Bird deaths from the tailings dam

WMC acknowledges tailings dangerous for birds
January 11, 2005.
<www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1279971.htm>

WMC Resources says it will do all it can to try and reduce the number of birds being killed at its Olympic Dam mine in South Australia’s north.

The South Australian Government has ordered a report after 100 birds were killed over a recent four day period.

Environmental agencies will visit the mine today to talk with the company.

WMC Resources spokesman Richard Yeeles agrees that the issue needs to be investigated.

"This is a very dry area and birds do see what appears to be a large body of water and will tend to land on these areas," he said.

"We have had a deterent system in place which over the years has helped us to reduce contact between birds and tailings facilities, but it appears for some reason that this is not working as it has done in the past."

Critique of ASNO

Jim Green
National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia.
jim.green@foe.org.au

March 2007

(See also EnergyScience Briefing Paper #19, August 2007 – a detailed critique of the  Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office written by Prof. Richard Broinowski, Assoc. Prof. Tilman Ruff, Dr. Alan Roberts and Jim Green.)

Acronyms

* AONM – Australian-obligated nuclear materials – e.g. Australian-origin uranium and its by-products such as depleted uranium and plutonium.
* ASNO – so-called Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office
* HEU – highly-enriched uranium
* IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency
* MUF – Material Unaccounted For.

Safeguards are not and could never be 100% effective

The Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) routinely misleads the Australian public and our political representatives when it asserts that international and bilateral safeguards agreements and processes “ensure” or “provide assurances” that Australian uranium and its by-products such as depleted uranium and plutonium, known collectively as Australian-obligated nuclear materials (AONM), will not contribute to weapons proliferation.

Those agreements and processes certainly attempt to prevent diversion of nuclear materials to weapons programs but they are not and could never be 100% effective.

ASNO and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade routinely offer these false “assurances”. The ASNO website illustrates the point:
1. The risk of diversion of AONM is not acknowledged in a document linked from the front page of ASNO’s website, “Australia’s Uranium Export Policy”, <www.dfat.gov.au/security/aus_uran_exp_policy.html>. That document asserts that “Australia’s uranium export policy … provides assurances that exported uranium and its derivatives cannot benefit the development of nuclear weapons or be used in other military programs.” Why no acknowledgement of the risk of diversion of AONM for nuclear weapons research and/or production?
2. That document links to another, “Australia’s Network of Nuclear Safeguards Agreements”, <www.dfat.gov.au/security/nuclear_safeguards.html>, which asserts that: “All of Australia’s uranium is exported for exclusively peaceful purposes, and only to countries and parties with which Australia has a bilateral safeguards Agreement. These Agreements ensure that Australia’s nuclear exports remain in exclusively peaceful use …” Why no acknowledgement of the risk of diversion of AONM?
3. That document links to an excerpt from the Australian Safeguards Office Annual Report 1998-99, <www.asno.dfat.gov.au/annual_report_9899/25_years.html>, which asserts that bilateral safeguards agreements “were established to ensure that nuclear items exported from Australia remain in exclusively peaceful use, and in no way enhance or contribute to any military purpose.” Why no acknowledgement of the risk of diversion of AONM?

The ASNO website links to the so-called Uranium Information Centre, which also fails to acknowledge the risk of diversion of AONM. We can easily understand why the industry-funded Uranium Information Centre peddles misinformation – it has a commercial interest in doing so. But what is ASNO’s excuse? While ASNO is an independent statutory authority, as it should be, it exhibits the tendencies of a captured bureaucracy.

Occasionally, ASNO will concede the indisputable point that there is a risk of diversion of AONM – for example, ASNO Director-General John Carlson (2005) states that “… of course it is possible diversion might occur in the future …”. However, it is far more common for ASNO to provide false “assurances” which strongly imply that there is no risk of diversion.

ASNO should clearly acknowledge on its website that there is a risk of diversion of AONM, and it should remove or modify statements which imply otherwise.

AONM is not fully accounted for

Carlson (2002) says: “All Australian-obligated nuclear material [AONM], including plutonium, is fully accounted for.” That is false. There are routine accounting discrepancies – called ‘Material Unaccounted For’. MUF refers to discrepancies between the ‘book stock’ (the expected measured amount) and the ‘physical stock’ (the actual measured amount) of nuclear materials at a location under safeguards. Such discrepancies are frequent due to the difficulty of precisely measuring amounts of nuclear material.

What Carlson means when he says that all AONM is “fully accounted for” is that ASNO has accepted all the various reasons given for MUF over the years, however fanciful those explanations may or may not be. (ASNO refuses to provide specific data on MUF discrepancies or even aggregate information. Nor has ASNO adequately justified this secrecy.)

Carlson (2005) states: “MUF certainly does not imply that AONM is missing. When ASNO concludes that all AONM is accounted for, this means, inter alia, that we are satisfied about the explanation for any MUF.”

In other words, when ASNO says all AONM is fully accounted for, it means all AONM is not fully accounted for.

It is agreed that MUF does not necessarily mean that diversion has occurred – the problem is that we cannot be certain that diversion of MUF has not occurred on each and every occasion when there is a difference between recorded and measured quantities. The inevitability of accounting discrepancies provides an obvious loophole for would-be proliferators. The problem is most acute with facilities processing large volumes of nuclear material, and in particular those processing large volumes of fissile material such as reprocessing plants.

South Korea

ASNO (letter, available on request) insists that South Korea did not use AONM in its long-standing secret nuclear weapons research program from 1979-2000. How can ASNO be sure? According to the letter, one reason is that the South Koreans say so!

We still do not know – and will probably never know – whether AONM was used in the South Korean secret nuclear weapons research program:
* We have the assurance of South Korean authorities – but the value of such an assurance is highly questionable in the circumstances.
* There could not possibly have been diversion before 1986 since there was no transfer of AONM to South Korea until 1986.
* Carlson (2005) states in relation to post-1986 unauthorised activities that: “… the IAEA’s investigations showed that the nuclear material used was produced from indigenous sources, Accordingly, ASNO is satisfied that no AONM was involved.” But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) appears to base its conclusions in part on “information provided by the ROK”, so the argument becomes circular. Moreover, the claim that only indigenous material was used is contested (Kang et al., 2005).

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons

Carlson (2000) states that “… in some of the countries having nuclear weapons, nuclear power remains insignificant or non-existent.” Carlson’s attempt to absolve civil nuclear programs from the proliferation problem ignores the well-documented use of civil nuclear facilities and materials in weapons programs as well as the important political ‘cover’ civil programs provide for military programs. It also ignores the more specific links between nuclear power and weapons proliferation.

Of the ten states known to have produced nuclear weapons:
* eight have nuclear power reactors.
* North Korea has no operating power reactors but an ‘Experimental Power Reactor’ is believed to have been the source of the fissile material (plutonium) used in the November 2006 nuclear bomb test, and North Korea has power reactors partly constructed under the Joint Framework Agreement.
* Israel has no power reactors, though the pretence of an interest in the development of nuclear power helped to justify nuclear transfers to Israel.

Power reactors are certainly used in support of India’s nuclear weapons program – this is no longer in dispute since India is refusing to subject numerous power reactors to safeguards under the US/India nuclear agreement.

The US itself is using a power reactor to produce tritium for use in nuclear weapons.

Pakistan may be using power reactor/s in support of its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea’s October 2006 weapon test is believed to have used plutonium from an ‘Experimental Power Reactor’.

Then Australian Prime Minister John Gorton certainly had military ambitions for the power reactor he pushed to have constructed at Jervis bay in NSW in the late 1960s – he later admitted that the agenda was to produce both plutonium and electricity.

Moreover, nuclear power reactors per sé need not be directly involved in weapons research/production in order for a nuclear power program to provide cover and support for a weapons program. For example, the nuclear weapons programs in South Africa and Pakistan were clearly outgrowths of their power programs although enrichment plants, not power reactors, produced the fissile material for use in weapons. Likewise, nuclear power programs typically involve the construction of research/training reactors which can be and have been used in weapons programs (e.g. India, Israel).

Iraq is another illustration of the potential for nuclear power programs to facilitate nuclear weapons programs even if power reactors are not used to produce fissile material for weapons, or even if power reactors are not built. While Iraq’s nuclear research program provided much cover for the weapons program, stated interest in developing nuclear power was also significant. According to Khidhir Hamza (1998), a senior nuclear scientist involved in Iraq’s weapons program: “Acquiring nuclear technology within the IAEA safeguards system was the first step in establishing the infrastructure necessary to develop nuclear weapons. In 1973, we decided to acquire a 40-megawatt research reactor, a fuel manufacturing plant, and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities, all under cover of acquiring the expertise needed to eventually build and operate nuclear power plants and produce and recycle nuclear fuel. Our hidden agenda was to clandestinely develop the expertise and infrastructure needed to produce weapon-grade plutonium.”

Carlson’s view also sits uncomfortably with the concentration of nuclear power in weapons states – almost 60% of global nuclear power output is in the nuclear weapons states and those power programs involve large numbers of nuclear scientists, technicians, engineers etc., with frequent transfer to and from nuclear weapons programs.

In short, the attempt to distance nuclear power programs from weapons proliferation is disingenuous. While currently-serving politicians and bureaucrats are prone to obfuscation on this point, several retired politicians have recently noted the link between power and weapons:
* Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”
* Former US President Bill Clinton said in 2006: “The push to bring back nuclear power as an antidote to global warming is a big problem. If you build more nuclear power plants we have toxic waste at least, bomb-making at worse.”
* Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating said in 2006: “Any country with a nuclear power program “ipso facto ends up with a nuclear weapons capability”.

Carlson (2000) says: “If we look to the history of nuclear weapons development, we can see that those countries with nuclear weapons developed them before they developed nuclear power programs.” However, ostensibly civil nuclear programs clearly preceded and facilitated the successful development of nuclear weapons in India, Pakistan, and in the former nuclear weapons state South Africa.

Carlson (2006) states: “I have pointed out on numerous occasions that nuclear power as such is not a proliferation problem – rather the problem is with the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies …” The claim is false, no matter how many times Carlson makes it:
* Power reactors have been used directly in weapons programs.
* Power programs have facilitated and provided cover for weapons programs even without direct use of power reactor/s in the weapons program.
* And, as will now be discussed, power reactors produce large volumes of weapons-useable plutonium and can be operated on a short irradiation cycle to produce large volumes of weapon-grade plutonium.

Plutonium grades

Statements by Carlson/ASNO about the weapons useability of below-weapon-grade plutonium grossly distort the available scientific evidence and can only be seen as an attempt to promote uranium exports and to absolve governments and uranium mining companies of their culpability in increasing the global stockpile of weapons-useable plutonium. (For a detailed discussion and references to the scientific literature, click here.)

