Cameco Brand Guidelines: Eldorado, SMDC, McArthur River & a 49% Westinghouse Stake

Eldorado, SMDC and a merger in 1988.

Cameco was created in 1988 by the merger and privatisation of two Crown corporations — the federally owned Eldorado Nuclear and the provincially owned Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation (SMDC) — according to English Wikipedia and the company’s own history. The new business was first called the Canadian Mining and Energy Corporation; the name was later shortened to Cameco. It is based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The older of the two parents had a long history, including war work. English Wikipedia says Eldorado began in 1926 as Eldorado Gold Mines, founded by the brothers Charles and Gilbert LaBine. After radioactive ore was found at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories in 1930, it mined radium at Port Radium and in 1933 built a radium refinery at Port Hope, Ontario. Radium production stopped in 1940, when the war closed European markets. The mine reopened in 1942 to supply uranium to the United States military, and in 1943 the Canadian government bought control of the company, making it a Crown corporation; Eldorado was then mining and processing uranium ore under contracts for the Manhattan Project, the wartime atomic-bomb programme. Early in 1944 it was renamed Eldorado Mining and Refining.

Wikipedia says the Crown company held a monopoly on uranium prospecting and development in Canada until 1948, opened the Beaverlodge mine at Uranium City, Saskatchewan, in 1953, and turned to supplying power plants after United States military purchases ended in the 1960s, when it took the name Eldorado Nuclear. That legacy is still visible at Port Hope, which Wikipedia describes as holding Canada’s largest volume of historic low-level radioactive waste, created by Eldorado and its private predecessors; a federal clean-up, the largest of its kind in Canadian history, is projected to finish in 2032. Cameco operates a uranium conversion facility in Port Hope and a refinery at Blind River, Ontario.

Privatisation came in stages. Cameco began 62% owned by Saskatchewan and 38% by Ottawa, according to Wikipedia. Its initial public offering in 1991 put shares on the Toronto and Montreal exchanges, the company says, and New York followed in 1996. The last government holding, Saskatchewan’s remaining 10%, was sold in February 2002.

The Athabasca Basin and beyond.

Cameco’s core is the Athabasca Basin of northern Saskatchewan. The company says mining began at McArthur River in 1999 and commercial production followed in November 2000, and it calls the deposit the world’s largest high-grade uranium mine; the ore is milled at Key Lake. In 1999 it sold interests in McArthur River and Key Lake to Cogema Resources. Low uranium prices led Cameco to suspend McArthur River and Key Lake in 2018, indefinitely, according to Wikipedia and the company, and Cameco says it produced its first packaged pounds after a restart in 2022.

Cigar Lake, which Wikipedia calls the world’s highest-grade uranium mine, reached commercial production in 2015, Cameco says, and the company and Areva marked its official opening on 23 September that year. Its ore goes to the McClean Lake mill under agreements Cameco signed in 2011. The Rabbit Lake operation was suspended in 2016.

Beyond Saskatchewan the company grew by purchase. In 1996 it bought Power Resources Inc., which it describes as the largest uranium producer in the United States at the time, and in 1998 Uranerz. Its operations in Wyoming and Nebraska were grouped as Cameco Resources in 2007, according to Wikipedia. In Kazakhstan it holds a share of JV Inkai, its joint venture with Kazatomprom: Cameco announced development of the Inkai mine in 2004, and World Nuclear News reported in March 2025 that a temporary suspension at Inkai in January that year, over permit approvals, had been resolved.

It has spread across the fuel cycle too. Cameco bought the fuel trader Nukem in 2012 and, after a 2021 purchase with Silex, holds 49% of Global Laser Enrichment, which is developing a laser enrichment technology, Wikipedia says. It is the fuel supplier to Bruce Power in Ontario, in which it held a stake from 2001 until a sale in 2014. Its gold business was spun off as Centerra Gold in 2004, and its remaining interest sold in 2009.

How uranium companies present themselves.

Uranium companies sell a commodity that few of their audiences will ever see, so their visual material leans on the stages around it. Mining reports and investor decks in this sector commonly show drill core laid out in trays, drums of uranium concentrate, the yellowcake of the trade, and the plants where ore is milled. The product itself is a powder; the imagery is of the places and steps that produce it.

Geography does much of the work. In-situ recovery, the method Kazatomprom uses for all of its production in Kazakhstan, pumps solution through wells rather than digging a pit, so its pictures tend to be wellfields of wellheads and pipework laid across open steppe and prairie. In northern Saskatchewan, the Athabasca Basin, where Cameco mines McArthur River and Cigar Lake, appears as lakes, forest and snow, with headframes and camps in winter light.

The fuel story widens the frame. Companies that sell uranium into conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication often finish their presentations with nuclear power plants, cooling towers and control rooms, and with the language of low-carbon, reliable electricity; when Cameco and Brookfield completed their purchase of Westinghouse in November 2023, World Nuclear News quoted Cameco’s chief executive on demand for nuclear power and energy security.

Much of this material is made for investors and for the industry itself. Producers and developers publish decks and annual reports for listings in markets such as Toronto, New York, London and Astana, and present at industry events, among them those of the World Nuclear Association, whose public information service is World Nuclear News. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — its origins, owners and mines — and treats its colours and type as an unofficial interpretation.

From mines to reactors.

The largest change came in reactors. In October 2022 Cameco and Brookfield Renewable Partners announced a plan to buy Westinghouse Electric Company, the American nuclear-services business that Brookfield Business Partners had bought out of bankruptcy in 2018. World Nuclear News reported on 8 November 2023 that the acquisition was complete, after a final regulatory approval on 3 November, leaving Cameco with 49% and Brookfield with 51%. Cameco’s chief executive described the deal as joining the company’s 35 years in uranium mining and fuel with Westinghouse’s reactor technology and services.

The company has also been through a long tax case. The Canada Revenue Agency challenged the way Cameco sold uranium through a marketing subsidiary in Switzerland. According to Wikipedia, the Tax Court of Canada ruled for Cameco in 2018; the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that decision, in 2020 by the company’s account; and on 18 February 2021 the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear a further appeal, making the rulings final.

Cameco’s shares trade in Toronto and New York. Its own history page records supply agreements, safety awards and community agreements in northern Saskatchewan, among them a 2017 collaboration agreement with the Lac La Ronge Indian Band.

For a design guide, Cameco shows how a company with Crown-corporation roots presents mines, fuel and reactors as one business. Compare Kazatomprom, its partner in JV Inkai, and Orano, the French fuel-cycle group formerly called Areva. For this guide we use a basin blue, a winter-ice grey and an ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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