Why shouldn't we believe the company?It should be easy to get a...

Why shouldn't we believe the company?
It should be easy to get a uranium mine off the ground in "Uranium friendly SA" yeah right...

All they need to do is dig 8 km underground to get to Mt Gee. That will be through one of the most seismicly active parts of Australia.
If they want to know what they are drilling through they will need to drill the route from the top... More environmental damage. Or they could tunnel blind through faults, dodgy rock, hard rock, aquifers, to get there...

Once when they have tunnelled 8km (how much will that cost!) they intent to mine a lower grade ore than any other underground uranium only operation.

Also, what will the tunnelling and mining do to ground water levels?

The dewatering of the mine and the tunnel may have a very major impact to the ground and surface water levels.
Resulting in Billabongs drying, and trees dying.
Needless to say what that will do to the wildlife and other plants.

When CRA looked at Mt Gee they wanted to blow the top off and open cut the deposit.

Are the 5m thicknesses at 0.08% 200m deep really economic?

Nobody in the world is mining 0.08% 200m deep as a uranium only mine, let alone one that you have to dig 8Km to get to

The endangered stripey bird, will another hurdle.
Up top there are endangered plants as well that will receive attention.

The biggest hurdle of all for Marathon is water, the removal of water from the ecosystem, and where they will get it from.

It is very likely that if Marathon is to get its mine approved the water will need to come from desalination, and the water will need to be piped from the sea.

The cost of a desalination plant and associated pipeline which will need to be placed underground for a large part of its trip for environmental reasons, will more than likely prove to be the economic downfall of this project.

Marathon have, by there virtue of planning an underground operation, already admitted that this is a very environmentally sensitive area.

Mt Gee is economic if you open cut it, and use local water, and dont give two hoots about what you leave behind.

Going underground, desalination, pipelines, noise, light, dust, visual impat, radon emmissions, diesel power generation/smoke noise.

All of these things will need to be funded from somewhere.

If this was Cigar Lake in Canada with 25% uranium, maybe it would be economic and maybe the environmental issues can be funded to reduce the impact

But we are talking an average grade 400 times worse.

Yep mine 400 times more rock to achieve the same result.