Labor under pressure to close Honeymoon uranium mine

BY JIM GREEN

The future of the Honeymoon uranium mine in South Australia is in jeopardy. It has been revealed that the owner, Canadian-based company Southern Cross Resources (SCR), does not have a commercial mining and milling licence.

The pressure is on the South Australian Labor government to honour its pre-election statement that "Labor continues to be opposed to the establishment of any new uranium mines". Environment minister John Hill said he would wait until an application for the licence had been received and then consider it. "It's all hypothetical at this stage", Hill said.

"The project has no legal basis to proceed", said Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear campaigner David Noonan. "In ending the Honeymoon project, we can spare our environment a repeat of the uncontrolled radioactive leaks and underground pollution now characteristic of the Beverley acid leach mine."

Both Beverley and Honeymoon use an in-situ leach mining method which extracts uranium from the ore by pumping an acidic solution through underground aquifers. Once the uranium is extracted, the acidic liquid wastes, still containing radioactive and heavy-metal pollutants, are pumped back into the aquifer.

"Southern Cross Resources has told the Toronto Stock Exchange that it has all necessary Australian approvals. Clearly this is not the case and now it's time to end the Honeymoon", Noonan said. SCR only has a trial mining licence.

SCR project executive Tom Hunter claims that the trial mining lease, granted by the former Liberal government in February — just before the state election — is "the overriding approval" and the commercial mining licence under the Radiation Protection and Control Act is a "procedural" matter.

SCR says it will pursue all avenues to advance the project. "The company will be expected to take the full range of options open to it", Hunter told a Senate inquiry into spills at uranium mines, held in Adelaide on October 4. He said the company had invested "some five years and more than $30 million" in the project.

Meanwhile, the Adelaide Advertiser reported on October 6 that Western Mining Corporation is planning a major upgrade to its copper and uranium mine at Roxby Downs, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide. The mine size could treble under the proposal — to a projected production of 600,000 tonnes of copper and 10,000 tonnes of uranium annually — and the cost of the expansion could reach $5 billion.

The South Australian Labor government has set up a task force to coordinate government input into the proposal, comprising representatives from all government departments. Premier Mike Rann told the Advertiser, "I want this investment to happen and I intend doing all I can to help it to happen".

From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.

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From GLW issue 512