Hardly a day goes by without some Labor politician calling for an end to Labor's "three mines" uranium policy. The representative body for the Top End Aboriginal communities, the Northern Land Council, has also thrown its weight behind these calls. Recently a range of environmental groups, including Greenpeace, Wilderness Society, Australian Conservation Foundation, Friends of the Earth and the state-based conservation bodies, came together to pressure the ALP to maintain current restrictions on uranium mining. Included in this loose alliance is the Northern Territory Environment Centre. Green Left Weekly's BERNIE BRIAN spoke to its campaigns coordinator, JAMIE PITTOCK.
Could you outline the threat to Kakadu posed by uranium mining?
Currently there is one operating mine within the boundaries of Kakadu National Park. The mining companies are proposing two other mines at Koongarra and Jabiluka. Both these mines pose more serious ramifications for Kakadu than the current mine.
Koongarra is in the catchment of the South Alligator River. Now Kakadu National Park was created for the sole purpose of protecting at least one entire tropical river catchment — the South Alligator — and it defeats the entire purpose of the park to have a uranium mine in that river catchment area. The Koongarra mine is also very close to Nourlangie Rock, which is one of the major visitor attractions of Kakadu.
The Jabiluka mine poses a more serious threat to the local environment for a number of reasons. The original proposal was prepared by a different company. It involved a major surface pit and processing facility at Jabiluka. Energy Resources of Australia [the owners of Ranger] has since bought the Jabiluka lease and is proposing an underground mine with an all-haulage road to the current facilities at Ranger.
This is a very different proposal from the one that the traditional owners were coerced into agreeing to a decade or more ago. The Jabiluka mine is near major wetlands, and this road would need to be constructed across Magela Creek, which obviously has major ramifications in the event of an accidental spillage.
Secondly, the Jabiluka site contains gold as well as uranium, which means that a cyanide processing facility would need to be added to any processing plant.
Thirdly, the Jabiluka mine is one of the richest uranium ore bodies in the world, so it is very highly radioactive. It is very unlikely that Jabiluka can be mined without reducing worker health and safety standards. Currently in Australia, workers are allowed to receive 50 mSe of radiation per year in uranium mines. The International Radiological Protection Council recommended in 1991 that the maximum dosage be dropped to 20 mSe.
Even the Office of Supervising Scientists (OSS) suggested that it would be very difficult for Jabiluka to be mined without exposing miners to unacceptably high doses of radiation. Of course, most experts are now saying there is no safe dose of radiation — that any radiation is likely to increase the risk of cancer and other ill health effects.
Fourthly, many of the radioactive products don't decay for something like 10,000 years. No government can honestly claim to guarantee that they can keep a site safe for that period of time — it's just ridiculous.
ERA wants basically to recycle their existing plant and equipment, which was not designed for such long-term operations. The intention is to use the current processing plant at Ranger to mill the ore from Jabiluka. Further, they are proposing to use the current Ranger pit as a repository for tailings from Jabiluka, which would mean that the current Ranger tailings would be left above ground.
What is the record of the mining companies on protecting the surrounding environment?
Ranger is the most heavily regulated mine in the world. Despite this, there have been a plethora of incidents where polluted waters and so forth have been released into the environment. In recent years there has been less, but this is mainly due to the fact that Ranger is operating below capacity because of the poor uranium market.
After 15 years of operation, the OSS is now saying that the environmental impacts of a large operating uranium mine are discernible outside the mine site. This is after only 15 years of operation, and Ranger is required to keep the site secure for a thousand years.
What is the Office of Supervising Scientists?
It's an arm of the Commonwealth Environmental Protection Authority. Their job is to monitor and report to the federal parliament on the environmental situation of the mines in Kakadu. The actual regulation of the environmental performance of the mines is undertaken by the Northern Territory Department of Mines and Energy. Those bodies, in conjunction with the Northern Land Council and conservation groups, are meant to coordinate their activities on the Advisory Committee for the Alligator Rivers Region.
The presence of the OSS has certainly meant that the Ranger mine has performed better than some others in the Northern Territory, but we still don't believe that the performance at Ranger is in any way adequate. The only way to protect World Heritage wetlands is to shut down the mine and rehabilitate.
How do you explain the support of the traditional owners for mining?
The traditional owners in the Kakadu area have been harassed by miming companies for 15 years, and people are being asked to process so many exploration licence applications. They are being dragged into meetings two and three times a week, and so they are under enormous pressure on these mining questions. We believe that people such as those in the Koongarra area are being coerced into agreeing to that mine.
The traditional owners have not had access to balanced information. We have sought for some years to be present at meetings concerning mining proposals so we can present information that balances that of the mining companies. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened.
We respect the situation in which the traditional owners find themselves. They obviously require additional resources to address such things as health needs. However, we don't think that the self-determination that the Northern Land Council is on about can be achieved if you haven't got the information with which to make an informed judgment.
For example we are unaware of the traditional owners being informed about Indonesia's nuclear reactor program and the likelihood of the mines in Kakadu supplying uranium to it and the implications for the traditional owners and their country if an accident were to occur. During the wet season an accident at any one of those reactors would contaminate much of northern Australia.
The traditional owners of Jabiluka have not made any decision in favour of the current proposal for the Jabiluka mine. We believe there is a degree of conflict of interest between the NLC's income from its mining royalties and its role in advising Aboriginal communities on mining proposals. We believe the current NLC position to support the dumping of the three mines policy doesn't reflect the views of a substantial number of its constituents.
People in these communities are not being offered any alternatives. They are being told you can have a very dirty uranium mine and royalties or, no mine and no royalties. We believe there are alternatives for those communities in Kakadu. Those other economic options haven't been fully explored, although groups like the Jabiluka Association who have done a tremendous amount to develop alternative economic enterprises for the traditional owners.
Aboriginal groups concerned about uranium mining need to speak up if they wish their concerns to be considered. At the moment the main message politicians are getting in Canberra is the NLC message that Aboriginal people want uranium mining, which in our view is not the full story by any means.
[Green Left Weekly is in the process of seeking a response from the Northern Land Council to the comments in this interview.]