In addition to the actual and potential use of below-weapon-grade plutonium in nuclear weapons, power reactors can be operated on a shorter-than-usual irradiation cycle to maximise the proportion of plutonium relative to other, unwanted plutonium isotopes. Thus, power reactors can produce large volumes (hundreds of kilograms per year) of weapon-grade plutonium, and as little as 3-4 kgs of this weapon-grade plutonium is required to build one nuclear weapon.

Carlson (2002) states that Australian-obligated plutonium is not weapon-grade but he fails to note that below-weapon-grade plutonium can be – and has been – used in nuclear weapons. Further, weapon-grade plutonium is produced using Australian uranium – in the normal course of events this weapon-grade plutonium is produced in power reactors and in the normal course of events it is converted to fuel-grade then reactor-grade plutonium in the reactor. It is misleading for Carlson to state that Australian-obligated plutonium is not weapon-grade without noting that below-weapon-grade plutonium can be and has been used in nuclear weapons.

Carlson (2002) says “weapons-grade plutonium is not produced in the normal operation of power reactors” though he knows it is and he knows that below-weapon-grade plutonium has been used in weapons.

Research reactors can be used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Israel and India are the most notorious examples of ‘research’ reactors being used for this purpose – most of the fissile material for their nuclear arsenals comes from research reactors. (For a detailed paper click here.)

IAEA safeguards

Carlson (2002) defends the IAEA’s safeguards system and says it provides the “foundation” for preventing misuse of Australian-obligated nuclear materials. The safeguards system was exposed as a farce by the Iraqi regime in the 1980s and early ’90s – see the voluminous material on this scandal published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (<www.thebulletin.org>) and by the IAEA (<www.iaea.org>). Since the Iraq debacle, efforts have been made to improve the system, but it still inadequate.

Apart from the nuclear industry and its apologists, including ASNO, there is universal acknowledgement of serious flaws with the safeguards system. Indeed Dr Mohamed El Baradei, the Director General of the IAEA, has stated that the IAEA’s basic inspection rights are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities”, that efforts to improve the system have been “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget”. (See statements at <www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/index.html>.)

Compare those acknowledgements from the IAEA Director General with ASNO’s false “assurances” that safeguards prevent diversion of AONM.

The IAEA has two roles – promoting the peaceful uses of atomic energy, and preventing weapons proliferation. Since the materials and facilities required for peaceful nuclear research and power programs can be and have been used for nuclear weapons R&D and in some cases full-scale weapons production, the IAEA’s two roles can be described as: trying to prevent weapons proliferation while actively promoting the expanded use of materials and facilities which can in many cases be used for nuclear weapons research and/or production. The contradiction is obvious notwithstanding Carlson’s (2005) comments about the two roles being “complementary” rather than “inconsistent”. By Carlson’s logic, drug-running operations would neatly complement efforts to stem the trade in illicit drugs.

Membership of the Board of Governors of the IAEA is weighted in favour of countries with significant nuclear programs. Carlson (2005) fails to see the problem arising from that weighting. The problem is that countries with significant nuclear programs may have reasons, e.g. commercial reasons, to downplay the proliferation risks associated with civil nuclear programs. South Australian Premier Mike Rann’s observation in a 1982 paper is pertinent: “Again and again, it has been demonstrated here and overseas that when problems over safeguards prove difficult, commercial considerations will come first.”

(Numerous articles on the flawed nuclear safeguards system are posted at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/safeguards/)

Uranium customer countries

Carlson (1998) makes the absurd claim that: “One of the features of Australian policy … is very careful selection of our treaty partners. We have concluded bilateral arrangements only with countries whose credentials are impeccable in this area.”

Carlson’s claim is demonstrably false. Australia has uranium export agreements with nuclear weapons states (most or all of which are failing to fulfil their NPT disarmament obligations), states with a history of covert nuclear weapons research based on their ‘civil’ nuclear programs, states blocking progress on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and states blocking progress on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.

To give some examples:

1. The US is breaching its NPT disarmament commitments in many ways: refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; making a mockery of the proposed Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty by blocking any inspection or verification measures; engaging in research on new generations of nuclear weapons; indicating that it might begin nuclear weapons testing again; resuming the production of tritium for use in nuclear weapons and using a ‘civil’ power reactor to produce the tritium; acknowledging in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review that it intends to maintain its nuclear arsenal “forever”; embarking on nuclear co-operation with India (a non-NPT state); threatening first-use nuclear strikes; and developing a nuclear hit-list of seven states, all of them NPT member states except North Korea, and five of them non-nuclear weapons states.

The disgraceful role of the US, and its manifold breaches of its NPT obligations, have been ignored by the Australian government. Successive Australian governments have claimed that the US is in compliance with its NPT obligations because of the reduction in the number of nuclear weapons. But even that solitary achievement is largely a function of creative accounting “worthy of Enron” according to the US Natural Resources Defense Council. Moreover, the numbers argument can be misleading. Due to technical enhancement, the smaller stockpile of US nuclear weapons actually has an increased destructive power.

2. France and the UK are also customers of Australian uranium and, like the US, neither country has the slightest intention of fulfilling its NPT disarmament obligations. The UK government is strongly advocating replacement of its Trident nuclear system. In January 2006, French President Jacques Chirac declared that French nuclear weapons would be used in fighting terrorism, increasing rather than decreasing the role of nuclear weapons in security doctrines.

3. The federal government has negotiated a bilateral treaty with China to permit uranium sales. China is a nuclear weapons state with no intention of fulfilling its NPT disarmament obligations, and it refuses to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Further, the Chinese state is undemocratic and repressive. It is difficult to imagine a nuclear industry worker in China publicly raising safety, security or proliferation concerns without reprisal. It is a closed, secretive state – which makes safeguarding AONM all the more difficult. China is included in the US’s Nuclear Posture Review hit-list because of the “ongoing modernization of its nuclear and non nuclear forces” and its “still developing strategic objectives”.

4. Japan, a major customer of Australian uranium, has developed a nuclear ‘threshold’ or ‘breakout’ capability – it could produce nuclear weapons within months of a decision to do so, relying heavily on facilities, materials and expertise from its civil nuclear program. An obvious source of fissile material for a weapons program in Japan would be its stockpile of plutonium – including Australian-obligated plutonium. In April 2002, the then leader of Japan’s Liberal Party, Ichiro Ozawa, said Japan should consider building nuclear weapons to counter China and suggested a source of fissile material: “It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads; we have plutonium at nuclear power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such warheads.”

Japan’s plutonium policy is anything but impeccable. It is irresponsible. Diplomatic cables in 1993 and 1994 from US Ambassadors in Tokyo describe Japan’s accumulation of plutonium as “massive” and questioned the rationale for the stockpiling of so much plutonium since it appeared to be economically unjustified. A March 1993 diplomatic cable from US Ambassador Armacost in Tokyo to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, posed these questions: “Can Japan expect that if it embarks on a massive plutonium recycling program that Korea and other nations would not press ahead with reprocessing programs? Would not the perception of Japan’s being awash in plutonium and possessing leading edge rocket technology create anxiety in the region?” (Greenpeace, 1999.)

Yet successive Australian governments have allowed Japan to stockpile Australian-obligated plutonium. Not once has a reprocessing request from Japan been refused.

5. South Korea is another major customer of Australian uranium with less than impeccable credentials. In 2004, South Korea disclosed information about a range of activities which violated its NPT commitments – uranium enrichment from 1979-81, the separation of small quantities of plutonium in 1982, uranium enrichment experiments in 2000, and the production of depleted uranium munitions from 1983-1987.

Nuclear weapons states   

Carlson (2005) states that it is it is “not plausible” that a non nuclear weapons state would seek nuclear weapons because the nuclear weapons states are not meeting their NPT commitments. Why not? According to IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed El Baradei (2005): “[W]e must show the world that our commitment to nuclear disarmament is firm. As long as some countries place strategic reliance on nuclear weapons as a deterrent, other countries will emulate them. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.”

Likewise, El Baradei (2004) noted that: ”There are some who have continued to dangle a cigarette from their mouth and tell everybody else not to smoke.”

So by the logic of no less an authority than Dr. Mohamed El Baradei – Nobel Peace Prize winner and IAEA Director General – Carlson is deluding himself.

Carlson’s illogical and incomprehensible statement is out of step not only with the IAEA Director General but also with the expert Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nobel Laureats, Cold War warriors such as Henry Kissinger and countless experts in non-proliferation.

Declared and undeclared facilities

Carlson (2006) stresses the use of undeclared facilities in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program from the 1970s to 1991:

“It is well known that discovery of the undeclared Iraq program after the first Gulf War showed inadequacies in “traditional” IAEA safeguards, especially as regards possible undeclared nuclear activities. This is what prompted the program to strengthen safeguards, of which the Additional Protocol is a part.

“It is also well known that the IAEA’s ability to detect undeclared nuclear activities requires substantial further development, this is the most serious challenge to safeguards – also discussed at length in my annual reports. Australian uranium is exported for declared nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards – the problem of detecting undeclared activities does not show that safeguards on declared activities are inadequate.” (emphasis in original)

However there is abundant evidence of safeguarded facilities being used in the nuclear weapons program in Iraq (Green, 2002).

For example, the safeguarded, highly-enriched uranium (HEU) fuelled IRT research reactor was frequently used in the Iraqi weapons program:

1. A fuel element from the IRT reactor was used for a plutonium extraction experiment.

2. On three other occasions, fuel elements were fabricated from undeclared uranium dioxide in an Experimental Reactor Fuel Fabrication Laboratory, they were secretly irradiated in the IRT reactor and then chemically processed in an unsafeguarded Radiochemical Laboratory containing hot cells.

3. The reactor was used to make polonium-210 for neutron initiator research, using bismuth targets.

4. The reactor was used to produce small quantities of plutonium-238, which could have been used for neutron initiator research instead of short lived polonium-210.

5. The reactor could potentially have produced sufficient plutonium for one weapon over a period of several years using fuel and/or a uranium blanket and/or uranium targets; this risk, albeit small, was increased by the fact that IAEA inspections of the reactor were infrequent because of the low risk status of the reactor.

6. HEU fuel for the IRT reactor, and the 0.5 MW(th) Tammuz-II reactor, was diverted during Iraq’s 1990-1991 ‘crash program’.

7. ‘Dirty’ radiation bombs were produced and three test bombs were exploded in Iraq in 1987, using materials irradiated in the IRT and/or Tammuz II research reactors (the more powerful IRT reactor was the better suited of the two reactors for the purpose).

Not once did the IAEA detect these proscribed uses of the ‘safeguarded’ IRT reactor.

The US military clearly believed the IRT and Tammuz II reactors represented a proliferation threat and bombed them in 1991.

