BY JIM GREEN
Federal environment minister Robert Hill announced on February 1 that he requires further detailed information before making a final decision on the Honeymoon uranium mine proposal.
The Honeymoon project, located 80km west of Broken Hill, is owned by Southern Cross Resources. If approved, Honeymoon will produce 1000 tonnes of uranium oxide a year. Trial mining has been conducted since 1998 using the acid-based in-situ leach (ISL) mining technique which involves pumping acid into underground ore bodies to dissolve uranium, which is then pumped to the surface for processing with liquid wastes being reinjected underground.
Hill said he requires further evaluation of aquifers (layers of sand that hold saline water and the uranium ore) "before commonwealth approvals are given".
"The testing of aquifer boundaries, their associated groundwater chemistry, and the effectiveness of monitoring wells will provide the information needed to determine whether approval can be given", Hill said.
The terms of reference for the additional required work will be determined by the federal environment department in conjunction with the South Australian mines department.
Hill accepted departmental advice that other environmental issues, such as the method of mining and the production process, were adequately addressed by the environmental impact study process. That process dealt only with local impacts, ignoring the public health, environmental and weapons proliferation issues associated with uranium enrichment, power reactors and radioactive waste.
Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) spokesperson Dave Sweeney said, "Acid-based ISL mining is a polluting process that is not used in any other developed nation because of its adverse impacts on groundwater and the environment. Southern Cross Resources would not get approval for this process at home in Canada and it is good news that they failed to do so today in Australia."
The ACF has called for the disclosure of key information on groundwater flows and impacts at Honeymoon that has been withheld from public scrutiny by Southern Cross Resources on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. ACF is currently appealing the company's suppression of this key information through the SA ombudsman's office.
Some 30,000 cubic metres of radioactive liquid wastes from the trial mine have already been dumped into the regional groundwater reserve at Honeymoon without any rehabilitation being required by the federal or state government.
Peter Mangano, a resource analyst from Salomon Smith Barney, says spot prices for uranium are at all-time low levels, and it is not a good time for new players to enter the international market.
"The market is quite weak at the moment and that's been caused by slower growth in nuclear power than I think people would have projected some years ago", Mangano told ABC radio on January 31. "But most importantly it's been caused by a fairly significant oversupply of uranium into that fairly slow growing market."