Adelaide FoE meeting this Thursday at 6pm
David Noonan is our guest speaker at this meeting, talking about matters nuclear: the waste dump and Olympic dam mine.
BHP now faces a $6.3 billion (US dollars) law-suit in the UK on behalf of 200,000 Brazilian people. The case alleges the Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP was “woefully negligent” in the run-up to the 2015 dam failure that led to Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.
Mayors of two towns wiped out by the Samarco disaster assert that BHP has been using delaying tactics to avoid paying compensation to thousands of people affected by the flood of tailings waste.
There have long been calls from environmentalists and others for Australian mining companies to be required to apply Australian standards to their overseas mining operations. The logic is sound given the often inadequate practices of Australian mining companies overseas.
But the logic is also a little shaky given that mining standards in Australia leave much room for improvement. Olympic Dam is a case in point.
BHP orchestrated approval in 2019 for a massive new tailings dam at Olympic Dam ? Tailings Storage Facility 6 (TSF6). This tailings dam is to be built in the same risky ‘upstream’ design that featured in both the Samarco disaster and the January 2019 Vale Brumadinho tailings dam disaster that killed over 250 people – mainly mine workers ? in Brazil.
— “BHP betrays international safety efforts” by Dr Jim Green and David Noonan, in The Ecologist
