Posted on October 12th, 2010 at 6:00 am
By Scott Ludlam, Greens Senator WA
Dear potential investor,
As you consider the wide range of places to put your hard earned cash as the Australian economy stages its tentative recovery, there are a couple of things to keep in mind about the uranium boom.
That’s about the extent of the good news, unfortunately. If some of the uranium plays look unusually cheap at the moment, there are good reasons for that.
First, unlike the rest of the mining sector, you’ll be mining a carcinogen. Inhaling or ingesting uranium increases your risk of cancer.
Same with the dozen or so ‘daughter’ isotopes including radium and radon gas that seep from the waste stream. That creates a formidable headache when trying to work out how to contain millions of tonnes of finely powdered radioactive tailings after the mining is done.
It’s a key reason why you’d be confronting entrenched and determined opposition from local Aboriginal land owners, environmental groups, trade unions, local residents and their lawyers.
It’s not really appropriate to leave these carcinogenic by products lying around in the landscape, which is why the Ranger Uranium Mine in Kakadu has a bond condition to isolate the waste for a period of not less than 10,000 years. That’s going to be expensive and probably impossible, but that’s the game you’d be in.
Secondly, rumours of the demise of the global nuclear power industry, while exaggerated, are very interesting indeed. Nuclear fission is the most excruciatingly expensive method of boiling water imaginable, which is why nuclear is being out-competed, everywhere in the world, by low cost and fast moving renewable energy.
There’s no nuclear renaissance anywhere on the horizon.
Thirdly, you’d want to think pretty carefully about buying into a mining outfit that dug up the raw materials for weapons of mass destruction and then sold them to nuclear weapons states.
As this tortuous process runs its course, it is having the ironic consequence of flooding the market with blended down uranium from decommissioned warheads, further depressing the battered world uranium price.
Two of the largest uranium miners in the world got a rude ‘new paradigm’ shock recently when the Commonwealth Government announced it would hand the Koongarra lease back to the Djok landowners in Kakadu, and the NT Government decided that permitting the Angela Pamela uranium mine 20km from Alice Springs wasn’t worth the continued political heat.
The last time the nuclear industry declared a renaissance was afoot, was the late 1990s. A wave of uranium hopefuls across WA were wiped out when it came to nothing.
Personally, I wouldn’t wish uranium shares on my worst enemy. Buyer beware.
You can follow Senator Luldlam on twitter @senatorludlam
WEB http://www.scottludlam.org.au/
Read more:
http://www.wangle.com.au/1opinion/an-open-letter-to-uranium-investors
