Antinuclear

Rum Jungle still polluted 45 years after uranium mine was closed

Rum Jungle uranium mine in NT polluting environment 45 years after closure, ABC Radio The World Today  By Sara Everingham Traditional owner Kathy Mills finds every visit to site of the old Rum Jungle uranium mine upsetting.

The site, 100 kilometres south of Darwin, is overrun with scrubby weeds, there are two abandoned mining pits, large mounds of waste rock and the water in a diverted channel of the Finniss River is tinged orange and brown from contamination.

But the great-grandmother wants to show people around in the hope it will help her family’s long battle to have the site rehabilitated.

Ms Mills wants the Commonwealth to “hurry up” and rehabilitate the Rum Jungle mine — a Commonwealth-backed venture that produced uranium for the nuclear weapons programs of the US and British governments.

The mine closed 45 years ago but acid and metals are draining into the environment and the site remains off limits to the public including traditional owners.

This month’s federal budget had $11 million for the NT Government to put the finishing touches on a plan for rehabilitation.

Ms Mills said she was running out of time to see Rum Jungle fixed.

Mine took away ‘aspect of land’s importance’

When Rum Jungle was developed traditional owners had no say in it.

One mining pit was dug into a sacred women’s site on the east branch of the Finniss River and the flow of the river was diverted for one kilometre. Ms Mills vividly remembers the anger of one of her older relatives when he saw for the first time how the mine had transformed the land.

“It took away the whole aspect of the importance of that land,” she said.

But in the early 1950s the Commonwealth saw uranium as an opportunity to develop the north.

At the time, Rum Jungle was a major industrial development in northern Australia.

The then prime minister Robert Menzies came to the Top End to open it.

Notorious for environmental problems

When mining finished at Rum Jungle in 1971, no rehabilitation was done and the site became notorious for its environmental problems.

In the early 1980s, the Rum Jungle site could not be handed over to traditional owners as part of the successful Finniss River Land claim in case they became liable for the environmental problems.

The Commonwealth spent $18 million on rehabilitation in the 1980s but some of the work did not last.

At Rum Jungle, scientists from the NT Government are monitoring contamination in the Finniss River…….http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-30/rum-jungle-uranium-mine-in-nt-polluting-environment-45-years-on/7460666

June 1, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | aboriginal issues, environment, Northern Territory