The IAEA (1997, p.53) states that the IRT reactor was of “very limited usefulness as a plutonium production reactor” but made a “useful” contribution to the nuclear weapons research and development program.

Iraq’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty was a net positive for its nuclear weapons program. Safeguards did little to thwart the program, and NPT accession facilitated technology transfer. IAEA safeguards inspector Roger Richter resigned in 1981, having written to the US State Department the year before stating: ‘The most disturbing implication of the Iraqi nuclear program is that the NPT agreement has had the effect of assisting Iraq in acquiring the nuclear technology and nuclear material for its program by absolving the cooperating nations of their moral responsibility by shifting it to the IAEA. These cooperating nations have thwarted concerted international criticism of their actions by pointing to Iraq’s signing of NPT, while turning away from the numerous, obvious and compelling evidence which leads to the conclusion that Iraq is embarked on a nuclear weapons program.” (Quoted in MacLachlan and Ryan (1991); see also Nucleonics Week, June 25, 1981, p.3.)

Conclusion

ASNO has a track record of making false and misleading statements. Numerous other examples could be provided in addition to those included in this paper. Since ASNO has proven itself unwilling to redress this problem, the Commonwealth government should hold ASNO to account.

References

Anon., November 12, 1990, “Blix Says IAEA Does Not Dispute Utility of Reactor-Grade Pu for Weapons,” Nuclear Fuel, p.8.

Blix, H., November 1, 1990, Letter to the Nuclear Control Institute, Washington DC.

Carlson, John, December 21, 1998, Evidence before Joint Committee on Treaties, <www.aph.gov.au/hansard/joint/commttee/j2022.pdf>.

Carlson, John, 2000, “Nuclear Energy and Non-proliferation – Issues and Challenges: An Australian Perspective”, Paper prepared for JAIF Symposium on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy and Non-Proliferation, Tokyo, 9-10 March 2000.

Carlson, John, November 15, 2002, Australian Financial Review, Letter to the Editor. <www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/uraniumbombs.html>

Carlson, John, 2005, supplementary submission 33.1 to
House Standing Committee on Industry and Resources, Inquiry into developing Australia’s non-fossil fuel energy industry, <www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/isr/uranium/subs.htm>
or direct download: <www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/isr/uranium/subs/sub33_1.pdf>.

Carlson, John, November 27, 2006, supplementary submission 30.2 to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Inquiry into Uranium Sales To China, <www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/ jsct/8august2006/subs2/sub30_2.pdf>.

El Baradei, Mohamed, 2004, Quoted in James Traub, “The Netherworld of Nonproliferation”, New York Times, June 13.

El Baradei, Mohamed, 2005, <www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2005/ebsp2005n006.html>.

Green, Jim, 2002, Myth of the Peaceful Atom: Research Reactors and Nuclear Weapons, https://nuclear.foe.org.au/research-reactors-nuclear-weapons/

Greenpeace, September 1, 1999, “Confidential diplomatic documents reveal U.S. proliferation concerns over Japan’s plutonium program”, media release.

Hamza, Khidhir, 1998, “Inside Saddam’s secret nuclear program”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October, Vol.54, No.5.

International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997, “Fourth consolidated report of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency under paragraph 16 of Security Council resolution 1051 (1996)”, IAEA Document S/1997/779, Vienna, Austria: IAEA, October, <www.iaea.org/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/reports/s_1997_779.pdf>

Kang, Jungmin, Peter Hayes, Li Bin, Tatsujiro Suzuki and Richard Tanter, 2005, “South Korea’s nuclear surprise”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February, Vol.61, No.01, pp.40-49, <www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf05kang>.

Koutsoukis, Jason, November 9, 2002, “Has anybody seen Australia’s uranium?”, Australian Financial Review, pg. 21.

MacLachlan, Ann and Margaret Ryan, 1991, “Allied bombing of Iraqi reactors provokes no safeguards debate”, Nucleonics Week, January 31.

Watered Down Negotiations – WMC Picks Both Sides

Watered Down Negotiations – WMC Picks Both Sides

Jan Whyte and Ila Marks look at how WMC’s activities are potentially dividing the Aboriginal people, possibly damaging areas of cultural and sacred significance and maybe degrading the environment. This article was published in the FoE Australia magazine, Chain Reaction, No. 75 (July 1996).

UNDER THE MAGNIFICENT arid landscapes of Central Australia lies the Great Artesian Basin (GAB), one of the world’s largest underground water systems. Around the edges of the GAB, stretching from Queensland to South Australia, are Mound Springs -natural outlets for the underground water. Above the GAB in northern South Australia lies Lake Eyre, a huge salt lake, and a designated National Park. Adjoining the southern edge of the lake lies Finniss Springs Mission Station.

Finniss Springs was a cattle station leased under the South Australian Pastoral Act. In 1992 it was resumed by the SA Government with the intention of creating a National Park. This was never proclaimed and the status of the Station is unclear. The Arabunna people are widely accepted as being the traditional custodians for the land in this area. Members of the Arabunna community were the Finniss lease shareholders until its resumption.

One hundred and twenty kilometres south of Lake Eyre is the copper uranium mine at Olympic Dam owned by Western Mining Corporation (WMC). Water, up to fifteen million litres per day, needed for the mine, metallurgy plant and township of Roxby Downs, is presently obtained from six bores a few kilometres to the west of Finniss Springs (Borefield A) and three bores on the edge of Lake Eyre South.

WMC is opening a new borefield (Borefield B) 100 kilometres north east from Borefield A to accommodate a ‘billion dollar’ expansion of the mine’s operations. Thirty-three million litres of water per day will be pumped from Borefield B and nine million litres per day from Borefield A will continue to be pumped. The water is obtained free of charge by special license from the South Australian Government.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) believes this depletion of water from the GAB and Borefield A has had a deleterious effect on the environment of the Mound Springs which host many rare species of flora and fauna. The Springs and the Lake are also of great cultural and sacred significance to the Arabunna people who are concerned about the damage being done. FOE is also disturbed by the lack of consultation on the part of WMC.

Undermining Consultation

It appears that WMC has embarked on a course of side-stepping consultation with the Arabunna as the traditional custodians. It has also taken similar actions in regard to the Kokotha, the traditional custodians for the actual mine site. One method used by mining companies to side-step proper consultation processes is documented in North America and Canada as well as Australia. Mining companies incorporate small Aboriginal groups in areas under dispute and give them financial support. These groups are then regarded as the official representatives for that area and mining companies proceed to consult with them. Thus, it seems as if the companies are going through the correct legal processes whereas, in fact, they are ignoring parties who have legitimate interests. In the case of Finniss Springs Station a group was established early in 1992 calling itself the Dieri Mitha Council. The people involved in this group had previously identified themselves as being part of the Arabunna community. WMC has signed a co-operation agreement with the Dieri Mitha Council for areas of land in which WMC has an interest, Borefield B and the pipeline corridor through Finniss Springs. FOE believes that WMC has provided money and supplied the Dieri Mitha Council with vehicles. The Dieri Mitha Council currently has a native title claim over Finniss Springs Station. Co-incidentally, its Darwin lawyer also acts for WMC.

In Australia every Aboriginal group has its own beliefs and customs which are linked to their own territory. It would have been unheard of to perform a ceremony on another tribe’s land uninvited. But this is what happened when it appears that WMC financed the Dieri Mitha Council to bring people from the Northern Territory, 1,600 kilometres away, to hold a ceremony on Arabunna land. This was an attempt to prove that the Dieri Mitha are the traditional custodians and still traditionally linked to the land, proof of which is needed to support a native title claim. It would also support WMC’s contention that it consulted with the appropriate Aboriginal group with regard to the pipeline corridor and Borefield B. It appears that the ‘ceremonies’ were assisted by WMC employees and consultants. The Arabunna consider this a sacrilege, and are outraged that a mining company has used Aboriginal culture for its own gain. The ‘ceremony’ took place close to the township of Marree in January 1995. Over the time of the ceremony, which lasted several days, the people of Marree, and especially members of the Arabunna community, were subjected to a high level of terror and fear. As a consequence of the violence four members of the Dieri Mitha Council are serving jail sentences of up to four years for assault (see Chain Reaction Number 73-74).

It is not suggested that WMC were responsible for, or encouraged, the violence that took place.

The Dieri Mitha Council is also involved in frustrating and harassing tactics that prevent or delay plans and projects initiated by the Marree Arabunna People’s Committee. In November 1995 the Dieri Mitha Council used a Court injunction to prevent Finniss Springs Station from being transferred to the SA Aboriginal Lands Trust. Under the care of the Aboriginal Lands Trust the management of Finniss Springs Station would have ensured that sacred areas and sites were protected and a proper land management scheme was put in place. The management of Finniss Springs Station, and the status of the land, remains in limbo, it would seem to the benefit of WMC.

On a community level other projects have been frustrated by the Dieri Mitha Council. For example, they have prevented houses from being relocated within the town to accommodate residents of Marree even though there is an acute housing shortage. Employment schemes have also been stopped. Members of the Arabunna community are prevented from visiting their own land for fear of assault by members of the Dieri Mitha Council.

Borefield Developments

Meanwhile WMC is moving quickly to construct its pipeline and access road across the gibber, break away and sandhill country of Finniss Springs Station. Under agreements with the Dieri Mitha, WMC is obtaining site approval for the pipeline work, the new borefield and the test bores scattered across the country side. Traditional custodians maintain that the Dieri Mitha do not have relevant traditional knowledge and that traditional sites could be violated as a result.

These spring complexes are liable to be affected by the development of Borefield B.

The pipeline construction is a massive operation involving over a thousand semi-trailers transporting pipes from three different states. All of this movement of trucks and people means that it is more likely that sacred sites will be damaged by people who are unaware or do not care about their significance.

In recent years registered Aboriginal sites have been damaged by WMC employees and contractors as well as tourists behaving inappropriately and causing irreparable damage.

Watching The Springs

WMC is engaged in an extensive monitoring program and is gathering information useful for a better understanding of the Mound Springs. This information is not readily available to interested parties, however, and that which is available indicates that the springs have been seriously affected. Since WMC began taking water from the area in 1983 two springs have dried completely. At Venable Spring a pump with two solar panels is still not producing flowing water. Other springs, particularly Beatrice and Bopeechee, have drastically reduced flows.

In November 1995 WMC began pumping two hundred thousand litres of water a day into the aquifer in the vicinity of Bopeechee Spring. By April 1996 there had been no improvement in flows. The Bopeechee experiment is an attempt to determine whether the springs are replenished by water flow or pressure.

The Mound Springs are being considered for World Heritage listing as well as the National Park proposal. It appears that WMC employees and consultants are also active in campaigns to prevent these proposals coming to fruition.

