THE world's big miners all have a list of things of which they can be proud. It's generally as long as the list of things of which they are not so proud - a list of shame if you like. And so it is with Anglo-Australian heavyweight Rio Tinto. On the ''proud'' side of the ledger, it can rightly crow about its 40-year compact with traditional owners affected by its iron ore operations in the Pilbara. Thanks to selective briefings with the Canberra press gallery, the story got the sort of front-page treatment Rio was aiming for.

Managing the list of shame demands a different strategy. Bad news is selectively released to brokers and analysts, keeping the dissemination of ugliness to assessments of what it means in share price terms.

That is the strategy Rio has employed with its major shame in this country - Energy Resources of Australia, the Ranger uranium miner, of which Rio owns 68 per cent.

ERA has been producing uranium at Ranger for 30 years come this August. It is only the second mine in the world to have produced more than 100,000 tonnes of uranium.

But as the collapse in the group's share price from a 52-week high of $15 to yesterday's closing price of $4.68 suggests, there is something very wrong with ERA.

In the post-Fukushima world, some of ERA's $2 billion value loss can be attributed to the general selloff in uranium stocks in the expectation that demand for the radioactive material is not going to be as robust.

But the reality is that Ranger is an operational mess, so much so that processing has been suspended until at least July because of water-handling issues.

On top of that is the sad situation that ERA is stuck with Ranger and it has nowhere else to go, thanks to 30 years of inaction, failing to secure new business by leveraging off its uranium mining and marketing expertise.

Rio should not have let any of this happen. It is paying the price in terms of value loss on its 68 per cent stake, but it also had an obligation to ensure the minority shareholders were spared the pain.

On the water-management issues, ERA and its parent have something of an excuse.

The past decade at Kakadu - the Ranger lease is excised from the surrounding national park - has been the wettest on record.

The build-up of water prompted the decision in January to suspend processing for 12 weeks as a ''precautionary measure'' to ensure the operations tailings storage dam remained below its authorised operating level. Further rain has forced a suspension to late July.

ERA's response is a $367 million water-management program, increasing the height of the tailings dam and building a brine concentrator for accelerated evaporation of process water. Given Ranger is in its 30th year of operation, the question has to be asked: why weren't these actions taken earlier?

If Ranger were a goldmine in outback Western Australia, the occasional flooding and possible breaching of its tailings retention system would not be a big deal.

But Ranger is a uranium mine, inside a national park and smack bang in the middle of the Alligator River system. There should be no chance of it being caught out. But as Rio's briefing notes to analysts last week showed, seriously heavy wet seasons have been a regular occurrence in the region since 2000-01.

Had Ranger been configured for exceptional rain, ERA would not be suffering its current horrors.

There would also not be the question marks hanging over its planned projects to extend operations at Ranger - and royalties to the traditional owners - beyond 2021.

Most analysts now believe the development of a heap leach operation at Ranger will not proceed.

And as Merrill Lynch put it last week, don't hold your breath for ERA's board meeting this month to give the go-ahead for the other life-extending option - the development of uranium mineralisation that sits beneath the Ranger 3 pit. It is a world-class resource all right, but it would be nice for the $367 million water-management response to have become a reality first. Water management aside, it is also shameful that after 30 years as a listed company, Ranger is still ERA's only operating asset (rain permitting).

In the past eight years, new uranium companies have emerged to capitalise on uranium's return to vogue through the fight against global warming.

Paladin is an example, coming from nothing six years ago to the $2.2 billion company it is today on the strength of its African and other projects. It has also shed massive value, but it is still twice the size of ERA, which had more than 20 years' head start. It is too late - and environmentally unthinkable - for Rio to cut loose ERA. But minority shareholders must be wondering what might have been if Rio had let it have its head some years back.