[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1497518.htm]
AM - Friday, 4 November , 2005 08:20:00 Reporter: Hayden Cooper PETER CAVE: BHP Billiton is planning to dig a massive crater a kilometre deep and three kilometres wide, in the middle of Australia's outback wilderness. The company is considering a major expansion of Olympic Dam in the far north of South Australia, to make it the world's largest uranium and copper mine.
Hayden Cooper reports from Olympic Dam.
HAYDEN COOPER: In the red dust of remote South Australia, BHP Billiton is drilling in search of a lucrative treasure.
Beneath the semi-arid scrub is a cocktail of silver, gold, copper, and uranium, a cache which BHP's Base Metals Chief Roger Higgins admits was the grand lure in the company's takeover of WMC Resources.
ROGER HIGGINS: The plan is that we'll turn this into one of the great open pit copper mines. We're quite confident of a good expansion project here. But the actual dimensions of that - the size and shape of that project - will probably take us a year or two to determine exactly, but we're quite confident there is a project here.
HAYDEN COOPER: The project is a $5 billion expansion, doubling copper production, quadrupling uranium output, and converting the mine from a network of underground tunnels, to a massive open pit.
But it'll still be two years before BHP Billiton decides whether to proceed, and it needs approval from federal and state governments, perhaps part of the reason why Premier Mike Rann is being given the royal treatment at Olympic Dam.
MIKE RANN: So we're basically standing above where the big open cut… so three kilometres by three kilometres, and a kilometre deep.
HAYDEN COOPER: Despite Labor's long-held caution of uranium mining, this is one project Mr Rann is desperate to secure.
MIKE RANN: What we're standing above now is essentially where there'll be, we believe, the world's biggest open cut mine, and also the biggest mixed ore body in the world. So we're talking about an ore body that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars… not hundreds of millions of dollars, but hundreds of billions of dollars.
HAYDEN COOPER: But opponents like the Australian Conservation Foundation's David Noonan say there's much more at stake if the expansion does go ahead.
DAVID NOONAN: This is to turn Roxby into the world's largest uranium mine. It's to turn South Australia into the uranium quarry for the world nuclear industry.
It will make South Australians responsible for much of the nuclear risk, much of the potential nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl, for the proliferation of potential nuclear terrorism and plutonium production right across the globe. That's certainly not good news for South Australia.
HAYDEN COOPER: BHP's Roger Higgins says valuable though it is, uranium is just a by-product, and he dismisses questions about the future of nuclear power in Australia.
ROGER HIGGINS: Without the copper and the other products, the gold and silver, there wouldn't be a mine here. So the uranium is a very important by-product, and that's the part of the nuclear energy cycle that we're in. And there is no policy in Australia for nuclear power, and we're not interested in seeing that change, and if it does, then we'll react to that at the time.
HAYDEN COOPER: In the meantime, as the drilling continues 24 hours a day, the company's geologists say so big is the resource that the challenge is not finding the ore body, but rather, finding where the ore body ends.
PETER CAVE: Hayden Cooper reporting from the Olympic Dam Mine.
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