Saturday 30 October 2004
The Age

Dangerous uranium oxide, or yellow cake, has apparently leaked in another mishap at the Ranger mine in the Kakadu National Park.

A spokeswoman for Energy Resources Australia Limited, the mine's owner, last night said material that "appeared to be yellow cake" had leaked from a compressed air tool in the packing plant where uranium oxide is put in drums for export.

Northern Territory Government regulators will investigate how yellow cake came to be in the compressed air system in an area of the mine that is supposed to be highly regulated.

The spokeswoman said a worker in the immediate area, wearing protective clothing, was not exposed to radiation.

Ian Loftus, an official in the Darwin-based Office of the Supervising Scientist, which monitors the mine for the Federal Government, confirmed late yesterday that ERA had reported a new incident.

The Federal Government last month put ERA on notice that it must improve its operations at Ranger or be shut down. The threat followed a damning report by the Office of Supervising Scientist into an incident in March when 149 workers were exposed to water contaminated with 400 times the legal limit of uranium. Twenty-eight people had high levels of exposure to the contamination.

The Supervising Scientist's findings included that ERA had a "substantial backlog" of maintenance work at the mine, one of the world's biggest producers of uranium. The Northern Territory Government has launched unprecedented legal action against ERA, which the Office of Supervising Scientist said had breached several conditions of its licence. The charges will be heard in the Darwin Magistrates Court in November.

Dave Sweeney, nuclear campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the latest incident was further evidence of the collapsing infrastructure at the mine, where there have been more than 120 leaks, spills and operating breaches since it opened in 1981.