The Counter-Argument to the Anti Lynas Shrills Posted on September 25, 2012 by Alessandro Bruno
The Kuantan High Court has granted the ‘Save Malaysia Stop Lynas’ (SMSL, an “NGO”), an interim stay for its request to repeal the Temporary Operating License (TOL) that Lynas was granted last August. Indeed, Judge Mariana Yahya has temporarily suspended the TOL until the High Court makes its final decision next October 4.
SMSL presented its latest judicial applications against Lynas on August 28, asking the Court to “revoke the temporary operating licence granted by the Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB) on 30th January to the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) on the ground that no detailed environmental impact assessment (DEIA) was done and that a fresh radiological impact assessment and a radioactive waste management plan should have been submitted to AELB for approval before the TOL was granted”.
SMSL has also asked the Court to “review the decision of the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation not to revoke the Lynas temporary operating licence”.
In July, it should be noted, a Court found the same SMSL to be guilty of defamation and its alarmism lacking in any scientific basis and at the end of last August the Malaysian government granted Lynas the TOL.
On 26 September, the High Court in Kuala Lumpur will hear from SMSL, who are defendants in the Lynas defamation case.
While shares of Lynas (AUX: LYC) shares dropped on the news, production was scheduled to start no earlier than October.
This means that the temporary repeal will not actually halt any activity; nor does it mean that Lynas should stop any preparatory work ahead of starting the production cycle.
The SMSL protests have drawn interest from the political opposition, which has exploited the public’s fear and misunderstanding of Lynas’s activities into an election issue. The environmentalists and their political opposition allies hampered the Malaysian government’s efforts to support LAMP.
It should be noted that while many mining companies, in the past, have engaged in unethical and environmentally damaging practices, providing fodder for the anti-LAMP activists, Lynas has made a valiant effort in resources and exercise to ensuring the highest safety and environmental standards.
SMSL has managed to transform an environmental issue into a political one and in order to consider the validity or flaw of the NGO and its backers’ arguments it is important to remember what rare earths are and what they are not – at least as far as the claims of radioactivity are concerned, for this is what the residents of the island of Pahang are worried about and what the NGO’s and their political allies have been exploiting.
Therefore, let it be presented to the Court that rare earths are not radioactive. Their extraction often leaves thorium (and sometimes uranium). Thorium radiation involves alpha particles, lower in intensity than the Beta particles used in nuclear medicine.
Alpha particles, while rendering the emitting materials harmful if ingested, are not able to penetrate human skin. For propaganda purposes the protests against the LAMP facility are marked by shrill statements about LAMP being radioactive; in fact, only some of its waste (thorium) is mildly radioactive. To bring this concept, literally, ‘closer to home’, Americium-241 emits alpha radiation and it is used in common domestic smoke detectors.
The Lynas processing plant has also suffered from, inadvertently bad timing. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown in 2011 has provided anti-Lynas protesters an excuse, comparing rare earth facilities to nuclear reactors, fueling popular alarmism.
Other anti Lynas protesters cite the abandoned Asian Rare Earth plant (ARE) that used to be run by Mitsubishi Chemicals in Bukit Merah.
However, ARE was built more than 25 years ago and it focused on the extraction of yttrium from monazite containing some 10% thorium.
Lynas will be processing rare earth ores from the Mount Weld mine in Australia, which contains only 0.17 % thorium; evidently, producing a fraction of the alpha radiation.
What Lynas will no doubt produce at LAMP is chemical waste and the company will have to take every precaution in managing it, in the same way that dozens of other chemical plants, not under legal threats from NGO’s and citizens’ groups, are doing every day in Malaysia.
There are several Coal and oil fired power generation plants in Malaysia that emit several pollutants from NOx, SO2 to arsenic, lead and mercury among others. Nobody has yet to demand the Courts in Kuala Lumpur to block them from operating.
Iron and copper mines in Malaysia release such by-products as thorium, radium and uranium and nobody is lining up to halt them. Even the innocent mineral fertilizer, rock phosphate, produces radioactive waste including the aforementioned thorium and uranium. Thorium-232 remains the sole radioactive element contained in the Lynas waste.
It has a half-life of 14 billion years, which means it is less radioactive than Potassium-40 (naturally occurring and consumed by humans) whose half-life is only 1.25 billion years; the longer the half life the less intense the radioactivity.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) noted that the radiation levels from Lynas’s thorium leftovers were so low as to not require any special permission for its transport.
Finally, the most important issue is the most basic and the most overlooked: if anyone should be concerned about thorium radioactivity from Lynas’s rare earths, these are the actual miners themselves at Mount Weld, Australia.
Nobody is doing any rare earth mining in Kuantan!
In France, the Rhodia Group has operated a rare earth processing plant in La Rochelle, a tourism centre, for some forty years.
The plant processes and recycles rare earths, producing thorium as a by-product. The residents and tourists to La Rochelle have never reported any adverse health effects while Rhodia remains one of the main rare earth processers in the world, supplying cerium to customers worldwide. Rhodia stores thorium residues in salt form in the company’s own special site with regular monitoring from France’s nuclear authority.
The thorium is not considered waste; indeed, France, which is one of the main producers of nuclear energy, believes that the thorium will become an important nuclear fuel in the next decade. Rather than block the plant, the government has imposed a strict set of regulatory standards, allowing the community to thrive and tourism to continue.
Rather than perpetuating shrill advice, Malaysian authorities and the residents of Kuantan should consider the Rhodia example as the way forward instead of the Courts.
LYC Price at posting:
75.7¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
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