BY JIM GREEN
The Howard government approved the Honeymoon uranium mine in north-eastern South Australia on November 21. Canadian-based mining company Southern Cross Resources is expected to begin commercial production next year.
The mine, expected to produce 1000 tonnes of uranium oxide a year, will use a controversial in-situ leaching (ISL) process. Sulphuric acid and oxygen are pumped into the mining aquifer and the solution is piped to the surface. Once the uranium is extracted, the acidic liquid wastes, still containing radioactive and heavy-metal pollutants, are pumped back into the aquifer.
The controversial ISL mining technique has been used in former Soviet bloc countries where it has been linked with extensive ground-water contamination.
Trial uranium mining has been conducted at Honeymoon since 1998, resulting in 30,000 cubic metres of liquid wastes being dumped into the regional ground-water reserve without any rehabilitation being required by the federal or state governments. Reports on the environmental impacts of trial mining were kept secret by Southern Cross Resources on the spurious grounds of commercial confidentiality.
In February, then environment minister Robert Hill refused to approve commercial-scale production because of unresolved questions relating to the reinjection of wastes into the mining aquifer. Hill acknowledged that "the aquifer is essentially an unbounded system" and asked for further testing of aquifer boundaries, their associated ground-water chemistry and the effectiveness of monitoring wells.
Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear campaigner David Noonan accused Hill of delaying approval until after the November 10 federal election; the supplementary reports were given to him in August. "This is essentially a toxic pollution plan", Noonan said after the November 21 announcement. "The South Australian public must urge the state government to reject this mine."
Southern Cross Resources still has to secure export permits from the federal government and a mining lease from the Liberal government in South Australia. None of the regulatory processes require consideration of anything other than local impacts; thus the public health, environmental and weapons proliferation issues associated with uranium enrichment, power reactors and spent reactor fuel are conveniently ignored.
Southern Cross Resources may seek to mine other deposits near Honeymoon in the coming years. With uranium mines at Roxby Downs, Beverley and Honeymoon, South Australia now has the dubious honour of hosting three of Australia's four operational uranium mines.
South Australians will again be in the nuclear firing-line early next year, when the federal government releases an environmental impact statement (EIS) justifying its plan to establish a national dump for low-level and short-lived intermediate level wastes near Woomera.
The federal government will write, review and rubber-stamp the sham EIS, but overcoming public hostility to the project in South Australia could pose far greater problems. A poll conducted by Channel 7 in July 1999 found that 93% of South Australians oppose the dump. A poll conducted by the Adelaide Advertiser in July 2000 found that 87% of South Australians oppose the dump and 78% of respondents said there should be a referendum on the issue.
Already, public hostility has forced the federal government to abandon its plan for an above-ground store for high-level wastes (including wastes from the nuclear reactor in the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights) adjacent to the planned low-level dump in South Australia.
The South Australian Liberal government supports the planned nuclear dump. This support appears to stem from a deal struck in the mid-1990s. In a leaked 1995 letter, then South Australian premier Dean Brown wrote to Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating saying that the state government would consider supporting a nuclear dump at Woomera if the federal government agreed not to pursue a World Heritage listing for the adjacent Lake Eyre region.
The federal government has repeatedly insisted that the South Australian site was chosen on "scientific" grounds, and counterposes this "scientific" approach to the alleged hysterical rantings of the anti-nuclear movement. However, last year, nuclear engineer turned whistle-blower Alan Parkinson revealed that the senior federal government bureaucrat involved in the push for a nuclear dump did not know the difference between alpha and gamma radiation, while another senior bureaucrat confused acids and bases.
The deal revealed by the leaked 1995 letter seems a much more likely reason for the choice of South Australia to host the dump than the pseudo-scientific justifications emanating from ignorant bureaucrats in the federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
The botched "clean-up" of the Maralinga nuclear weapons testing site, and revelations earlier this year that humans were used as guinea-pigs during the British weapons tests, have also heightened opposition to nuclear dumping in South Australia. The same bureaucrats who were in charge of the disposal of contaminated soil from the Maralinga test site are involved in the nuclear waste dump scheme, and the game plan is identical — dump the waste in unlined trenches and insist, straight-faced, that this is "world's best practice".
Parkinson wrote in the Canberra Times last year: "Those with responsibility for the proposed national waste repository are the same people who have recently buried long-lived plutonium waste (half-life 24,000 years) in an unlined burial trench [at Maralinga] only 2-3 metres below ground — slightly deeper than we place human corpses. If accepted, this precedent should now allow the commonwealth to place all radioactive waste in shallow, unlined burial trenches, with no regard for its longevity or toxicity, and no regard for the suitability of the site."
From Green Left Weekly, November 28, 2001.
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