The mine would also include a tailings pond, mill and wastewater treatment facilities.
There's the giant tailings pond, which is actually the largest dam in the world.
The engineering company that designed the tailings pond had also warned that it was operating potentially beyond capacity.
The mine's tailings pond sits 5km below Petrov Lake, which is fed by glaciers that melt naturally as the seasons change.
Syncrude said this was the first time in its 30 years that a large flock of birds had landed on a tailings pond.
Aided by, among other things, the death of 1,600 ducks in a tailings pond and photos making northern Alberta look like a moonscape, environmentalists have succeeded in tarnishing the province's brand.
This, Gloria Jackson explained, was a tailings pond; it held water that had been used in the separation process and was too contaminated with mercury and other toxins to be released back into the Athabasca.
An Alberta judge found Syncrude Canada Ltd., the biggest producer in Canada's oil sands, guilty on Friday of charges stemming from the deaths of 1,600 ducks that landed on a toxic tailings pond in northern Alberta in 2008.
And then there is the vast no man's land in front of the town: a former tailings pond that is considered poisoned ground, protected by a fence topped with barbed wire.
The company was convicted in June by an Alberta court for failing to deploy scarecrows and loud cannons in April 2008 to prevent the migratory birds from landing on a tailings pond containing oily residue from one of its operations.
However, they offered no comments to reports that Vale had diverted extra water from another mine to the tailings pond behind the dam in the weeks preceding its collapse.