It is time that action was taken to prevent further environmental damage to these unique mound springs and to address the social impacts on the local Aboriginal community.

Jan Whyte and Ila Marks, members of the FoE Anti-Uranium Collective and have made regular visits to the Mound Springs over the last ten years.


Violence in Marree – WMC Interference

Radio National’s Background Briefing – Sunday March 5, 1995. Transcript of story about the outbreak of violence in Marree, SA, in January 1995, and its connection to the Roxby Downs mine.

Reporter :  Helen Thomas  Matt Peacock
Speaker :  Peter SUTTON – Anthropologist
Terry DWYER – Senior Public Affairs Officer, Olympic Dam Operations, Western Mining Corporation (now WMC  Resources Ltd.)
Reg DODD – Co-ordinator, Arabana People’s Committee  Timmy STRANGWAYS – Resident, Marree, SA
Piers BOWMAN – Executive General Manager, Copper Uranium Division, Western Mining Corporation (now WMC  Resources Ltd.)
Peter MAGUIRE – Resident, Marree, SA
Rob CRAIGIE – Analyst, ANZ McCaughan Ltd.  Patricia LANE – Registrar, National Native Title Tribunal  Lyle OLDFIELD – Resident, Marree, SA  Deane FERGIE – Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide  Phillip JONES – Director, Anthropology Unit, South Australian Museum  Clive ROSEWARNE – Spokesperson, Friends of the Earth  Kevin BUZACOTT – Spokesperson, Arabana Community  Raelene WARREN – Spokesperson, Dieri Community

Audiotape :  91-1775 [C95/0257-1-1] ( )
Transcript :  91-2275 (Online)

This transcript is taken from a tape recording, and freedom from errors, omissions or misunderstandings cannot be guaranteed.

