The remediation of Ranger uranium mine: will it really restore the environment?
Traditional owners were given land rights in return for their support for the Ranger mine, and Kakadu National Park was born. ……. the land will finally be returned to the traditional owners… the question is, in what state? ……… we could find the site an eroding heap of substandard scrub.
As part of cleaning up the mine site, contaminated buildings and equipment will be buried in one of the mine’s enormous pits.
We’ve been told that burying the equipment and the contaminated material in the mine site is out of step with global best practice in the mining industry.
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Kakadu in crisis, ABC 22 Feb 2021, Crisis in Kakadu: The turmoil threatening Australia’s biggest national park
“It’s gone downhill. No one basically trusts anybody, no one respects each other anymore. That’s how bad it is here.” Traditional owner Kakadu is one of the great natural wonders of the world. The stunning landscape, teeming with wildlife, is a major tourist destination with scores of Instagram friendly sites. For tourism operators it is an iconic symbol of what Australia has to offer. “It’s one of the most special places in Australia. It’s for so long been one of the reasons why people visit Australia and for Australians, one of their must do life experiences.” Tourism industry representative Despite its beauty, there is trouble inside Australia’s biggest national park. This World Heritage listed site is in crisis. “It’s an absolute mess because the institutions responsible for fixing it up aren’t doing their job.” Traditional owner On Monday Four Corners investigates accusations of mismanagement and neglect which have fuelled a bitter dispute between the park’s traditional owners and the authority that runs the park.
Things are a bit tense here…It seems like it’s being run from far and beyond, meaning Canberra. We need people on the ground, at the grassroots level, dealing, talking with our people.” Senior cultural tour guide Key locations are in a state of disrepair, others are inaccessible and local community members are furious. Tourism operators hoping to cash in on a domestic tourism boom after a horror 2020 say action needs to be taken now. “We believe it can be fixed. We believe we have no choice but to fix it. Kakadu deserves more.” Tourism industry representative The stakes couldn’t be higher for the local Indigenous community. Royalty payments that have flowed from the controversial Ranger uranium mine are ending. After 40 years of production, the mine has shut down and there are massive plans to transform the former mining town of Jabiru into a tourism hub. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been committed to redevelop the town, but some are asking if this will be money well spent. “I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people, the education of our people, employment of our people…Tourism is not the be all and end all.” Senior community member Traditional owners are speaking out about their frustrations and they want all of Australia to hear them. “I really truly believe that this has got to be the turning point… if we don’t sit at the table very soon, things will be taken into our own hands.” Senior cultural tour guide Crisis in Kakadu, can be seen on , ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners. ………….ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: Traditional owners were given land rights in return for their support for the Ranger mine, and Kakadu National Park was born. JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: They were told, the negotiators, you will have land rights. But what will happen is Kakadu will become a national park, World Heritage, jointly managed with the Commonwealth government, and you will have uranium mines. JUSTIN O’BRIEN, CEO, GUNDJEIHMI ABORIGINAL CORPORATION: The park was part of the package. We know now that the cabinet submissions show us, the cabinet papers from 1978, that the park, the salve so to speak, was withheld until they’d secured agreement for the mine. The two go hand in hand. This was a major deal in Australian history. But the park was the thing that was part of the social contract that was to make it all better. They signed the same agreements on the same day, on the 3rd of November 1978. ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: Now, after 40 years, the mine is done. Processing of uranium ore at Ranger finished last month. The mine site will be rehabilitated by Rio Tinto subsidiary ERA over five years, and then the land will finally be returned to the traditional owners… the question is, in what state? PROFESSOR KINGSLEY DIXON, ECOLOGICAL REHABILITATION EXPERT, CURTIN UNIVERSITY: The biggest issue that the mine faces now is that it is sitting in Kakadu National Park. There is both a regulatory and a cultural perception from the Indigenous people that it will be restored to the same values, to the same quality, with the same diversity as Kakadu. And at this stage that represents some significant technological and scientific impediments and problems that we need to overcome. ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: ERA has promised to leave the site in a state that is “similar” to its World Heritage-listed surrounds. It’s a massive job. Professor Kingsley Dixon is advising on the rehabilitation of the Ranger mine. PROFESSOR KINGSLEY DIXON, ECOLOGICAL REHABILITATION EXPERT, CURTIN UNIVERSITY: If we’re unable to put back those complete landscapes and the species diversity, including the culturally significant species that the Indigenous communities want to see in those sites, which have been on their landscape for tens of thousands of years, we could find the site an eroding heap of substandard scrub. ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: As part of cleaning up the mine site, contaminated buildings and equipment will be buried in one of the mine’s enormous pits. We’ve been told that burying the equipment and the contaminated material in the mine site is out of step with global best practice in the mining industry. Is this true and why isn’t ERA following global best practice? PAUL ARNOLD, CEO, ENERGY RESOURCES AUSTRALIA: We have, with the support and input from our stakeholders, regulators, undertaken a very detailed assessment of how best to rehabilitate the site given that we’re situated and surrounded by a national park, and have assessed that the most prudent way to manage that mine infrastructure is to store it within the mined-out pit at pit three. That has the endorsement of the supervising scientists and other, uh, stakeholders and supported by our own scientific analysis. PROFESSOR KINGSLEY DIXON, ECOLOGICAL REHABILITATION EXPERT, CURTIN: To bury your infrastructure onsite is out of step with what I think is global best practise in the mining industry. Mining industries around the world remove their infrastructure and reinstate the natural ecology over those sites. So deep burial is on the cards, I would find that surprising and certainly something that the ERA should probably re-examine. ………… MAY NANGO, TRADITIONAL OWNER (speaking in Kunwinjku): They should look after the land. They should communicate with us what’s happening so we will know if any contaminated water appears. We need to know because we go hunting near here, where we live, on the creek. We go fishing nearby and walking there. DJAYKUK DJANDJOMERR, TRADITIONAL OWNER: You got some people that monitoring that area. I hope, I hope they do really best things for Bininj people. Because, you know, the mine is, we know it’s close. As we said, you know, we just want [them to be] really, really, really careful, for people downstream. ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: There’s not a lot of faith in ERA’s parent company, Rio Tinto, which blew up the 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage sites at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara in May last year. …… ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: The town of Jabiru was built to service the mine but 40 years on, it’s worn out. Now the streets are emptying by the week. As the town contracts from more than 1000 people as mine workers and their families leave, Jabiru must reinvent itself to survive. …………….. https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/kakadu-in-crisis/13180512 |
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1.This month
For international nuclear news go to https://nuclear-news.net
of the week
Nuclear power cannot solve the climate crisis
PETITION https://www.alp.org.au/petitions/australians-dont-want-nuclear-power/
26 Feb – 24 April The Image is not Nothing (Concrete Archives) is a group exhibition that explores the ways in which acts of nuclear trauma, Indigenous genocide and cultural erasure have been memorialised by artists and others. It comes as the result of research by curators Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce whose fieldwork has encompassed sites of significance including Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Maralinga, New York, Wounded Knee and former Yugoslavia.
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Submissions to the Senate Committee Inquiry into National Radioactive Management Amendment Bill. 2020. Go to our summaries of significant submissions, conveniently listed in alphabetical order at Kimba waste dump submissions or see all submissions listed at Read the Submissions
Bill Gates, while motivated to help fight climate change, has also long been trying to make a success of his nuclear technology company Terra Power. The climate emergency presents him with the perfect opportunity to promote this, and especially, to get tax–payer funding to do it, as he suggests in his new book.
Elon Musk and Bill Gates: beware of gurus toting solutions to climate change
Elon Musk has grand plans to save the world. Bill Gates has just published his book ”How To Avoid a Climate Disaster”. They both envisage tax-payer funding for their solutions. But beware of gurus toting the solution to the planet’s crisis.
If you don’t think that our home planet is in an ecocidal crisis, then you’ve been blissfully unaware of global heating, over-population, biodiversity loss, waste crises, plastic pollution, overconsumption of energy , water shortages, deforestation, nuclear danger, space junk danger, perpetual nuclear war risk…….
Visionaries like Bill Gates and Elon Musk have brought extraordinary, and beneficial advances to our human society. On the way, they have become billionaires. And good luck to them. But their wealth and fame has made them all too ready to be seen as world leaders, and to see themselves as having the solutions to world problems. This can be problematic, as in effect, some of their solutions exacerbate the problems.
