Talk:Ranger Uranium Mine

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Assessment comments

This article contains a lot of very emotive language.

The accounts of the poisining lead the reader to believe that the company deliberately poisoned workers and shrugged off the fine as a cost of doing business. There is no evidence of this.

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License to polute ? This is a very dodgy entry.

203.14.124.11 03:36, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comment added to text

The article is presently marked {{TotallyDisputed}}.

203.166.44.129 (talk · contribs) added:

What a load of garbage!! Whoever wrote that account of Ranger is either incredibly ignorant of the facts or is trying to mislead in a big way. Ranger is the most heavily scrutinised mine in the world and there is no evidence of any harm to the environment of neighbouring Kakadu National Park. It's amazing that environmentalists have to lie so much to propogate their own views.

The comment is presumably about this edit by 58.165.27.202 (talk · contribs).

The solution is to hold the debate on this talk page, and improve (WP:NPOV and WP:CITE) the article, not debate in the article itself. --Scott Davis Talk 14:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

On further reflection, I deleted those paragraphs and the NPOV tag too. There's now hardly anything left, and one of the external links talks about contaminated water no longer in the text, but the removed text contained a lot of opinion not in that article. --Scott Davis Talk 14:09, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


yeah, there's hardly anything left, so I put some back.

in response to the charge of emotive language, I changed 'scandalous' to 'accidental'. note that the disputed 'license to pollute' was quoted from the NT Government's prosecuting QC, who successfully convicted ERA for 3 breaches of their environmental guidelines in 2005.

i think it would be good to include some stuff about how the mine was forced upon unwilling traditional owners, how they later defeated plans to mine the nearby jabiluka deposit. I really don't understand why these were removed.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.165.36.230 (talk)

OK. This time I've let it stand, but I've wikified it for you, reduced further the tone, and identified the sections that need to cite reliable sources for the claims. Please find and provide references. If the QC said it in court, it will be on record somewhere. You can add the other stuff too if you cite sources. --Scott Davis Talk 14:10, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Picture copyright

The two contamination pictures look like they are from an official report of some sort, and do not appear to have proper copyright tags on them identifying the owner and licence. Unfortunately, new GFDL or CC-licenced pictures of the site are likely to be difficult to obtain. See WP:COPYRIGHT and Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for more info. --Scott Davis Talk 10:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

=> these pictures were tabled as evidence in court. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.165.25.86 (talk)

What is the copyright status? Who owns it and what license are they released under? Wikipedia requires a free licence for any purpose. --Scott Davis Talk 09:38, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] some changes

I removed the reference to the dose.

this statement could be misinterpreted as meaning that the does suffered by the local aboriginal kids playing sandcastles with uranium leachate was acceptable. Of course, if this incident gave them a dose around the public limit, and they live next door to a uranium mine, it can be expected that they received twice the 'acceptable' public limit (once from the mine, once from the incident). This is messy to describe, so I decided it is just better to leave it out.

I've updated the information about life of mine / closure / rehab, and provided an up-to-date reference.

The UIC page is misleading - it's also a biased source, totally funded by the uranium mining sector. Last year, the UIC was taken over by the new Australian Uranium Association (see http://www.uic.com.au/AUAannouncement.pdf) which is directed by Henry Kenyon-Sloane, the director of ERA : hardly an impartial source. The statements taken from UIC made it sound like there's a well funded, well defined rehab plan : there isn't. Rehabilitation plans are not public, and must be very fluid given recent expansion (and strong indications of more to come). There is a bond, but this is not expected to cover the (current) expected costs of rehab. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 58.165.2.51 (talk) 23:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC).

Thankyou. I did recognise that UIC was associated with ERA (and other mining companies), and tried not to cite it for anything that could be biased. I've re-cited the rehabilitation from the last annual report, which is required to be not misleading and to keep the market properly informed. I found it on the ERA website, but can probably find the ASX version if required for impartiality. The "recent expansion" laterite processing plant could well be considered as part of the rehabilitation - it is going to remove 2800 tonnes of uranium oxide from a pile of clay-like material that has been growing on site since 1980. We will get more up-to-date info next month in their annual report, I suppose. --Scott Davis Talk 14:07, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