MATT PEACOCK : On 12 January, this year, the tiny outback town of Marree in South Australia was the scene of extraordinary activity. Police from as far away as Coober Pedy and Port Augusta descended on the outpost, as did the Flying Doctor, after a violent clash had left one young Aboriginal man fatally shot and several people injured. It was the latest tragic episode in a long-running dispute over land ownership.
Two Aboriginal communities, the Arabana and the Dieri Mitha, claim to be the custodians of the region that takes in the Marree township itself. More significant, though, is the region which runs beneath the land.
Hugh Morgan’s Western Mining Corporation, one of Australia’s largest miners, is so keen to secure access to the water that it signed a consultative agreement with the Dieri two years ago. The company’s planning a billion dollar expansion of its nearby Roxby Downs mine, yet it’s only recently that the Dieri Mitha land claim has been filed with the Native Title Tribunal. Now, the town of Marree that quietly straddles the old Ghan railway line is waiting in trepidation for the next move in a fight that’s already claimed one life. Helen Thomas reports.
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : There was a mob of guys on the road going towards my mother’s and a mob was cutting across from the back fence of my mother’s dragging sticks and…….along the fence, all the way up from the back fence to the front.
HELEN THOMAS : How many guys do you reckon were coming in those two mobs ?
UNIDENTIFIED : Oh, 20 or maybe even 25 – I don’t know. They were going along from the front then, went past my mother’s, throwing stones on top of the roof, throwing rocks through the windows, irons at the house, singing out, yelling the they was. Went next door towards my sister’s place. They were singing out and screaming there, so they decided to pull the screen doors on the house trying to get in, pull window screens off the window. They got a big iron and they were pushing the irons through the window. Then they ripped the screen right up, smashed the windows, the glass.
But before that, there was all the bunch in the front and the young fella was coming over. From the kitchen window, you could see how they were scattered in the yard.
HELEN THOMAS : It was a night everyone wants to forget – a hot, steamy, Thursday evening in January when a little mayhem came ot the town of Marree – from all accounts, just 25 minutes of violence in the tiny outpost that sits on the intersection of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks.
UNIDENTIFIED : I told my sister to go in the bedroom with the kids, but she ended up in the laundry with them.
HELEN THOMAS : How many kids were in the house ?
UNIDENTIFIED : There’s 14.
HELEN THOMAS : Fourteen kids.
UNIDENTIFIED : Fourteen and a six-month-old baby.
HELEN THOMAS : Were they scared ?
UNIDENTIFIED : Yes.
HELEN THOMAS : Screaming ?
UNIDENTIFIED : Yes. Scared, certainly. It was hot inside. It was hot that night – just sweating.
HELEN THOMAS : What happened in that long half hour which left one 19-year-old dead, several people injured and 12 arrested, could have significant impact on the futures of at least two Aboriginal communities and one of Australia’s largest mining companies, the Western Mining Corporation.
PETER MAGUIRE : Well, I say what future ? It’s been 20 years now. Why is it going to change ?
HELEN THOMAS : You don’t think anything can get better ?
PETER MAGUIRE : Only if the government steps in.
HELEN THOMAS : Did it surprise you that the violence got so bad that someone died ?
PETER MAGUIRE : No.
LYLE OLDFIELD : When you look at the aftermath the next day and try and go through it, I was very surprised only one person was killed, because I think there could have been 9 or 10 quite easily.
HELEN THOMAS : Peter Maguire, bartender at the Marree Hotel and Lyle Oldfield who runs Marree’s Oasis Cafe. He’s lived in the area for nearly 50 years and knows it’s history better than most white men. Like the rest of the town’s 80 locals, he’d heard the predictions of violence.
RAELENE WARREN : If nothing’s done pretty fast and pretty soon, we’ll have a murder on our hands.
HELEN THOMAS : Warren who refused to be interviewed for this program, was right about that, and most in Marree expect more trouble, now. They believe their night of terror, like earlier less tragic outbreaks of violence, is linked to a dispute over land, and multinational mining giant, Western Mining, is right at the centre of this fight in its bid to gain access rights to the water on that land.
PIERS BOWMAN : The key issue to development of Olympic Dam is water. Any project in Australia remote from a site around the coast will have the problem of water, so water will always be a major problem. The Great Artesian Basin has an immense capability to support both local communities and large projects such as Olympic Dam.
HELEN THOMAS : Piers Bowman who is the Executive General Manager for Western Mining’s Copper Uranium Division.
Already the company pumps 13 million litres a day out of the Great Artesian Basin. Kevin Buzacott from the Arabana community.
Kevin, tell us about where we are, where we are standing right now.
KEVIN BUZACOTT : We’re standing, now, right on the shore of south Lake Eyre.
HELEN THOMAS : Lake Eyre ?
KEVIN BUZACOTT : Lake Eyre south, and this is where this pump – this is where they’ve taken all this water now right out of the basin.
HELEN THOMAS : Has it affected the lake at all ?
KEVIN BUZACOTT : It has affected all the other springs around.
HELEN THOMAS : As we were driving up, we noticed you were pointing out smaller bores that are all ready to go, along the way.
KEVIN BUZACOTT : I don’t know how many they’ve got altogether, but there’s heaps of them. And they’re like this one here – either ready to go or they’re already working.
HELEN THOMAS : And you grew up in this territory ?
KEVIN BUZACOTT : Born and bred here and walked this land.
HELEN THOMAS : Do you remember walking as a kid ?
KEVIN BUZACOTT : Oh, yes. We walked this even when I was big.
HELEN THOMAS : Do you still walk it ?
KEVIN BUZACOTT : Oh, I still do when I’m here, when I’m around, you know, but it makes it difficult with all this argument and all these other fellas just going all over the place causing all sorts of problems.
HELEN THOMAS : Two years ago, in its haste to secure access to the land and water that’s fast turning into liquid gold, Western Mining signed an agreement with the Dieri Association, acknowledging that group as the people who have primary responsibilities within Aboriginal tradition for the area.
PIERS BOWMAN : The work that we have done on ascertaining the background, particularly in the areas that we wish to operate on, has indicated that the Dieri have the traditional rights to that area. Now that, of course, is in dispute, but certainly the area that we are looking to progress our water supplies from certainly – it appears from all the work we have done – falls in the Dieri land claim.
HELEN THOMAS : Terry Dwyer, Senior Public Affairs Officer with Olympic Dam Operations, knows the mine like the back of his hand.
TERRY DWYER : This is our metallurgical plant entrance, the boom gate there. The mine is to the east, about a kilometre and a half away, and the ore is transferred overland to a stockpile. And from there we have a concentrator, a hydrometallurgical section, a copper smelter and a copper refinery to process the four minerals we have here – copper, uranium, gold and silver.
There’s a fair bit of construction work going on. We’re towards the end of optimisation number 2 expansion here, which is an $88 million expansion which is going to take us from roughly about 66,000 tonnes a year of pure copper to about 85,000 tonnes a year of pure copper.
HELEN THOMAS : You don’t talk in small figures here.
TERRY DWYER : No. It’s a large plant, and it needs to be, because we’re one of the few places in the world that takes minerals through to their final product and trucks them out as pure product. So you need to have a lot of metallurgical installation on site to be able to do that. So it has cost us a lot of money. It’s cost us, to this stage, around about a billion dollars or over a billion dollars to set Olympic Dam up, and we’ll be spending and expanding here for many years to come before we get to our optimum production levels.
HELEN THOMAS : The two Aboriginal groups involved in this land struggle, the Arabana and the Dieri Mitha, both claim to be the traditional owners. James Noonan, barristers and solicitors, a Darwin-based law firm, filed the Dieri Mitha’s land claim with the National Native Title Tribunal several weeks ago. That firm is also used by Western Mining, but the mining giant rejects out of hand the suggestion that Western Mining lawyers drew up the claim which covers the township of Marree itself, Lake Eyre and 120,000 square kilometres over all.
How did you pay for your land claim ?
RAELENE WARREN : I don’t have to answer that.
HELEN THOMAS : Raelene Warren after January’s fatal shooting. The Arabana’s land claim was filed two years ago by Sydney’s Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service in the High Court. It took in Marree, Lake Eyre and Finnis Springs Station. Reg Dodd, the co-ordinator of the Marree Arabana People’s Committee.
REG DODD : We’ve never opposed mining in any way at all. We’ve never opposed what Western Mining is doing. What we were concerned about – and I was deeply concerned about this – a lack of consultation. Previously, there was good consultation, and all of a sudden that deteriorated and it didn’t exist at all. We didn’t oppose what they were doing. We were happy to sit down and negotiate with them. We were happy to consult with them. It was Western Mining who was trying to discredit this centre.
HELEN THOMAS : Is that still your position ? Would you still sit down with them ?
REG DODD : I will sit down and talk to any person, anyone at all, Western Mining or not.
HELEN THOMAS : Clearly, they want to spend a lot of money expanding Olympic Dam. Are you against that ?
REG DODD : No. We were never against that. We were never against any sort of development of that area. What we were concerned and opposing was the non-proper consultation.
HELEN THOMAS : Western Mining is so close to the Dieri Mitha community that one of the company’s key negotiators was in town on the day of the January shooting attending an initiation ceremony. Background Briefing understands that perhaps suspecting trouble, he left suddenly Thursday afternoon, just hours before the violence erupted. It’s also been claimed that the two four-wheel drives used in the recent incident at Marree were hired at Western Mining’s expense from a company in Alice Springs to take people to the Dieri initiation. Western Mining disputes this.
UNIDENTIFIED : I’m not going to comment on that at all. Western Mining is a very large mining company. We have a massive project 110 kilometres south of this area. The fact that we’re in the area and that there’s a concern between two tribes over land merely raises our recognition on the project. How we’re involved and where we’re involved and so on, I think, is all then cast into some comment. The fact is we are in the area and we’re looking for water. We’re following an environmental program and we are talking to people that we believe are involved in the area as best we can, so I think it’s unfair to try and cast us into some other role.
HELEN THOMAS : Background Briefing has found that a law firm in Darwin sent $4,000 in cash to representatives in Alice Springs who then prepaid for the hire of the vehicles on behalf of the Dieri Mitha. It’s common knowledge in Marree that at least another $7,000 was spent over a five-day period before the fatal shooting by the group taking part in the initiation ceremony.
Peter Maguire runs the local pub with his wife.
PETER MAGUIRE : They never actually came in the hotel and sat down and drank. Now and again, one would have a beer but they’d come in, in groups of three or four, and buy a quantity of alcohol and they’d go away, and then an hour later or maybe two or three or four or maybe half an hour later, another group would come in and buy another heap of alcohol.
HELEN THOMAS : In that time, can you tell us how much they spent on alcohol and smokes, say ?
PETER MAGUIRE : They spent a lot of money that week, in that four days. Yes, they increased our takings probably four or five grand for the week. Everything was cash. They weren’t a problem in the hotel at all and they just came in. In fact, I had to borrow beer from here, there and everywhere to keep a supply going. But yes, it was a good trading week.
HELEN THOMAS : Raelene Warren has said that this money came from a private loan. Well, let me put this to you. It is also alleged that Western Mining has paid for the Dieri land claim to go forward, for the legal expenses involved. is it true ?
PIERS BOWMAN : I’m not even going to comment on that. We’re not involved.
HELEN THOMAS : So no money’s changed hands as far as you’re aware from Western Mining in either of the two Aboriginal groups ?
PIERS BOWMAN : We’re not involved in their land claim. That is their land claim and their problem. Our involvement in the area is to look at how we can progress our environmental impact on the area and to talk to people who we need to talk to and be involved in our process, and to progress that from a government point of view.
HELEN THOMAS : Western Mining’s Piers Bowman.
The roots of the current dispute in Marree twist back 20 years ago and centre around a cattle station that sprung up originally in `859. And like all edge-of-the-desert showdowns, there’s a map at the heart of this saga. Actually, there are two maps : one that’s probably 50 years old and another drawn more recently.
Driving from the copper-uranium mine at Roxby Downs, you get to Marree by taking a borefield road and turning onto the Oodnadatta Track. It’s extraordinary country.
CLIVE ROSEWARNE : It’s quite a beautiful area. It’s an arid zone where the rainfall is much less than the evaporation rates. It’s predominantly gibber plain which is those small, shiny, round stones which reflect the heat back up into the sun. One of the unique aspects of the landscape is the many changes that it’s been through over time. It has been, at various times, an inland sea; it’s been a rainforest. All these go back many thousands of years and have left their particular patterns across the landscape.
It’s a very dry landscape but the amazing thing around that particular area is underneath all this, you have the Great Artesian Basin, and what occurs through the area that we’re talking about are what’s called mound springs where the natural water from the Great Artesian Basin comes up to the surface, percolates out, evaporates – very salty water, high mineral content, and that gets left behind forming little hillocks, little lumps, little mounds, sometimes just springs and creeks, and so there is, paradoxically in this very dry landscape, a lot of water.
There’s a lot of pressure on the water usage in the area and that’s – all these springs, as you can imagine, would be of high cultural significance to the people who live in those areas, and then when you bring any new users in, they put greater pressures and can cause conflicts over that water use, and that’s the situation we’re seeing up there now.
HELEN THOMAS : You’ve obviously spent time in the area. Describe more specifically a mound spring. I mean, when you get up close, what do you actually see ?
CLIVE ROSEWARNE : Okay. You may see a small spring coming out of the ground. You may find a fairly large pond. You may find actually a mound which may be about the height of a normal room, and you’ll find a seepage on the top; quite often, quite springy ground, a lot of rushes around the area, a lot of bird life around the area, brolgas, freshwater water birds, a lot of small birds. They are quite important habitat sites in that sense. Also, because each spring has been isolated from one another for such a long period of time, each spring has quite unique micro-flora and fauna in the water, and the various mineral contents of the waters are quite different. So they are like little islands dotted around in the arid landscape.
HELEN THOMAS : Close to the Strzelecki Desert and no too far from the Simpson, this arid zone could only have beckoned the hardiest of souls at the turn of the century – the Afghan cameleers and early white settlers who pushed the Ghan railway up to Alice Springs with little regard for the Aboriginal communities along the way. A more respectful journeyman was Scottish-born Francis Dunbar-Warren who built the homestead of Finnis Springs in 1918.
And this is the core of the matter, certainly as far as Western Mining’s concerned, because it’s to the east of the station that the mining giant wants to draw more water. Water is already being drawn from bore fields to the west and north-west of Finnis Springs. If the new borefield goes ahead, water will travel by pipeline across the property via an easement to Roxby Downs.
Now, way before any of this, Francis Dunbar-Warren married an Aboriginal woman from the Arabana community and their inhabitants are now embroiled in this fight. From a white Australian’s point of view, this could be seen as a family feud that’s been simmering for too long – a fair-dinkum blue about how the old family property is to be used involving blood relatives and interconnecting marriages. But the Aboriginal communities involved with Finnis Springs say it’s more complex and political than that. South Australian anthropologist, Phillip Jones, agrees.
PHILLIP JONES : I think that the current climate of political events associated with the Mabo decision in the last two or three years has produced an appetite perhaps in the media, certainly among the lawyers, for a product that is Aboriginal culture which is defined as being self-contained, seamless, in the sense that it reaches back into history and tradition.
And if you look at the Marree situation, if you look at the reality of the history there, you find that there’s been tremendous social dislocation over the last century. Communities have fractured and reformed along different lines. There’s a history of fracture in the Marree community between Afghan, European and Aboriginal people, and there’s an argument for saying that that same history of fracture has transferred itself or fed off divisions in Aboriginal society.
Now, the upshot of all of this, as I say, you have very complex fault lines running through Aboriginal groups which simply do allow you to speak of the Dieri or the Arabana or the Kuyani as you can speak, for example, of local groups in Arnhem Land. In other words, the paradigm has shifted and it’s something that lawyers and anthropologists perhaps haven’t taken enough account of.
HELEN THOMAS : Since the 1940s, the boundaries accepted by most Australian anthropologists were set out in a map drawn by Norman Tindale. According to this map, the Finnis Springs-Marree region, now in contention, originally belonged to a third Aboriginal group, the Kuyani community. Jones, head of the South Australian Museum’s anthropology unit studied the late Norman Tindale’s work.
PHILLIP JONES : His intention, with this map, was always to draw a map of the situation as it had perhaps been at the moment of European contact rather than a dynamic and changing situation such as is certainly reflected in the area today. But his conclusion, basically, was that the Finnis Springs area was traditionally occupied by the Kuyani people; to their north-east lay the territory of the Dieri people; and to their north-west lay the territory of the Arabana people. Those were his conclusions. I guess there are groups of Aboriginal people who support those conclusions today. Alternatively, there are groups of people who support the conclusion that the Dieri have come south and have title to that area. And likewise, Arabana people also make a claim to that country.
HELEN THOMAS : In a sense, by publicly siding with the Dieri Mitha, Western Mining is in dispute with the Tindale map. The company has turned to the work of geographer, Stephen Davis.
PHILLIP JONES : I think you’d have to ask the question at what point Western Mining’s interests become the interests of the Dieri people, and vice versa, and until that question is resolved, I think there’s a very strong case to be made for turning to perhaps more objective sources of inquiry and looking into the full range of advice that can be sought across the board.
HELEN THOMAS : In 1993, Stephen Davis who is now Western Mining’s group geographer, published his own map of Australia and its Aboriginal boundaries. Independent anthropologist, Peter Sutton.
PETER SUTTON : The Davis map shows frontiers, in his terms, between a number of groups in that area. It doesn’t show any disputed areas. It also shows one significant area, there, with no group attached to it, around about the area of the Olympic Dam mine. There are many other disputed land areas across Australia which have been a matter of public knowledge for many years. For example, at Daly River and at Finnis River in the Northern Territory, these are famous cases. Again, in those areas, no disputed areas are shown on the Davis map. In other words, we’re presented with an appearance of stability and unanimity which really isn’t there in any land-owning system in the world as far as I know.
HELEN THOMAS : I guess a lot of people who are listening, this morning, are probably wondering should that matter. I mean, is Davis right in leaving it that open-ended ?
PETER SUTTON : They do matter in the sense that people’s personal histories and their sense of themselves are involved at the most local and detailed level, and this can affect conflict between and within families. It can affect your prospects for reasonable emotional health and perhaps physical health, from time to time, so these are vital issues in a day-to-day sense for those people who have to live with them day-to-day. In the current situation, with native title having been legislated and a large number of claims being laid on the basis of native title legislation, it’s now really important that going public on things like who owns what land is done with the greatest care and the greatest responsibility.
HELEN THOMAS : Why is Finnis Springs itself so important in this dispute ?
