NAMA : SYALOM TAFATI GEA

NIM : DBD 115 041

Gold lust threatens water catchment

John Wilson

The NSW Labor government is allowing a private company to destroy an irreplaceable public
asset, risking downstream communities, industries and jobs.

Near Tenterfield, in northern NSW, Ross Mining has all but final approval for open cut gold
mines involving the use of thousands of tonnes of cyanide and arsenic in sensitive headwaters
of the Clarence River.

The Timbarra plateau is revered by Aboriginal people as a place of creation, initiation and
healing.

The ecology is complex, blending subtropical, temperate, coastal, central and tablelands
influences in a unique high altitude wetland habitat. Being isolated, it is a natural sanctuary
for more than 20 vulnerable species, including the endangered Hastings River mouse, brush-
tailed rock wallaby and stuttering frog.

The state government promised to make Timbarra a national park. But it also assured Ross
Mining it would not impede exploration or mining there and issued a mining licence just two
days after halting the Lake Cowal mine.

"The Timbarra Gold Mining Project falls within the richest and most diverse part of the
plateau ... considered crucial to the area's fauna", reported northern zone zoologist David
Scott.

According to former National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) consultant Harry Parnaby,
"The fauna impact study provides inadequate information".

For minute traces of gold, Ross Mining will blast, haul and crush 30 million tonnes of
granite. It will treat it with thousands of tonnes of cement and cyanide, plus lime, hot caustic
soda and hydrochloric acid, releasing kilotonnes of arsenic not accounted for in the EIS.

Dams on porous sand and waste rock dumps on steep slopes of unstable gravel in a high
rainfall area have the makings of a disaster not unlike that at Ok Tedi in PNG.
The mine would leave voids in the landscape half a kilometre long, 250 metres wide and 130
metres deep. One of these in the course of Duncan's Creek would take 10 years to fill. Eight
or more are being contemplated.

Lethal cyanide ponds will be open to birds and animals, and the company won't guarantee
that token plastic sheets will keep the poisons from ground water, rivers, communities,
industries and the food chain.

The NPWS did not invite applications for gazetting Timbarra as an "Aboriginal place" before
approving the mines that will desecrate the area. For millennia, Aboriginal people performed
religious duties to the land. Now they're allowed to visit Timbarra only by prior consent and
accompanied by an NPWS representative.

The NSW Environment Protection Authority says, "The EIS did not provide a satisfactory
assessment of all costs and benefits associated with the project". It failed in assessing
pollution risks and in protecting endangered species, indigenous culture and downstream
communities and industries.

The state government requires only $3 million as a deposit against default and for cleaning up
the area. Yet BHP paid $500 million damages over Ok Tedi and the legal bills over the
USA's Summitville mine were US$500 million before the clean-up. Corrected for size, these
figures suggest that at least $25 million is a more appropriate deposit for Timbarra.

Taxpayers will pay around $2.25 million a year to the project in the form of the diesel fuel
rebate to Ross Mining.

The project has received privileged treatment from the government. The granting of Ross
Mining's licence to pump 2.5 million litres of water a day from the Timbarra River was
followed by an embargo on other water users.

A downstream licence to graze was cancelled without compensation after the licensee
opposed the mine. Other rural ventures to be spoiled by blasting and pollution weren't
notified by Tenterfield Council, which fobbed off inquiries by saying, "They're just
reworking old tailings".

Melbourne solicitors Slater and Gordon, who successfully sued BHP over Ok Tedi, are now
acting against Ross Mining over the Timbarra project.

Timbarra is a new rallying point in the battle to replace exploitation with sustainable
economics. The north-eastern environment movement is mobilising to that end. For more
information telephone (041) 857 4863 or (066) 221 302.

[John Wilson is a member of the Timbarra Protection Coalition.]

Source: Green Left Weekly No 282, July 2 1997

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page. For further details regarding
subscriptions and correspondence please contact greenleft@peg.apc.org
 NAMA : SAMPETUA A. SINAGA

NIM : DBD 115 030

Mining the Earth

John E. Young, Worldwatch Institute

MINERAL INDUSTRIES RAVAGING THE EARTH

Mining ranks among the world's most destructive industries. Each year, mining strips some
28 billion tons of material from the earth--more than is moved by the natural erosion of all
the earth's rivers. Worldwide, mining and smelting generate an estimated 2.7 billion tons of
processing waste each year, much of it hazardous--dwarfing the quantity of the more familiar
municipal waste. And smelting pumps an estimated 6 million tons of sulfur dioxide, a major
contributor to acid rain, into the atmosphere each year.

Yet minerals extraction and processing are conspicuous only by their absence in most
discussions of global environmental threats. Governmental and private analyses have focused
only on increasing minerals supply.

While the world appears in little danger of running out of most non-fuel minerals, can the
planet afford the human and ecological price of its growing appetite for minerals? Human
needs might be satisfied with smaller inputs of virgin materials.

