Buried in last week’s budget was money for rehabilitating the Rum Jungle uranium mine near Darwin. The exact sum was not disclosed.
Rum Jungle used to be a household name. It was Australia’s first large-scale uranium mine and supplied the US and British nuclear weapons programs during the Cold War.
Today, the mine is better known for extensively polluting the Finniss River after it closed in 1971. Despite a major rehabilitation project by the Commonwealth in the 1980s, the damage to the local environment is ongoing.
I first visited Rum Jungle in 2004, and it was a colourful mess, to say the least. Over later years, I saw it worsen. Instead of a river bed, there were salt crusts containing heavy metals and radioactive material. Pools of water were rich reds and aqua greens hallmarks of water pollution. Healthy aquatic species were nowhere to be found, like an ecological desert.
PDAC: Think big, exploration opportunity is huge, says BHP’s Laura Tyler
BHP s chief technical officer Laura Tyler. Credit: BHP.
“From where I sit, the opportunity in front of us is huge,”
BHP’s (NYSE: BHP; LSE: BHP; ASX: BHP) chief technical officer Laura Tyler told the PDAC’s virtual convention. “I see great prosperity as we collaborate to discover the commodities of the future … faster, more efficiently, and more sustainably than ever before.”
Speaking from Adelaide in Australia, Tyler noted that the last year had been one of “challenge and opportunity for us all.” She then provided a brief history of nickel, which is fast becoming the “workhorse” of battery technologies and plays an essential role in decarbonizing the global economy.
WA Government to review BHP s environmental licences in dusty Pilbara town of Newman
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TueTuesday 12
Residents in the East Pilbara region say red dust is regularly seen in the air.
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The WA Government will review the environmental licences of two BHP mines in the Pilbara amid concerns around rising dust levels.
Key points:
DWER says the review has been triggered by an increase in dust levels
A report into dust in Newman finds no asbestos fibres in samples from 2018 to 2019
The town of Newman, described as a dome of dust by residents, is bordered by the iron ore operations Mount Whaleback (one kilometre away) and Eastern Ridge (five kilometres to the north-east).