DEANE FERGIE : Well, I thin it’s important for a variety of reasons. One is because on Finnis Springs, there’s some really important mythological sites, and the one that most people know about are the mound springs which are really crucial, both in many of the kind of mythological tracks in this area. It’s also significant because, historically, it became this incredible focal point for a large number of Aboriginal people, and most of the Aboriginal people in Marree, today, have a really significant – at the very least – historical link with Finnis Springs Station and, in fact, with the work that went on there. So Finnis Springs Station is one of the things that was very obvious from the very beginning of our research in the late 80’s. Long before this blew up in its present form was the incredible sort of focal, symbolic importance. You know, in a sense, if you were to say “What is the heartland of these Aboriginal people ?”, you would say Finnis Springs Station, and they would say it themselves, very much.
HELEN THOMAS : And I guess you’re not just talking about the two groups at loggerheads in this dispute, the Arabana and the Dieri Mitha – you’re talking about other Aboriginal groups in the area ?
DEANE FERGIE : Well, I think the interesting thing is that the people’s relationship with Finnis predates, in a sense, those two distinctions which, in some respects, are very contemporary distinctions.
HELEN THOMAS : In what sense ?
DEANE FERGIE : Well, I think it’s very clear the Arabana People’s Committee was a committee that was formed as an organisation in the 80’s, and the Dieri Mitha was formed even more recently. And although, in a sense, they call upon tribal appellations, tribal names, in their identities, these are organisations of very recent production, I suppose, where people have pulled in the resources of of those language group names, I suppose very recently.
HELEN THOMAS : Can I look at that split, there ? When you were there, were the two groups that we’re talking about now, the Arabana and the Dieri Mitha, in dispute, if you like, over not just Finnis Springs and the old property that still stands there, but also Marree and a large section around both those two areas ?
DEANE FERGIE : Well, at that point we were in the field for, you know, the focus of our research, Dieri Mitha didn’t exist, and at that time, many of the leading identities in that group went to Arabana People’s Committee meetings and although there was a great deal of tension within those meetings, split – as you see it now – it didn’t have the same form, certainly at that time.
HELEN THOMAS : Deane Fergie who lectures in Anthropology at Flinders University. She also lived in Marree for nearly a year working on an oral history project.
DEANE FERGIE : I would argue that, in part, this particular dispute as named, has not just to do with the politics of those Aboriginal people, but a great deal to do with the politics and policies of government. I don’t think it’s any coincidence, frankly, that these people are actually trying to produce an identity which stresses attributes of Aboriginal people that the Government and the public, indeed, have come to expect of them – you know, to be able to give a tribal name, to have a whole series of “traditional attributes” and so on.
HELEN THOMAS : In 1993, Stephen Davis was designated to sign the agreement with the Dieri Association on Western Mining’s behalf. It’s an intriguing document suggesting the Dieri are the traditional owners of the land. But just how significant is this agreement ? Patricia Lane is Registrar of the National Native Title Tribunal.
PATRICIA LANE : It’s always open for Aboriginal groups to consult and negotiate with companies or individuals that want to do things with respect to their land. In fact, we encourage people to speak to Aboriginal groups if they plan to do things with the land. But that’s different from a determination of native title. In the process that we’ve got, a determination is made after all of the parties to the application have reached agreement. Now, that might mean that Western Mining could well be a party to the mediation if the application was accepted. It might also mean that the Arabana people are a party to the application if it’s accepted, and it’s all of the parties that reach agreement, not just one or two.
HELEN THOMAS : So let me get this straight. On the strength of the agreement that they signed in 1993 with the Dieri, Western Mining could in fact become an applicant to the claim now before the tribunal, or would they have to file on their own behalf ?
PATRICIA LANE : Well, they could be a party because if they have an interest in the land which is subject to the application, then the Act provides that parties whose interests are affected can become parties to the mediation.
HELEN THOMAS : So if that application is accepted, if the claim does go forward in the tribunal, what you’re saying is that this particular agreement that was signed between Western Mining and the Dieri could, in fact, be quite significant ?
PATRICIA LANE : Well, it’s up to Western Mining to do what is sees fit to protect it’s interests and, obviously, that may well mean being a party to the application and reaching agreement. If they have agreement with the Dieri people, that’s fine, but they may need to reach agreement with every other party to the tribunal as well.
HELEN THOMAS : The Arabana community claims that Western Mining failed to properly consult with them about the land, and it’s that fact, more than any other, that angers them. Reg Dodd from the Arabana People’s Committee believes the agreement between the mining giant and the Dieri has no status.
REG DODD : It has nothing, nothing whatsoever, and we’ve been told by the then State Government that it didn’t have any legal status. But then, I say to Western Mining why did they not consult with the Dieri people when they first did the anthropological work and the archaeological work ? In their records and in the book – in the statement there – they didn’t speak to any because there weren’t any there. There were people around but they weren’t claiming to be Dieri people then.
HELEN THOMAS : And just so we’re clear on this, you’re saying the Dieri people have really have no claim to this land ?
REG DODD : Nothing, nothing.
HELEN THOMAS : And when you say traditional owners, can you be clear for us exactly what you mean by that ?
REG DODD : What I mean by traditional owners is that if you could go out onto the land and identify with that area, to the stories and to the features of the land in your traditional tongue. and traditionally you go out to do the traditional practices, maybe hunting and passing on that information to your younger generation and that.
HELEN THOMAS : Certainly, a number of people have said that the Arabana aren’t the only people that are entitled to this land, that the Kuyani are, that the Dieri are. What do you say to that ?
REG DODD : I’m happy, as I’ve said all along, to go out and talk about that land in my traditional Arabana language.
HELEN THOMAS : And why is the language important ?
REG DODD : Well, I can’t go out there and explain in English and say : This is my traditional land. I can go out there and relate in the native tongue that my old people taught me to talk in.
HELEN THOMAS : How long have the Arabana people been here ? How long has it been your land ?
REG DODD : Well, it’s been here for ages, you know. The old people said our traditional land runs from here way up to the top end of Dalhousie.
HELEN THOMAS : What are we talking about, a hundred years or more ?
REG DODD : Oh, yes most definitely. I mean, they relate to stories of the ice age and that, so how long ago was that ? And beyond that.
DEANE FERGIE : The Government, I think, displays at times its failure to understand the way in which Aboriginal lives are constituted in a place like Marree. These are not Pitjantjatjara, these are not Maralinga, these are not Aranda people, in that sense of, you know, very tribally-oriented people. On the other hand, they don’t live at Port Adelaide or at Redfern or somewhere else. The people of Marree, the Aboriginal people of Marree, have for a long time sort of fallen through the sieve of government policy in many respects and they haven’t had a lot of the benefits that governments give people who fit into nice categories. These people have, in a lot of respects, had very ambiguous status and they haven’t actually had a lot of the benefits that go with being stridently authentically tribal or stridently authentically urban.
HELEN THOMAS : Anthropologist, Deane Fergie, from the University of Adelaide.
The Arabana alleged that the Dieri Mitha have followed and harassed them out of Finnis Springs and out on the long red-dirt roads for the past 18 months. The group claims the vehicle used in these incidents had been lent to the Dieri by Western Mining. Now, Background Briefing has a copy of a letter dated June 1994 indicating the four-wheel drive allegedly used in these incidents was owned by Western Mining and on loan to the Dieri.
The Arabana claim things took a nastier turn a year ago. Timmy Strangways.
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : We’re just going to head up past the Marree general store and we’re going to head down to my house which is 27 4TH Street where the first incident occurred where they smashed my house up. Now, we’re just coming in towards my house now, and I’ll show you what they’ve done. We’ve had everything fixed up since then but I’ll give you a fair idea of what happened here.
We moved into this house, here, and we were in it about 12 months, I’d say, and I’ve put in a garden and all that, grown some trees, even a lawn, and they smashed every window along the front. If you come down here you can see the rip in the blind and that where the big stones went through.
HELEN THOMAS : They threw stones through ?
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : Yes. And they were all over next-door there having a party all day and most of the night. I was away at the time. Only my wife and kids and my mother, her husband and a couple of my brothers were up here. And as you can see that big rip there, that’s where a big stone went through, and you can still see some of the things on the screens, the big dents. They chucked bricks and everything through.
HELEN THOMAS : Did they break all the windows here ?
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : Yes, every one of them. I had kids in the house. The youngest one was four and the eldest one would have been 12. And they terrorised the kids and the wife, my mother and my brothers and that; they chased them across town and all hell broke loose here.
HELEN THOMAS : Have your kids, has your wife been back here since ?
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : Oh, we come down here every now and then and check the house out, but we’re stopping up the other end of town.
HELEN THOMAS : Is that because, what, you don’t feel safe or it just brings back bad memories ?
TIMMY STRANGWAYS : The kids don’t feel safe here and my wife don’t feel safe and neither do I, you know.
HELEN THOMAS : Seven people were arrested after this and the charges will be heard in Leigh Creek next week. But in January, the night before Black Friday, the mood in Marree got worse. Reg Dodd.
REG DODD : Now, there was bashing, there was people running around from house to house threatening people. And I saw one of the tribal elders, a highly respected lawman, beaten to a pulp…..
HELEN THOMAS : In the street ?
REG DODD : In the street. Now, these people who did that are not from this area.
HELEN THOMAS : How many were there ?
REG DODD : There were possibly 15 to 20 guys. For sure, the leaders, the instigators, were people from here. Now, I was saying all along that this was going to happen but this fell on deaf ears. No one want a bar of that. I’ve written to the Federal Ministers, to the State Ministers, all over the countryside, to ATSIC, to Department of State Office of Aboriginal Affairs, and no one wanted to listen.
HELEN THOMAS : Why ?
REG DODD : I don’t know. I don’t know who they were afraid of.
HELEN THOMAS : You were convinced that that sort of violence was erupting ?
REG DODD : I knew that as sure as that sun was going to rise every morning that that was going to happen.
HELEN THOMAS : It’s been alleged that between 15 and 25 outsiders had come from Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory to take part in the initiation ceremony that week in and around Marree, but one 22-year-old man has been charged with murder and 11 others face various counts of assault and firearms offences in Port Augusta court, next week, so we can’t go into specific detail about the alleged sequence of events that night.
We can say that geographer, Stephen Davis, was the Western Mining employee in Marree on 12 January, the night of the fatal shooting. Although we’re not suggesting he was involved in the violence, Background Briefing understands that Davis, who declined our repeated requests for an interview, had been in town for a couple of days, attending the initiation, and had planned to stay on a day or so more. Instead, he left in a hurry, just hours before the trouble started. This is not the first time Davis has been involved in a land rights matter. Less than a decade ago, he put forward opinion at the Coronation Hill dispute in the Northern Territory. In that matter, a Resource Assessment Commission report specifically rejected his maps outlining Aboriginal boundaries.
DEANE FERGIE : In every sense, you must take account of the role of Western Mining in this context, and I think their position has either been incredibly naive – their role in this position has been incredibly naive – or it’s been incredibly mischievous. There’s not a lot of middle ground in a sense, I think, in this context, and for example, I think their agreement with the Dieri people and the signing of that agreement on Finnis either displayed enormous naivety or enormous political mischievous, and I think that’s something that the State Government might also have taken up. It’s really worth thinking to yourself : Who stands to benefit from Aboriginal people in this area being in discord ? And I don’t know that it’s the Aboriginal people who stand to benefit from being in discord, in being in such dramatic discord.
HELEN THOMAS : Do you think it’s fair to say that Western Mining have stirred an already troubled pot?
HELEN THOMAS : Oh, I think that’s very fair to say.
HELEN THOMAS : Terry, how long have you actually been working here ?
TERRY DWYER : I’ve been at Olympic Dam for about eight and a half years, and I got up here at the start of the major construction in 1986 and it was a fascinating time. There was about a thousand contractors crawling all over the place and spending something like a million dollars a day. It was really good to be part of.
HELEN THOMAS : What existed when you first got here ?Was Roxby Downs the town like it is now ?
TERRY DWYER : Absolutely not. I stayed in the single persons’ camp here. There was no town. And I was taken out by the boss out to a sand dune and shown a couple of guys with surveyor pegs and theodolites, and they were marking out the early stages of town. And I was told then that this was going to be the town of Roxby. It was pretty hard to imagine at that stage, but everything that was said, at that stage, has come true. We’ve built a brand-new, well-designed, thoroughly modern and pleasant town.
HELEN THOMAS : Then there’s the question of a World Heritage listing for this area, which divides the town of Marree into different alliances. Green groups, of course, think it’s a great idea.
CLIVE ROSEWARNE : Yes. We support the need for a World Heritage listing for specific sites around the Lake Eyre Basin. Actually, the proposal for World Heritage listing is not a blanket covering of the whole area. It picks particular sites, and around that area it’s the mound springs which are the areas which are highlighted, plus Lake Eyre itself.
HELEN THOMAS : Clive Rosewarne from Friends of the Earth.
The group has worked closely with the Arabana and their concern about further damage to the area’s mound springs if Western Mining goes ahead with its plan for a second borefield. The main point of contention is just where the company wants to sink it. The Arabana, like Friends of the Earth, worry about the company’s proposed borefield B site, but Reg Dodd sees a way round this.
REG DODD : I can’t say for Friends of the Earth, but I can say for the Arabana centre, we’ve never opposed borefield B – we’ve never opposed that. I’m saying what they should do is go back to their original proposal of taking water from further up into the basin up near the Clayton bore, where they put down a bore.
HELEN THOMAS : So you’d be happy for them to take water from the region, just not that particular spot.
REG DODD : I think because they are taking it from the edge of the basin rather than going into the central point of the basin. And it’s already damaged the Venable bore and some of the springs around there. There’s no water – it’s ceased to flow, the water.
HELEN THOMAS : So how important is the proposed billion dollar expansion of Olympic Dam to the Western Mining Corporation ? Rob Craigie is an analyst with stockbroking firm, ANZ McCaughan.
ROB CRAIGIE : Western Mining are at an early stage of looking at options for expanding the Olympic Dam copper-uranium-gold mine. The feasibility studies are started and it should be completed by the end of this year. And if that feasibility study is attractive, if the outcome is attractive, a decision will be made in early 1996 to expand production to 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes of copper per year.
You’ve referred to the investment cost and that’s very significant. They’re looking at spending up to a billion dollars on infrastructure and also on mine smelter and refinery costs. The expansion decision is much more decision than two previous, smaller expansions that have been made at Olympic Dam. A decision to double capacity isn’t certain. It involves considerable financial risks; also, clearly, some technical risks; so it’s not an easy decision for Western Mining to make given the amount of money involved.
HELEN THOMAS : Well, given the amount of money involved, I guess most people listening this morning would be wondering how much money they are going to get back. I mean, it’s obviously not a gambler’s industry, as such, is it ?
ROB CRAIGIE : That’s right. Clearly, they are looking for a return on their investment and I think they would expect they would increase revenues by perhaps 300 million to 350 million per annum – that’s sales revenues, not profits – and I guess there’d also be benefits to the surrounding economy in the State from that investment. So there’d be flow-on benefits to all the contractors, service providers, and you’d expect there’d be multiplier effects through the rest of the South Australian economy.
HELEN THOMAS : High stakes, indeed.
ROB CRAIGIE : Sure.
UNIDENTIFIED : This is the uranium section as most people know it. It’s a standard uranium treatment where we use sulphuric acid to leach the ore so the uranium is dissolved into a liquid. From there, we clean it up – it’s easier to work with as a a liquid – and then we add ammonium, bring it back to a solid form, heat it or roast it, and it ends up as a dark-green powder. And the final form of uranium is called yellowcake but, in fact, it is not yellow; it’s dark-green, almost black. From there, it is drummed into 200-litre drums, placed into shipping containers, and every three or four months we have a convoy of semitrailers that will have one shipping container on each truck. There’ll be police vehicles and clean-up vehicles and back-up vehicles accompanying the convoy, and they’ll travel down the highway down to Port Adelaide where a ship will be waiting and off to customers overseas.
HELEN THOMAS : Back home, the traditional ownership dispute affects everyone in Marree, and those running the towns’ few businesses – the two shops, the two caravan parks, the garage and hotel – fear the town’s tourist industry is in jeopardy. Peter Maguire.
PETER MAGUIRE : Most of our tourists are over 50 and they want a hassle-free holiday. And the place is hassle free at the moment, but you can’t ring up a tourist and say : Listen, come up here because we haven’t got any hassles. They’re just really bypassing the town. We should have a lot more tourists at the moment that we’re not getting. We’re just getting none.
HELEN THOMAS : And you think that’s because they’re scared to come ?
PETER MAGUIRE : I’m positive that that’s the reason for it. Yes, I’m absolutely positive. And I don’t know how much longer it’s going to go on for. Because with these court cases that are coming up as a result of this, they will all come to the court’s attention right at the start of our tourist season and that will be more publicity. The publicity will scare them off again.
HELEN THOMAS : Clive Rosewarne, in an ideal world, how does this situation get resolved ?
CLIVE ROSEWARNE : In an ideal world, you would not have a major player with a lot of power and influence on the outside pressuring communities to make decisions. In an ideal world, Aboriginal communities wouldn’t be in a position to feel they had to support such a toxic industry as uranium mining in order to get some economic benefit from the land which they have a traditional and cultural link to.
HELEN THOMAS : Do you think that’s what’s happening ?
CLIVE ROSEWARNE : I think that’s the picture; that’s the pressure that Aboriginal communities are being put under in that area. It’s a decision between a toxic industry or nothing.
HELEN THOMAS : Piers Bowman, you’ve been in this job, I understand, for five months, now.
PIERS BOWMAN : That’s correct, yes.
HELEN THOMAS : Have you had a chance to get up to Finnis Springs, to get to stay perhaps for a couple of days at Marree to talk to the people ?
PIERS BOWMAN : No, I haven’t. I have been through the area and I’ve had a look at the area from an environmental point of view and I think that’s where our involvement should be. We have a number of ways of contacts with the local groups and I think that’s the best approach for it.
HELEN THOMAS : Do you want to spend more time in the area ?
PIERS BOWMAN : We will look at how we will progress the issues there and how we can be a party to solving the problems in the longer term.
HELEN THOMAS : Native Title Tribunal Member, Fred Chaney, has been invited to Marree to attend a meeting of both Aboriginal groups, the Arabana and the Dieri Mitha, within the next 10 days. In the meantime, observers ponder Western Mining’s actions in a dispute that needn’t have involved the company at all. And the tiny outback town of Marree waits uneasily for the deadlock to break.
UNIDENTIFIED : One of the problems with this is that everybody’s been trying to pick the winner for long, long time – yes, and I think it’s actually time we stopped trying to pick winners and try and pick a winnable situation. What you’ve got to come up with is actually a resolution with dignity.

