Tuesday 28 February 2006
ABC NT Country Hour

Report by Adrienne Francis

It's fairly unusual for one country to have so much of the worlds resources, and this is exactly where Australia sits in the uranium industry with one-third of the world's known uranium resources.

Most commodities are distributed fairly evenly throughout the world, but we have such a high proportion of uranium, it's unusual. To explain why, the Country Hour spoke to Dr Ian Lambert, group leader, Geoscience Australia.

"It relates to the geological evolution of our continent. Particularly in the middle period of Australia's evolution, there was alot of granite and volcanic rocks which were enriched in uranium and this is the source material of which our uranium has formed. Yellowcake is the product that is produced. We have almost 40% of the world low cost uranium resources, these are well and truly economic at current prices for uranium."

Nationally, the NT's uranium resources are second in size only to South Australia. Dr Lambert says Australian uranium could generate considerable nuclear power in the world market.

"We are supplying 22% of world demand for uranium and that figure is increasing as countries try and shore up their future resources. We expect that China will become a market once it has completed a nuclear safeguards treaty."

It's been claimed on the NT Country Hour guest-book at abc.net.au/rural/nt and elsewhere that even if we dug up all the uranium we had, it wouldn't meet current global demands for more than a few years. However, Dr Lambert denies this is true.

"That's not true, and goes back to the Club of Rome in the early 1970's predictions that we would run out of various resources. This hasn't happened and there are future discoveries and prices go up and that leads to further resources. Olympic Dam itself would last some 50-70 years. The prospects for further significant discoveries in the NT is very good."