehorse office is currently preparing its recommendation to the Yukon government.

Eaton estimates it will require another $5 million or $6 million in capital investment to get the wheels rolling. Raising the money will not be an issue, he said.

The proposal calls for a project life of five to seven years, reprocessing 10.1 million tons of tailings to recover 1.8 million tons of magnetite or iron-ore used in the production of steel, according to the project proposal.

Monday's price, said Eaton, was $135 per ton delivered to China.

Once reprocessed, most of the tailings will be put back into the main tailings pond, and covered with gravel to make the area useable for industrial lots, according to the project proposal.

Tailings that do not fit into the main pond will be used to fill in areas on the site that have fallen in.

Under the reclamation plan, all of the tailings will be removed from what are known as Valley A and Valley B and placed either on the main pond or elsewhere to help stabilize and fill in areas that are a safety concern.

The valleys will be revegetated, and the large retention dams at the end of the valleys will be removed, to return the area to a natural wildlife corridor.

There will be between 20 and 25 full-time jobs for eight or nine months of the year, as the project will be shut down during the dead of winter.

"These will be well-paying jobs, and you can go back home to your own bed every night,” Eaton told the 40-plus members of the public who attended the company's presentation Monday.

The project will generate about $1.5 million to $2 million in local payroll, the audience heard.

He said another $2.5 million will be spent locally on goods and services, and the trucking contract for 30 large trucks a day will run about $5.5 million, for a total injection into the economy of $10 million annually.

Areas of concern, he said, generally fall under five categories: traffic, trails, dust, noise and water quality.

Eaton assured members of the audience who live near the mine site that noise from the 24-7 operation will not be an issue. He presented what he described as scientific evidence to support his belief.

One truck every 48 minutes will be travelling through the night down the Mount Sima Road for what he called a short distance to join the existing all-night traffic travelling the Alaska and Klondike highways, he said.

Eaton pointed out there are no restrictions on nighttime truck traffic for city roads.

Production at the site, he said, will involve an excavator and loader, and a couple of relatively quiet electric motors to run the slurry pumps and magnetic rollers to pull out the iron ore, he said.

Eaton emphasized Eagle Industrial is not proposing a full-blown mining operation, by any stretch.

Existing public access to the site, including the snowmobile trail maintained by the Klondike Snowmobile Association, will be prohibited. A new snowmobile route has has already been figured out with representatives of the association, he said.

Eaton said a favourite local swimming hole below the Valley A dam will be marked off limits for the duration of the project.

Public access to the 68-hectare site while the project is operating is just too much of a safety issue, he said.

Technically, Eaton pointed out, people who cross through the property now are trespassing, because the land is under his control by way of a lease with the Yukon government signed back in 2010.

As for the dust, Eagle Industrial will take whatever steps it needs to minimize impact. Eaton suspects the dust blowing off the tailings today is more of an issue than it will be when he begins reprocessing, he said.

Eaton added that once the project is complete, the cover for the tailings will be much stronger and resistant to dust, so that it could be used, unlike current conditions.

"You might not be able to put up a big building, but you could park buses on it or use if for storage.”

The city's Official Community Plan, he pointed out, notes a desire to turn the site into useable industrial land, which he plans to do.

Most of Eaton's presentation focused on water, what will be required, the current state of water quality and what's expected.

Most of the water, 99 per cent, will come from and be recycled through the existing pit lake on site, he said.

Eaton explained the project requires about 23,000 cubic metres of water a day, but the pit lake holds 800,000 litres of mostly groundwater.

The processing water will be recycled through the lake. The company estimates it will lose about 200 to 230 cubic metres per day in the moisture content of the recovered iron-ore being shipped to Skagway, he said.

He said monitoring wells indicate the tailings have not proved to be an issue for residential groundwater wells in 25 years of sitting there, and there is no indication anything will change.

The company, however, is planning to go the extra distance to make sure the project does not have a negative impact on the water table, he said.

But what, asked one member of the audience, if the project goes sideways, and Eagle Industrials folds its tent two years in?

Eaton said like all other projects these days, he'll be required to put up financial deposits to cover the cost of returning the property to an environmentally stable site if things go sour.

The operation will require about two to 2.5 megawatts of power generation, but will not be drawing anything in the coldest months when demand on the grid is at its highest, he pointed out.

Rather, he said, in talking with Yukon Energy, it appears the Whitehorse Copper reclamation project will bring additional revenue from a stable industrial customer during the months when demand is not at its peak.

The Whitehorse Copper Mine closed in the fall of 1982, at the same time the lead-zinc mine at Faro began a four-year shutdown.

White Pass subsequently discontinued Whitehorse-to-Skagway rail service, and the territory was plunged into a prolonged economic recession.