SA Parliamentary Inquiry Into The Tailings System Leakage

WMC was not financially penalised for it’s failure to prevent escape of the contaminated water.

Due to the immense public outrage that such a breach of public
trust could happen, a major parliamentary inquiry was setup to
investigate the cause of the problem, possible solutions, and comment
on ‘the
desirability of the Department of Mines and Energy having prime
responsibility for environmental matters in relation to mining
operations’
.

Overall Conclusions

  • credit for calling attention to the leak was due to Dr Phil Crouch of the SA Health Commission.
  • WMC and the Dept. of Mines & Energy and the Dept. of
    Environment were reluctant to acknowledge that there was a leak.
    Acknowledgement eventually occurred in May 1993.
  • By August 1993 an initial estimate had been made of the magnitude of the leak.
  • Government departments and WMC discussed the drafting of a press release in November 1993.
  • In view of the above, the Minister for Mines &
    Energy, Mr Blevins, should have known about the seriousness of the
    problem at Olympic Dam before the State elections in December 1993. The
    fact that a public announcement was not made until February 1994 is a
    damning indictment of the Labour and Liberal governments and of the
    Dept. of Mines & Energy.

    The inquiry into the leak at Olympic Dam clearly shows that even
    experienced mining companies like WMC still cannot properly manage
    their dangerous wastes.

    The leak at Olympic Dam was not an isolated event. According to
    WMC’s Annual Environmental Progress Reports (1994-95 and 1996) there
    were at least two other cases of leaks at WMC operations in Western
    Australia, and negligent mismanagement of their Yeelirrie trial uranium
    mine :

  • Groundwater monitoring at the Baldivis nickel residue storage
    facility indicated that ammonium sulphate has leaked into the
    groundwater adjacent to Lake Cooloongup.
  • At the St. Ives gold mine at Kambalda, water from a TSF is seeping into the local aquifer causing a rise in the groundwater.
  • The Yeelirrie trial mine, abandoned in 1983 when the ALP Three
    Mines Policy was introduced, had been left without adequate fencing and
    signs for more than 10 years. Drums of uranium were left exposed, used
    for road building and the open pit dam, with high levels of radiation
    and salts, open to the public for swimming (see the Yeelirrie page for more info).
  • There was no substantive, quantifiable, accountable response of the SA
    Government to the failure of the Tailings Retention System (TRS) at
    Olympic Dam.

    In the "bad old days" many embarrassing pollutants were
    disposed of by tanks and dams that "leaked". The cases of Roxby,
    Baldivis and St Ives suggest that we have progressed from leakage to
    seepage, but the result is much the same.

    More regulatory power may be given to the EPA and the Health
    Commission but the recommendations from the leakage inquiry call for too little too late.

    Principal Findings and Recommendations of Note

    Below are excerpts from the Nineteenth report of the Environment, Resources and Development Committee of the Parliament of South Australia, released April 24, 1996, titled "Roxby Downs Water Leakage".

    page 49 :
    The Committee finds that the final design of the Olympic Dam
    tailings retention system was deficient in that there was only one
    storage area and no decant of tailings liquor was provided.

    The Committee also finds that the decision remove the coarse
    fraction from the tailings exacerbated these design deficiencies and
    made management of the system more difficult.

    page 49 :
    The Committee agrees that the concept of unlined evaporation ponds
    was a deficiency in the final design of the Olympic Dam tailings
    retention system.