=> I've reinserted more detail about closure plans. It is very misleading to include the company's report, which claims they have a closure plan, without noting that no-one else has ever seen this plan, that it is not fully funded, and that each announced expansion further stresses our capacity to rehabilitate the site on -any- budget. your assertion that the laterite plant is part of rehab is wildly off the mark : this is akin to the specious claim that they're doing the locals a favour by removing the dangerous uranium. This is unacceptably misleading. While the plant will extract a small fraction of the uranium, processing the laterite will actually increase its volume, and the vast majority of it will remain as waste on site. Only now rather than pebble-like material, this waste will be in the form of finely particularised sand, which the miner will simply leave on site, along with the other many thousands of tonnes of tailings waste. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.165.25.86 (talk)

"Provision" (or "provided for") is the correct accounting term for a future liability against a present asset. I also note that there is no reference to suggest that the provision is insufficient, which would be a breach of the stock exchange listing rules.
I didn't "assert" that the laterite processing is part of rehabilitation, I mused that it could be considered that way. I don't understand how processing pebble-sized stuff into sand can increase it's volume, especially while removing 2800 tonnes. There is no mention in the release about the proportion of uranium in the laterite ore that will be recovered. What makes you say it will only be a small fraction rather than above 88% like the rest of the ore processed (2005 annual report page 84)? --Scott Davis Talk 09:38, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
thanks for your scrutiny. it's valuable, because when you challenge what fraction of the U238 will be won from the laterite, I realise I'm not at all sure about the process, and will have to get some expert opinion on the efficiency. thanks again. As to the undeniable negative impacts of the plant on basic rehab objectives, removing 2800 tonnes from 1.6 million does not have much impact on volume, but converting pebble like material to sand does. By particularising the laterite, this process will increase the volume of the material and leave it more readily dispersed into the surrounding environment once the miner abandons this waste. I guess this isn't directly relevant to the article, but I couldn't ignore a claim that generating more waste might be considered as part of rehabilitation. From this discussion, it seems that the priority for research remains to outline the widening gap between the company's rehabilitation bond and the true costs which will be born by the Commonewealth once ERA are dead and gone ....
... which I've now done, referencing a quote from Dr Jim Green in GLW. I note that this appears to contradict the specific quote from the 2005 report. In part, this is because the company's legal obligations, as set down when mining commenced almost 30 years ago, are now recognised to fall short of what is required to rehabilitate the site to a fit state for reincorporation into Kakadu. The referenced 'closure model' falls well short of a rehabilitation plan, remains contested by stakeholders, and must be recognised to be highly susceptible to change, given the 3 distinct proposed expansions (into lower grade stockpiles, into laterite, and deeper into pit 3) in the last twelve months. The public has yet to see any information on how these proposals will impact on the specifics of rehabilitation, however by prolonging the life of the mine they have certainly overrun the timeline described by the closure model.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.165.7.206 (talk) 18 January 2007

Unfortunately, it can be an emotive topic, and one side tends to get ready media coverage for "standing up against the big business" and the other side tends not to get reported if they do do the right thing, and naturally tends to keep their head down to avoid getting shot at. I hope you agree we are making the article a lot better than it was a month ago even though our opinions on the matter quite possibly don't agree on very much. Thanks. --Scott Davis Talk 06:54, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

This is a very strange entry for an enterprise which exists to provide a product which is much in demand for clean electricity generation and which is run under very tight legal and environmental constraints. First, it is relevant to point out that its production in the last couple of years has ranged 4700 to 5500 t/yr u3o8 (4000-4660 tU). Second, its closure and rehabilitation plan wil obviously evolve as mining proceeds, and be under review by the government responsible, which also determines the amount of bond required to carry it out in case the company fails. Snide comments from detractors surely have no place here. With regard to the second section on health issues, this is tendentious nonsense. Any uranium mine has to report incidents down to a very low level of significance - much more so than any other inndustrial enterprise with comparable occupational health or environmental risk. That fact of life should not be represented in such a way as to stigmatise a company such as ERA which is responsible and well run by any objective criteria, and whose operations are very open to scrutiny by all stakeholders. Certainly there have been failures in mangement, but none which have harmed anyone or the environment. The one you feature was caused by a contractor making a mistake. The legal guy's comment about 'licence to pollute' is gratuitous and fatuous. ERA's licences in relation to (avoiding) pollution is under continuous scrutiny by a cast of thousands. I suggest remove the second section altogether and replace it with an objective account of the environmental and occupational health constraints and performance. Ianhl 00:46, 26 March 2007 (UTC)