Crikey intern Olly Perkins writes:
Green news for the day:
The future of uranium mining in the Kakadu National Park. Peter Garret has said he will closely study a proposal to expand the Ranger uranium mine in the Kakadu National Park, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
The mine, owned by Energy Resources of Australia, has had 150 spills, leaks and licence breaches since it opened in 1981.
Last week The Age reported that a Senate hearing was told last month that 100,000 litres of contaminated water a day is leaking from its tailings dam (tailings are piles of crushed radioactive rock left over from the mining process).
Dave Sweeney, a campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the plan would only make a bad situation worse, increasing the environmental damage inflicted by the mine.
“This is not responsible industry practice and will exacerbate the existing pressure and increasingly obvious management deficiencies at Ranger,” the SMH reported Mr Sweeney saying.
He is calling for the ERA to prepare a public and peer-reviewed environment impact statement, with two rounds of public consultation, before considering any expansion.
No gives backies says China. International negotiations surrounding emissions targets have just gotten more complicated, if that was possible, with China calling on the developed world to take responsibility for the emissions of its manufacturing industry, reports the BBC and the SMH.
China’s top climate change negotiator has said china should not pay for the consumer driven demand of other countries.
Asking importers to handle emissions “would mean that we would also like them to have jurisdiction and legislative powers in order to control and limit those,” top EU climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger was reported saying by the BBC.
The ABC reports that more than a year after it was cut off from the Murrey Darling River system, work has begun to refill Yatco Lagoon at Moorook in the Riverland.
Lagoon, now with water. The Murray-Darling Basin Natural Resources Management Board will pump about three gigalitres of water into the lagoon over the next three weeks.
The project will have immediate environmental benefits, Jeff Drogemuller, from the Yatco Landcare Wetland Group told the ABC
“We should see the emergence of some of the rarer frogs,” he said.
“We’re also hoping this will attract some of the more timid ducks like the pink-eared duck and the freckled duck. They need a few different plants to feed off.
“And it should bring a lot of birdlife back.”
