Despite hazards, Australian company Lynas pushing ahead with Malaysian rare earths project
Rare earths mining and processing is difficult, expensive and rarely ecologically friendly. It produces enormous quantities of wastewater, requires vast amounts of energy, uses toxic materials in the refining process and can produce radioactive materials with half-lives of hundreds of years.
Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and other government officials have continued to insist the plant won’t open until all safety and environmental concerns are met. …
Rare Earth Plant in Malaysia May be Closer to Opening, Asia Sentinel 22 Sept 11“.….An Australian-owned rare earths processing facility in Malaysia that is reported to be the world’s biggest outside China, which has been delayed by environmentalists and opposition political leaders, may well be gathering enough steam to open by the end of the year, say several sources in Kuala Lumpur…..The facility is to be operated by Lynas Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., a subsidiary of the publicly traded Lynas Corp of Australia….
Rare earths mining and processing is difficult, expensive and rarely ecologically friendly. It produces enormous quantities of wastewater, requires vast amounts of energy, uses toxic materials in the refining process and can produce radioactive materials with half-lives of hundreds of years. The United States closed its rare earths mining operations in California’s Mojave Desert in the 1990s because of the environmental cost. They are now being reopened.
Malaysia is particularly sensitive to the issue. In the 1980s, Mitsubishi Chemical established a plant in an area called Bukit Merah west of Ipoh. For the last two decades, both Mitsubishi and Malaysia have paid the price in terms of deaths of workers from leukemia and environmental cleanup that so far has cost US$99.2 million and still hasn’t been completed.
That environmental disaster thus laid the foundations for the current opposition to the Kuantan plant – which will only process materials shipped from Australia, not mine them domestically. Lynas Malaysia says it plans to import rare earth ore from Mount Weld in Western Australia, said to be the richest rare earth deposit on the planet, truck the ore to Fremantle, send it by containership to Kuantan, then process it at a RM700 million (US$231.9 million) facility at the Gebing Industrial Estate nearby in Pahang state.
Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and other government officials have continued to insist the plant won’t open until all safety and environmental concerns are met. …
September 22, 2011 -
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics international
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