The future envisioned by both Bill Gates and Elon Musk has one huge blind spot. They both foresee ever-expanding energy use, and they plan for that – problems can be fixed with technology.
On a finite planet, endless energy use just cannot work. But the concept of enough is just not in their plans. If the human species does not take up the concept of enough, we could just become an extinct species. Technology could be used to reduce energy use, but that idea fades away as Gates, Musk, and other technocratic leaders see progress as being to have ever more exciting and energy-guzzling gimmicks and activities.The digital revolution. It should be a benefit, enhancing our lives, and in many ways, it IS. But an energy price is paid in our unbridled use of digital technology. Every email, emoji, Facebook post, tweet, blogpost, Youtube, uses electricity. It’s not as if these actions just disappear ”into the cloud”. What a dishonest term that is! There is no such cloud. What there actually IS – is a host of vast areas of dirty great data” farms”. There’s another dishonest term. They’re not farms. They are soulless collections of great metal servers, using ever growing amounts of electricity, and of water, to keep them cool.
Then there’s the price at the end. It’s very hard to find out the details and the extent of toxic materials from digital technology, that are dumped in poor countries.
And, to be fair, companies like Apple, have made some efforts to reduce their ewaste. https://www.ewaste-expo.com/is-apple-delivering-on-its-environmental-claims/
However, planned obsolescence is rampant in the high tech world, resulting in the utter tragedy of ewaste pollution, – from discarded smartphones, laptops, computers, printers, TVs, fidbits, smart fridges, robots etc, the tragedy of the thousands of children working as waste-pickers in India and Africa, in slum conditions. E-waste includes many toxic materials such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, that release dioxins. . ”With no health or environmental protections in the slum, the toxins contaminate the air, water, and the food consumed in the slum…….. The area is constantly covered in thick, toxic smoke from the burning of electrical cables that goes on all day and night,” – High-tech hell: new documentary brings Africa’s e-waste slum to life https://news.mongabay.com/2012/04/high-tech-hell-new-documentary-brings-africas-e-waste-slum-to-life/
Both Gates and Musk are enthusiasts for renewable energy, and in the climate crisis, they are to be applauded for their work in this direction. Yet, as with all kinds of digital technology, renewables should not be unlimited, and do have their downsides, both in the production (pollution from rare earths mining/processing), and in the final disposal, with toxic wastes, and components that are difficult to recycle. . The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that solar panels produced 250,000 metric tonnes of waste in 2018 alone.
Bill Gates and Elon Musk do show their awareness of the planet’s grave environmental problems, but we don’t hear from them about energy conservation, or about moving away from the consumer society. Both talk quite enthusiastically about the great increase in energy use that we can expect. They complacently predict endless energy use, just as the nuclear lobby did in its glossy advertising film ”Pandora’s Promise”
Elon Musk now plans to put 24,000 satellites into space, and is well known for his dream of colonising Mars, and This idea has, of course, been taken up by many others, and there’s a sort of general public delight in space travel and interstellar rocketry. People seem oblivious to the fact that this will require huge amounts of energy, and that the space scientists already are turning away from clean solar power, to the far more dangerous source of nuclear fission. They’re also oblivious of the state of affairs in near space, where the trillions of bits of space debris pose dangers, floating about just like the plastic pollution in the oceans. Meanwhile the military planners in USA, Russia, China are already planning for nuclear weapons and war in space.
No surprise then that Elon Musk sees nuclear power as necessary – not just for his predicted need for much more electricity on Earth, but for this obsession with satellites and rockets.
Less well understood than his push for electric cars and Tesla technologies, is Elon Musk’s investment in the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Running Bitcoin demands enormous amounts of electricity, as Timothy Rooks explained recently https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than-whole-countries/a-56573390
Bill Gates, while motivated to help fight climate change, has also long been trying to make a success of his nuclear technology company Terra Power. The climate emergency presents him with the perfect opportunity to promote this, and especially, to get tax–payer funding to do it, as he suggests in his new book.
Wake up people! These two gurus have done some good stuff. But don’t let them manipulate us into dangerous territory – with nuclear technology, so connected with weaponry, and with its dangers, and the unsolved problem of radioactive trash. Sure, technology has got to be part of solving the planet’s crises. But we need much more imaginative leadership to steer our species away from infinite consumption and infinite energy use.
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