CPA - The Guardian

It seems an age since the ALP went to the 1977 federal elections with an anti-uranium mining policy complete with a green campaign button bearing the slogan “Uranium – Leave it in the Ground.” The no mines position was subsequently watered down to a three-mine policy. That was overturned in a charge headed by Kevin Rudd at the 2007 national party conference. Last week Environment Minister Peter Garrett gave the go ahead for Alliance Resources to move into production using the controversial acid corrosion method to extract uranium at the Four Mile mine in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

The floodgates for further mines have been thrown open. The number of exploration license applications had already swollen in expectation of the announcement. Alliance’s and other uranium mining companies’ share prices soared on the news.

The minister, a notable long-standing opponent of uranium mining, was keen to emphasise the “world’s best environmental standards” should be enforced on the mine. Opponents have not found those words comforting. At the nearby Beverley mine there have been 59 reported spills of radioactive material in the past decade including one involving 62,000 litres of contaminated water in 2002. There is no requirement placed on Alliance to ever clean up the radioactive plumes that will develop in ground water in the area as a result of the extraction method.

Resource developers are ecstatic. “It is encouraging because it gives certainty that other projects will get up,” Norman Kennedy of the PepinNini uranium mining company told The Australian Financial Review. His company has plans to start up a mine at Crocker Well in South Australia at the end of 2010. BHP Billiton is going through the process for approval of a mine at Yeelirrie in WA. Canada’s Uranium Ore is pushing the case for its mine at Honeymoon Well in SA. Mega Uranium is developing a project at Lake Maitland and Cameco is optimistic about its Kintyre mine in WA. Energy metals and Paladin will likely be among the first cabs off the rank with their Bigrlyi joint venture in the Northern Territory.

Long-term planning, lobbying and pressuring are about to bear fruit for these companies. Neglect of remote Aboriginal communities by successive state and federal governments has been emptying the interior of the country of its traditional owners and a golden age of corporate profits is opening up. The cost to the environment and the Aboriginal people’s land rights have been neutralised as issues to be negotiated, or so it would seem to the uranium industry.

Also encouraged by the news is the military lobby. The influential Navy League is insisting that Australia’s 12 new submarines should be nuclear powered. The choice of conventional submarines by the Defence Department was “an absurd decision when one remembers we are one the largest exporters of uranium,” the League says. It believes nuclear propulsion is needed to guarantee the range required to operate in the North China Sea as foreseen by military planners. A Defence spokesperson replied that “the government has ruled out nuclear propulsion for these submarines.” It used to rule out additional uranium mining, too.

Predictable bedfellows

Of course, the Navy League is not the only military connection interested in the future of uranium mining in Australia. Uranium mining, the nuclear industry and weapons manufacture are a comfy fit. Heathgate Resources (the owners of the Beverley mine) is affiliated to General Atomics, which is also one of the world’s biggest weapons manufacturers and the biggest sponsor of travel for the US Congress.

The company that will own the Four Mile mine (and set it up with mineral exploration outfit Alliance Resources) is Quasar Resources; a General Atomics subsidiary. Quasar is headed up by James Neal Blue, who the press describes politely as “colourful”.

Mr Blue helped conceive the Predator unmanned aircraft used to monitor and bomb targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reportedly holds Pentagon contracts worth US$700 million ($877 million). He is a planner. Fortune magazine claims he bought up large tracts of uranium-rich land long before it seemed possible that it could be exploited. Most of the uranium exported from the mine will be used in US reactors and the waste stored or used there.

Blue came to the public’s attention in the 1980s. He was a self-described “enthusiastic supporter” of President Reagan’s covert Contra war of terror against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He had an axe to grind. He part-owned a cocoa and banana plantation in Nicaragua with the family of former dictator Anastasio Somoza. He refuses to discuss whether he aided CIA operations in Nicaragua.

His brother had a brief stay in prison in Cuba for violating the country’s airspace in a private aircraft. He moved on from plantation crops to real estate and oil and finally into weapons manufacture and nuclear power. Among his other interests, Blue is now a director of Quasar and chair of General Atomics – the main stakeholders at the Four Mile and Beverley mines. Between them these sites have an area of almost 200 square kilometres.

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