The study's recommendations include eliminating subsidies governments provide for mining
virgin minerals, tightening environmental standards for mines and smelters, increasing the
recycling of materials, and making metals-based products more durable and easier to repair.

MINING THE EARTH documents many examples of the environmental devastation caused
by mineral production:

 Smelter pollution has created biological wastelands as large as 10,000 hectares and
added some 8 percent of total worldwide emissions of sulfur dioxide, a primary
contributor to acid rain.
 The United States' largest Superfund site, stretching 220 kilometers in Montana, and
at least 47 other superfund sites are former minerals operations.
  Smelters at a single iron mine in Brazil will require enough fuelwood to deforest
50,000 hectares of tropical forest each year; the mine is expected to operate for 250
years.

Many governments subsidize mineral production, while few enact or enforce strict
environmental regulations for mining operations. As a result, not only are many mining
operations more environmentally destructive than need be, but the prices of minerals do not
include their full environmental cost, the study finds.

Today's low mineral prices reflect only the immediate economics of extraction and
distribution. They fail to consider the full costs of denuded forests, eroded land, dammed or
polluted rivers, and the uprooting or decimation of indigenous peoples unlucky enough to live
atop mineral deposits. The United States government, for instance, gave the U.S. mining
industry up to $5 billion in tax subsidies over the last decade alone.

Congress is currently considering major changes to the archaic 1872 Mining Law, which
permits miners to buy federal land for $12 per hectare or less. Proposed legislation--S. 433
and the Rahall substitute for H.R. 918--would stop land giveaways, levy a royalty on gold,
silver, and other hard-rock minerals, and toughen environmental standards.

Mining has been poorly regulated even in wealthy industrialized countries. But its impacts
are particularly severe in developing nations, which produce a large and growing share of the
world's mineral supplies, although they use relatively little.

Since many industrial countries used up much of their own mineral endowments years ago,
the minerals industry has been moving to developing countries, where environmental controls
tend to be weak or nonexistent. Copper smelters in Chile, for instance, emit 12.5 times the
amount of sulfur dioxide as those in the U.S.

Contrary to popular belief, the people of most minerals- exporting developing countries have
gained little from mining and remain among the world's most impoverished. Expensive
investments in infrastructure combined with falling world minerals prices during the eighties
helped make minerals-dependent countries some of the world's most heavily indebted.

In Zambia, for example, copper provides 86 percent of export revenue. The price of copper
plummeted in the early eighties; as of 1989, Zambia's debt was 1.4 times its GNP. By
comparison, the average ratio of debt to GNP among the nations the World Bank classifies as
severely indebted is 0.6.

The Paper argues for reduced emphasis on minerals projects in development plans, and
increased attention to grassroots-oriented rural development, agriculture, education, health
care, and other basic human needs.

Since the industrial nations consume most minerals, they have a responsibility to help clean
up the damage in developing nations and ensure that new destruction be minimized. The
paper proposes taxing minerals extraction rather than subsidizing it, and using revenue from
those taxes to clean up mining sites in both industrialized and developing countries.

The study also proposes strengthening environmental standards and implementing cleaner
production technologies in the mining and smelting industries. Yet in the long run, regulation
will not be enough. Curbing mining's environmental destruction will require profound
changes in both minerals use and in the global economy. No country has yet developed and
put into place comprehensive policies on the use of minerals and other raw materials. The de
facto materials policies of industrial nations have always been to champion the production of
virgin minerals.

A far less destructive policy would use tax policy and other measures to maximize
conservation of mineral stocks already circulating in the global economy. Such a strategy
would reduce both the demand for new materials and the environmental damage done to
produce them. The industrialized world, its infrastructure largely built, needs minerals mostly
for maintenance and replacement and is therefore well placed to slow its consumption of
virgin materials. Recent positive signs include moves in Germany toward making industries
responsible for the fate of their products. Several European automobile manufacturers are
planning to produce cars with an eye toward easy recycling of parts.

Mining's devastating environmental effects make the ultimate case for a global environmental
strategy emphasizing pollution prevention. As an inherently destructive industry that supplies
raw materials throughout the economy, its impacts will best be reduced by basic changes in
other industries, and in the societies that eventually use mineral products.

"Mining the Earth", published in 1992, is available for $5 ($4 for 2-5 copies; $3 for 6-20
copies; $2 for 21+ copies) plus $3.00 shipping and handling per order from Worldwatch

For further information or to order any of our publications, contact us at:

Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036
Fax: 202-296-7365
E-mail: wwpub@igc.apc.org
 NAMA : APRILYA NOREZA HALOHO

NIM : DBD 115 039

Uranium: a death sentence for miners

The Howard government's announcement that it intends to scrap Labor's
three mines policy and allow the opening of new uranium mines in the
Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia has renewed calls
for an end to uranium mining by the environment and peace movements.

