Olympic Damn Uranium Mine – Premier Rann’s Toxic ECONOMIC Legacy?

BHP Billiton’s expanded Olympic Dam uranium mine – if it does eventuate – will leave a toxic radioactive legacy. But that’s not all. What about its economic legacy?

It’s going to cost a heap to get it started. They are going to need to move a million tonnes of rock per day for four years, that is, a billion tonnes of rock, just because of the overburden, because the ore body is far underground. So they are moving a million tonnes a day for four years before they even get to the ore body. This is going to cost $billions.

The energy cost, in drawing huge amounts of water from the proposed desalination plant in Spencer Gulf, will be massive.

All this – at a time when the market for uranium continues to slump, when nuclear power is becoming prohibitively expensive – seems like an economic folly.

South Australian Premier Rann initially rose to fame within the Labor party with a strong anti-uranium and anti-Roxby Downs push. But, once in power as Premier, he did a complete about face. Now Rann is poised to let BHP Billiton dictate the terms for the expansion of the mine.

This means renegotiating the Indenture Act 1982, which makes BHP Billiton exempt from the laws of the country. This legislation allows the mine to operate with wide-ranging exemptions from the Aboriginal Heritage Protection Act, the Environment Protection Act, the Natural Resources Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

Mike Rann’s goal is to make Mike Rann look big in history – to be the one that gave BHP Billiton free rein with its big misguided adventure. He has to do this in a hurry, before his Labor colleagues give him the boot. Here’s hoping that more thoughtful minds in South Australian politics will see that he doesn’t get away with this.