Wednesday, 25 October, 2006

ABC News Online

The mining company operating the Ranger uranium mine, which is surrounded by Kakadu National Park, has announced it will extend processing operations for a further six years.

Energy Resources Australia (ERA) says it will be able to extract an additional 11,000 tonnes of uranium from low grade material that has been sitting in stockpiles for some years.

The chief executive of ERA, Harry Kenyon-Slaney, says that will extend the life of the processing operations until 2020.

"Clearly one of the reasons that this has been possible is that the market price of uranium has increased significantly over recent years, and that lowers the cut-off grade that we can use," he said.