This article, abridged from a talk presented by Dr PHILLIP NITSCHKE to

the Public Inquiry into Ranger Uranium Mine organised by Everyone for a
Nuclear Free Future in Darwin on March 30, examines the costs to society
of uranium mining from another angle -- the health of uranium mine
workers.

Do uranium miners get cancer? The answer to that question is absolutely and
unequivocally yes. There are two categories of risk for uranium miners. First
are the direct effects: there is now irrefutable evidence that miners will be
exposed to a significant risk of lung cancer as a direct consequence of their
employment.

The results of research are starting to be consistent. In France, a 1993 paper

titled ``The mortality of French uranium miners exposed to relatively low
radon concentrations'' states that there is ``statistically significant evidence
of lung and laryngeal cancer deaths''. Another paper from the US, titled
``Lung cancer in New Mexican underground uranium workers'', states that
``excess lung cancer is demonstrated, radon in underground mines remains a
significant occupational hazard as the end of the twentieth century
approaches''.

In Czechoslovakia in 1991 researchers looked at the risks of malignant

neoplasms (cancers) of all types in workers in Czechoslovakian uranium
mines. They concluded that it was necessary to restrict uranium mining
because of the high medical risk.

Perhaps the most important result is Woodward's 1991 research into the
health consequences for workers at the Radium Hill mine in South Australia,
which operated for about 10 years. Woodward found that lung cancer
mortality was markedly higher among underground mine workers.

The proposed new uranium mine at Jabiluka will be underground, so the

issue of health effects in underground mines has to be looked at very closely
in Australia today. It has taken some time to absolutely establish that the
workers in underground uranium mines had a significantly increased chance
of developing one type of cancer at least, lung cancer.

Lung cancer takes a long time to establish itself, and it takes time for
researchers to absolutely establish the cause and effect between the
occupational hazard and the disease. So even though these mines may have
been operating for 10 or 20 years, the earliest that we could have established
the health consequences is now, and that's exactly what's happening.

The health consequences of those earlier mining operations are being

revealed and published in very specific detail for everyone to see. The
conclusion is clear: if you worked as a uranium miner in those earlier years,
you have a significantly increased risk of developing cancer.

It is the inhalation of radon, one of the radioactive by-products that

accumulates as a gas within the underground mine, which is thought to be
the cause of the development of this particular lung cancer. When you are
mining uranium underground, it is not so much the radiation coming at you
from all directions that's the issue, but the fact that radon gas exists in a
concentrated form in those confined spaces. This gas is mixed up at an
atomic level with the air that miners breath. There is no way to filter it out. I
will come back to this.

The second category of risk, the indirect cancer risk, is more contentious.
There are no clear answers in this area, but there are an awful lot of
unanswered questions.

Information has come to light in the last few years which shows that men
involved in industries where they are exposed to radiation father an
increased number of children with leukaemia. This information, which has
come to be known as the Sellafield results, has been debated for the last few
years, and still is.

In the 1980s, an epidemiologist called Gardiner, working in the UK around

the Sellafield reprocessing plant, noticed that there was an increased rate of
leukaemia among children in the immediate vicinity of the reprocessing
works. At first people thought that this was probably due to the children's
exposure to some form of environmental contamination which was getting
out from the reprocessing plant.

But what Gardiner found did not fit the distribution rates that he observed.
What did fit was the radiation exposure that the fathers of these children had
received immediately prior to the conception of the children. He found that
for workers who received cumulative radiation doses of 100 millisieverts
before conception, the risk of fathering a leukaemic child was six to seven
times higher than normal. For those receiving a dose of 10 millisieverts in
the six months prior to the child's conception, the risk was seven to eight
times.

Because these are relatively low doses of radiation, the results sent a shock
wave through the scientific community and the occupational health
communities around the world. Sellafield unions immediately advocated a
significant reduction in what was deemed a ``safe'' level of radiation
exposure for workers.

There is no easy way to explain the Sellafield results. They don't fit
scientists' understanding of how radiation impinges on the body -- that is,
that it changes some cells and produces cancer some 20 years later. There is
also no apparent explanation for the fact that the fathers didn't seem to be
getting any cancer but the children did.

In the consequent outcry in the scientific fraternity, a lot of inquiries and

studies were set up to try to find out just what the findings meant. Every
piece of research since that time has tended to pour cold water on Gardiner's
results. No-one in any way refutes them, they just can't explain them. The
situation is a little bit like we were in 20 years ago when we couldn't actually
establish that the workers in underground mines were getting lung cancer,
but there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that they were.

Nevertheless, the one thing that was clear was that there had to be an
immediate downward revision of the ``safe'' levels at which workers could
be exposed to radiation.