    Comment :
    This, the first major finding of the committee, sets an unfortunate precedent – it got it’s terminology wrong, and thereby set the stage for confusion, a result which can be attributed to WMC.

    The above statement was actually referring to Tailings Storage Facility
    (TSF), which is only one element of the Tailings Retention System
    (TRS), the other elements include the Mine Water Evaporation Pond
    (MWEP) and Wash Water Evaporation Ponds (EP). The confusion can be
    traced to the WMC submissions and WMC literature which defines the TSF
    as being "Holding areas for tailings, sometimes referred to as a
    Tailings Retention System".

    What the finding refers to is that by not dividing the TSF into
    a number of cells so that the tailings could be rotated from one to
    another, and by not having a mechanism for drawing off excess liquid
    into a sealed evaporation pond, the tailings could not dry out
    sufficiently to provide a seal to the otherwise unsealed TSF.

    The above finding amounts to a condemnation not only of WMC and
    the SA Department of Mines & Energy, which approved of the changes,
    but of the environmental impact assessment process. After going through
    the motions of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), receiving
    submissions, and modifying it’s proposal, the operators were allowed to
    radically modify the design of the TSF, without public consultation,
    subject to the approval of the Department of Mines & Energy in
    consultation with the Health Commission and the Department of
    Environment & Planning.

    page 54 :
    While being satisfied that the approvals process
    was handled conscientiously and competently by the agencies
    involved…….the Committee is concerned that potentially valuable
    public comment or comment by disinterested experts was not available to
    the then joint venturers.

    Such comment may conceivably have alerted agencies or the joint
    venturers to the deficiencies in design…….and may also have helped
    to reduce some of the problems experienced with operation of the
    system.

    Comment :
    Thus the committee acknowledges this deficiency in the approvals process. It then goes on to recommend the following :

    page 132 :
    Recommendation 13
    The Committee
    recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy reviews any statutory
    and practical impediments to the free flow of information about the
    environmental impact of Olympic Dam operations with a view to ensuring
    that all relevant information is freely available to interested members
    of the public.

    Comment :
    Indeed Recommendation 14 (below) states the need for more public scrutiny, but even here it is only for "information exchange" and not measures designed to improve assessment of environmental performance at Olympic Dam.

    As long as the Dept. of Mines & Energy (now Mines & Energy South Australia, "MESA") maintains the environmental regulator of the mine it has a clear and unequivocal conflict of interest. It is both the promoter and regulator of mining – two very opposing roles.

    This is contrary to the widely accepted practice of keeping industry and regulators at arms length as far as possible.

    Not only was the TSF radically modified but the modifications were such
    that they were clearly contrary to the design concept which formed the
    basis of the original proposal and it should have been apparent to the
    most junior mining engineer that the redesigned TSF would leak
    profusely. Both the joint venturers and the Dept. of Mines & Energy
    were clearly at fault in permitting such a TSF to be built.

    The fact that it was not the Dept. of Mines & Energy which
    raised the alarm, but Dr Crouch of the Health Commission, and the
    absence of any attempt until then, to carry out a mass balance is an
    indictment of the Dept. of Mines & Energy.

    Despite clear evidence that the Dept. of Mines & Energy is
    not the appropriate department to monitor environmental issues the
    committee made the following two recommendations :

    page 55 :
    Recommendation 4
    The Committee
    recommends that requests for approval for future developments at
    Olympic Dam beyond those considered in the course of the recent public
    Environmental Review should be made in a similarly public manner.

    Recommendation 5
    The Committee
    recommends that, as with the recent Olympic Dam Environmental Review,
    future reviews should be carried out in accordance with guidelines
    issued by the Minister for Mines and Energy which should be developed
    by the Minister following consultation with relevant agencies.

    Comment :
    Environmental Reviews and regulations should be set by the Environment
    Protection Authority in consultation with community, environmental and
    interested groups, not by an agency with a mission to promote mining.
    As pointed out above, this is a clear conflict of interest.

    The Dept. of Environment and Planning was presumably considered to be
    either incompetent or too radical to be trusted with environmental
    management. The Committee, however, seems to recognise the potential
    conflict of interest with Recommendation 15 :

    page 136 :
    Recommendation 15
    The Committee
    recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy and the Minister of
    Environment and Natural Resources consult with the Olympic Dam
    operators and relevant government agencies with a view to establishing
    a system of periodic, independent, external, environmental audit
    arrangements in relation to Olympic Dam operations.

    Comment :
    The Roxby Indenture Act prevents such a process and until the Act is
    revoked entirely there can be no truly independent, external
    environmental assessment of the impacts of Olympic Dam.

    page 63 :
    The Committee finds that there were deficiencies in the monitoring and reporting systems in place at Olympic Dam….

    Comment :
    This finding is an understatement. The inadequacy of the
    monitoring and it’s regulation were pitiful. Despite constant problems
    with surface water entering boreholes, as late as November 1992, the
    operators had still not secured all bore holes against contamination by
    surface waters.

    page 73 :
    The Committee finds that the Olympic Dam tailings retention system
    did not receive the degree of informed supervision of its various
    components it required to operate efficiently as designed and that this
    inadequate supervision by the operators of the tailings retention
    system, particularly the system as extended in 1991, contributed to the
    massive leakage from it.

    Comment :
    This understatement stops short of accusing the operators of negligence.

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that, although admitting difficulties of
    interpretation, the operators were reluctant to accept that a leakage
    from the tailings retention system was occurring, despite mounting
    evidence to that effect.

    Comment :
    One disturbing aspect of this denial was the claim by WMC that a
    localized leak was not a breach of the restricted release zone (RRZ)
    because the zone extends underground indefinitely! WMC argued that as
    no lower boundary had been defined, and the leakage went straight down,
    there was no breach of the zone, and in any event the leakage would be
    returned to the mine.

    WMC also tried to deny the deficiencies in the design and operation of the TSF :

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that, confident of the benign impact of any
    seepage, the operators were reluctant to admit deficiencies in the
    design and difficulties with the operation of the tailings retention
    system which were contributing to the leakage from it and that this
    reluctance coloured their reporting of operations at Olympic Dam and
    delayed measures necessary to understand the leakage and reduce its
    impact.

    Comment :
    This recommendation refers to the fact that the operators relied on
    laboratory studies to support their contention that any leakage would
    be blocked by the underlying limestone. This ignores defects in the
    limestone structure and advice from mining consultants.

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that it was only when the leakage was too big to
    ignore or to explain away and only in response to hard prompting from
    regulatory agencies that ad hoc operational changes were converted into
    radical remedial action to alter the original defective design concept.

    Comment :
    When this "radical remedial action" was finally taken, the agency which
    did the prompting was not, as one might have expected, the Dept. of
    Environment or the Dept. of Mines & Energy, but the Health
    Commission, especially Dr Phil Crouch. The Dept. of Mines & Energy
    was as reluctant as the operators to accept the obvious. Basic measures
    like doing a mass balance, ie., comparing the liquid put into the TRS
    with the amount lost by evaporation, were not even attempted until
    mid-1993.

    The report then goes on to make a few more findings and proceeds to a gigantic leap of faith concerning the harmful effects :

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that the monitoring systems designed in part to
    detect leakage from the Olympic Dam tailings retention system were
    defective….

    page 95 :
    The Committee finds that the leakage is not attributable to any
    single cause and that, although it does not come from any single
    source, the minewater evaporation pond has made a significant
    contribution to the amount of leaked liquid.

    page 108 :
    The Committee finds that, on the basis of current evidence, there
    have been no harmful effects to employees, the local community or the
    environment arising out of the leakage from the tailings retention
    system at Olympic Dam and that it is highly unlikely that any such
    harmful effects will emerge in the future.

    Comment :
    Despite recognising a "lack of knowledge about what has happened to the
    leaked liquor under Olympic Dam" and that "more scientific studies are
    obviously necessary", the report confidently asserts that there has
    been no harmful effects to date and any such effects are "highly
    unlikely" to emerge in the future.

    Such polarized findings can hardly be an oversight. Bearing in mind
    that the mine is expected to have a life of more than 100 years and
    that many of the radioactive contaminants in the ground under the TRS
    will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, it is very hard
    to see where the Committee finds it’s confidence.

    page 123 :
    As in its Sellicks Hill Quarry Cave report,
    having looked at some of the mistakes of the past, the Committee is
    anxious to look positively to the future and to make recommendations
    which will prevent their reoccurence and increase public confidence in
    the operations.

    Comment :
    Thus it becomes clear that the Committee is not
    intending to seriously question Olympic Dam’s competence in properly
    managing it’s own operations, the Inquiry is merely an exercise in
    public relations.

    page 126 :
    Recommendation 11
    The Committee recommends that the operators be encouraged to continue
    their commitment to improving their environmental management of Olympic
    Dam operations and that government agencies commit themselves to
    establishing environmental goals and overseeing their attainment while
    leaving the prime responsibility for day to day environmental
    management to the operators.

    Comment :
    In one sentence the Committee is openly critical of the recalcitrant
    behaviour which Olympic Dam displayed in their concern over the
    seepage, that the tailings retention system did not get the degree of
    professional supervision such a system unequivocally demands, and yet
    they are still allowed responsibility for their own environmental
    management despite proven gross incompetence ? This is clearly
    unacceptable.

    page 131 :
    However, with the company, the Committee sees considerable benefits in
    the Olympic Dam operations being more ‘open to public scrutiny’.

    Comment :
    The Roxby Indenture Act provides a secure channel
    between the company and the government in order to fast-track approvals
    and permits and thereby avoid rigorous public scrutiny. If "being more
    open to public scrutiny" is going to achieve anything, it would have to
    involve the removal of the Roxby Indenture Act. So far this is not
    being considered at all.

    page 132 :
    Recommendation 14
    The Committee recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy consult
    with the Olympic Dam operators, other relevant state and Commonwealth
    agencies and other interested bodies with a view to providing a forum
    for information exchange and policy consultation among groups on the
    effect of operations at Olympic Dam on the environment.

    Comment :
    The Federal Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, has released a
    press statement saying that such a forum is currently being planned. As
    noted above, the recommendation is for "information exchange" and not a
    two way dialogue as it is being marketed as. It remains to be seen that
    even if such a form were established whether it would be anything more
    than a sleek public relations campaign.

    page 136 :
    The Committee finds that although there is a separate, fully
    professional environment group within the Department of Mines and
    Energy committed to a high standard of environmental management, this
    does not overcome the public’s perceived lack of objectivity of the
    regulatory process currently in place in relation to the Olympic Dam
    operations.

    Comment :
    Until the Roxby Indenture Act is revoked there is no "perceived" lack
    of objectivity on behalf of the public at all – environmental
    regulation of a large mining operation by a body with a mission to
    promote mining is a clear and unequivocal conflict of interest.