Energy Efficiency

Ok Tedi is the well known environmental disaster that took place in what was once part of Australian territory until the Australian Government ‘gave’ Papua New Guinea back to the true owners (unlike Irian Jaya still suffering genocide, pillage and ransacking by Indonesia).

Will Yeelirie in Western Australia be a repeat of Ok Tedi?

Those less tactful in their observations might suggest that this decision was to open the way for mass exploitation by many – Australian – companies like BHP to ravage and destroy (on a massive scale) the environment with little concern of recourse.

BHP has since dissolved its 52% ownership in the mining company and walked away after paying an out-of-Court settlement of $28 million. [However the mine is still in operation and waste continues to flow into the river system. BHP was granted legal indemnity from future mine related damages].

The question of course is ‘will BHP Billiton really be an Australian company and at what point in time will it ‘dissolve’ its relationship with the Australian government?

Now we all know that politicians and senior bureaucrats are for sale to the highest bidder and the Australian Public is a ‘day-light to second’ place winner in these stakes, so let’s consider the track record of BHP in Papua New Guinea.

The mine operators discharge 80 million tons of tailings into the river system each year causing widespread and diverse harm, both environmentally and socially to some 50,000 people living in about 120 villages downstream of the mine. The chemicals in the tailings killed or contaminated fish (which the people of the surrounding villages still ate because fish are a staple part of their diet) and changed the riverbed, causing a relatively deep and slow river to become shallower and develop rapids thereby disrupting indigenous transportation routes.

Flooding caused by the raised riverbed, left a thick layer of contaminated mud on the flood plain among plantations of taro, bananas and sago palm, also staples of the local diet, with a 1300 square kilometres damaged in this way.  Copper concentration in the water was some 30 times above the standard level but alarmingly the World Health Organisation said it is still WHO standards.

The original plans included an Environmental Impact Statement done by an Australian Consultancy that called for a tailings dam to be built near the mine, allowing for heavy metals and solid particles to settle, before releasing the ‘clean high-water’ into the river system where remaining contaminants would be diluted. [don’t laugh, it’s true], but surprise, surprise, the plan was seriously flawed and a (regular for the area) earthquake in 1984 caused the half built dam to collapse; BHP continued operations without any dam, because they argued it would be too expensive to rebuild it.  Experts have predicted that it will take some 300 years to ‘clean up’ the toxic contamination.

So why should Australia allow BHP to dig up the most toxic substance on Earth … what are the enormous environmental impacts and health risks of allowing uranium mine in WA ?  The uranium mine planed by BHP Billiton at Yeelirie (about 550 kilometres east of Geraldton) may initially employ some 700 people for a about two years and then drop be more than half, but what will remain … lets consider our existing uranium experience.

• The Federal Government admitted that 100,000 litres of contaminated groundwater is seeping from tailings at Ranger uranium mine into Kakadu each day, so the potential impact of large-scale dewatering of the mine site at Yeelirie combined with heavy downpours is alarming.
• The mine’s yellowcake product is supposed to be taken inside sealed drums on existing roads from Yeelirie to a ‘secure’ rail facility near Kalgoorlie and then by train to Adelaide and then Darwin before going overseas. Trucking overland within Australia raises a concern; according to the Federal Department of Infrastructure and Transport, there are more than 2,000 serious truck accidents on WA roads each year, while the Australian Transport Safety Bureau reports there are on average more than 35 serious train derailments and collisions annually in WA.  Yellowcake powder (uranium oxide concentrate) is the consistency of talcum powder, so should a serious road or rail collision occur, people using the same transport routes or living nearby would be at risk of breathing in the dust.
• If the calculation is done of the embodied energy that goes into building a nuclear reactor, it is hard to see how anyone can possibly describe nuclear power as a low-carbon solution to greenhouse gas emissions and that the total energy produced by the nuclear plants will be less than all the energy that goes into digging up, refining, processing, building, commissioning, running and decommissioning a nuclear power plant, leaving aside the nuclear waste.
• The global nuclear industry has still not developed a solution to its waste problem; however, in the last 10 years, the multinational company Pangea has been lobbying hard in Australia for the establishment of an international nuclear waste here, which previous Prime Minister John Howard was apparently all for.

As Greens Senator Scott Ludlam points out;

1. ‘there is a relatively small number of new jobs, especially compared to renewable energies such as solar, which has created lasting employment for some 250,000 people in Germany’
2. ‘in its referral document to the Federal Department of Environment, BHP revealed that through an on-site leaching process, the proposed mine would produce 110 million tonnes of radioactive waste’
3. ‘it proposes that this huge amount of rock and sludge would be stored at the mine site in an open pit or tailings dam, where it would remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
4. ‘this means that once the mine opens, mine workers and anyone else in the area would be at risk on windy days of breathing in dust or random gas blown off the tailings.; these radioactive materials greatly increase the risk of cancer if ingested.
5. ‘BHP says 10,000 hectares of mostly well vegetated land would be disturbed by the mine; this area is home to six threatened animal species, 11 migratory birds and a number of rare and priority-listed plant species,
6. ‘the site experiences intense rain at times, causing water to flow in sheets off the proposed mine site towards nearby lakes.

You need to contact your local State and Federal member/s and tell them in no uncertain words that you don’t want Yeelirie to be Australia’s Ok Tedi …