The question of radiation standards is a rather complex and vexed one. The
bases for setting radiation standards can be divided into external exposure
and internal exposure.

External exposure measures the amount of radiation which impinges on the

body, usually the whole body, as a result of simply being in a particular
environment. If you are standing on a part of the planet where there's a high
background radiation, the radiation coming on to your body is
predominantly in the form of gamma rays. Its effect on the human body is
measured in a unit called millisieverts.

Scientific attempts have been made to work out at what level of external
radiation there is an increased risk of cancer. On this basis, judgments have
then been made regarding at what levels the cancer risk is considered to be
``acceptable''.

The level considered acceptable has changed dramatically over the 100-year
history of the uranium mining industry. In 1900, it was believed safe for a
worker to be exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation per day. By 1925, the
figure had dropped to 5000 millisieverts per year. The latest
recommendations of the international body commissioned to develop these
units, the International Commission for Radiation Protection (ICRP),
reduced it to 20 millisieverts per year in 1990. Of course, the ICRP figure is
only a recommendation. It is up to individual countries to decide whether or
not to adopt these standards.

It should be noted too that this figure is an average: it accepts the fact that
workers may be exposed to more than 50 millisieverts in one year in some
situations so long as they do not receive more than 100 millisieverts over
five consecutive years.

There are a number of principles which underlie the setting of this standard.
The first is that there needs to be justification whenever someone is exposed
to any radiation.

The second principle is that exposure should always be kept as low as

possible. There is no such thing as a safe level of radiation, but the thinking
behind setting an international standard is that there may need to be a trade-
off in the national interest (e.g. export income) or in the interest of the
individual (e.g. higher wages perhaps).

Thirdly, these recommended limits are meant to be top limits; radiation

exposure should be kept as low as possible below that. The principle of
additivity applies here; that is, if someone gets radiation from one source and
then again from another source, it is recognised that they are additive (some
would even say multiplicative), and cannot be separated.

It is on the basis of this principle that we should be calling for a national

register of all people exposed to radiation in the industrial work place. It is
impossible to keep track of workers moving from mine site to mine site
unless there is a register which records people's total accumulated radiation
dose.

The important point about the changing levels of "acceptable" radiation

exposure over the history of uranium mining is that the trend has always
been downwards; in fact, recommended levels have reduced dramatically.
There is a lot of information (like the Sellafield results) that we still don't
understand, but as we understand it more, it is likely that the millisieverts per
year level set now will turn out not to be a safe level at all.

Australia has been remarkably slow to implement the 1990 ICRP

recommendation. For the last six years, the radiation level which workers
could be exposed to in Australia was not 20 but 50 millisieverts per year.
The ICRP's 1990 recommendations must be adopted in Australia
immediately.

The specific dangers associated with radon gas exposure have resulted in the
development of a specific internal exposure level standard associated with
the ingestion of radioactive material.
This standard quantifies the risk for workers inhaling this radioactive gas in
terms of working level months (WLM). Risk levels are determined by the
concentration of radon gas that is breathed and the length of time it is
breathed for.

There are only two ways to reduce the risk in this area. The first is to limit
the amount of time workers breathe the stuff by, for example, rotating
workers in and out of the area. However, this measure is the subject of
debate since, if there is no radiation exposure threshold below which you
don't get cancer (that is, if there is no safe exposure level), then rotating
workers through the mines would simply spread the numbers of cancer
amongst a bigger pool of people.

Nevertheless, as far as the mine operators are concerned, the rotation method
reduces the workers' exposure to below the official or "public worrying"
level, although it is an expensive strategy requiring mines to have a larger
pool of workers.

Alternatively, the level of radon concentration in the mine can be lowered. A

lot of strategies have been tried to achieve this, perhaps the simplest being to
blast air from large air circulation plants through the underground mine site.

In 1986, the ICRP limit of 50 millisieverts of radiation exposure was

translated as being equivalent to five WLMs. When the ICRP reduced the
limit of 20 millisieverts in 1990, however, the recommended WLM did not
change. For underground miners, then, the level of risk that was considered
safe in 1986 is still considered acceptable.

The reason for this anomaly is probably that complying with lower WLM
levels would be very expensive, possibly making the difference between
profitable and unprofitable mining operations.

Nevertheless, it is coming to light that the diseases that uranium miners are
now experiencing are very specifically associated with their work history. It
is probable that, as has happened in the case of mesothelioma in asbestos
workers, uranium miners are going to start demanding compensation for the
life-threatening diseases that their workplace exposed them to.

Those compensation claims might just tip the scales and knock the economic
strength out of a pretty marginal industry. [Phillip Nitschke is a member of
the Medical Association for the Prevention of War and was a Senate
candidate for the NT Greens in the last federal election.]

Green Left Weekly No 282 July 23rd 1997.

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page. For further
details regarding subscriptions and correspondence please contact
greenleft@peg.apc.org