A typically dusty drive 25km south of Australia’s central capital brings you to an unlocked gate beside the old Ghan railway line.

Behind the fence, among the rolling red desert hills, drilling workers are busy boring 120 holes into an area of earth said to contain about 12,000 tonnes of uranium oxide worth up to $2.5 billion.

The uranium deposits, named Angela and Pamela, were first discovered in the 1970s and 80s but lay dormant until a new exploration licence was granted by the Northern Territory government late last year.

Canadian company Cameco and Australian-owned Paladin, the two businesses involved in the joint venture, hope to build Australia’s fifth uranium mine inside the Alice Springs water catchment boundary.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett last month gave approval for the nation’s fourth uranium mine at South Australia’s Four Mile mine.

The Angela Pamela exploratory licence is part of the NT’s push to expand its mining industry in response to a global surge for uranium.

But a growing chorus of Alice Springs residents and tourism operators say the health risks of building a uranium mine within dust-storm distance of a major regional hub outweigh any economic benefits.

Family and medical groups have expressed grave concerns about Cameco’s recent history of radioactive leaks and flooding accidents from its uranium mines.

If the Angela Pamela uranium mine is built it will be positioned within 15km of existing and proposed bore fields for the Alice Springs drinking supply.

Cameco, the world’s largest producer of uranium, flooded its Cigar Lake mine in Canada in 2006, leaving one fifth of the world’s uranium reserves underwater. Efforts to remove the water have so far failed.

In 2007 the company discovered a 10-year radioactive leak at its Port Hope conversion plant and last year paid $1.4 million to the US State of Wyoming for failing to comply with a host of environmental standards at its Smith Ranch-Highland facility.

Cameco says its preliminary groundwater tests have found no connection between the uranium deposit and the Mereenie Aquifer which supplies water to Alice Springs, but has refused to guarantee that contamination won’t occur.

This is in contrast to a comment by NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson in October last year, in which he gave his “absolute assurance” to the safety of Alice Springs residents.

Arid Lands Environment Centre coordinator Jimmy Cocking says the chief minster’s promise “demonstrates the government’s arrogance towards the people of central Australia”.

“We’ve got a big mining company which has caused all these groundwater problems around the world coming into our town and telling us to trust it with our precious water source. It’s an unacceptable risk for Alice Springs and an unacceptable precedent for the government to be setting,” Cocking says.

“Both the nuclear industry and the government are relying on the fact that because we’re so far away from the big cities this issue will be out of sight, out of mind.

“If this is allowed to happen a lot of families will leave the town and we need to stop this now before exploration is finished and a full mining application is submitted.

“Who really wants to go to a place where if the wind blows up from the south like it does here almost every day, there’s a possibility that you’re breathing in radioactive dust?”

Tempers flared at a community meeting in March when Primary Industries Minister Kon Vatskalis admitted he did not know about Cameco’s history in Canada before granting it an exploration licence.

Mr Vatskalis says any proposal for a new mine is subject to strict environmental approvals processes. “Where a proposed mine is in the vicinity or catchment of a town water supply, thorough hydrogeological studies would be required to establish that there is no likelihood of contamination of the water supply before any approval to mine is granted.”

He says Cameco has been operating in the NT for 16 years and has “consistently met their social and environmental responsibilities”.

“They have a good record of environmental performance in the Territory. Any application for the mining of uranium would trigger a formal environmental assessment under Commonwealth legislation that will include a rigorous assessment of dust and water contamination issues”.

But Don Wait, owner of Wayoutback Tours, is furious the government would consider risking the red centre’s multi-million dollar eco-tourism industry.

“What bloody idiot came up with the idea of a uranium mine in the water catchment? Governments are responsible for looking after people, not putting them in jeopardy,” he says.

“Travellers come here from all over the world to experience our unique untouched natural landscape. The investment in tourism in this area has been massive for a large number of years and you can ruin our reputation overnight by plonking a uranium mine right next to Alice Springs. The consequences are just outrageous.

“They say it’s going to create jobs but there is a glut of work in this town. I have to get backpackers to fill positions”.

A survey of 306 travellers conducted by Mr Wait’s company found 20 per cent would not return to Alice Springs if a uranium mine was built, and 44 per cent said they were unsure.

Mr Vatskalis says that if the mine proceeded it would have “a relatively small footprint and is not likely to be visible from any of the major tourist attractions in and around Alice Springs”.

“The presence of the Ranger uranium mine within Kakadu National Park has not prevented a thriving tourist industry in that region,” he says.

Beyond Nuclear Initiative campaigner Nat Wasley says it is “ludicrous” for the federal and territory governments to use the Ranger uranium mine as an example of good practise.

“The Commonwealth’s own scientist revealed in March that 100,000 litres of contaminated water is leaking from the mine into the ground beneath Kakadu every day,” Wasley says.

“If those are the problems they’re having at the most heavily regulated uranium mine in Australia, if not the world, one can only imagine what might happen down the track at Alice Springs”.

The Australian Labor Party controversially dumped its “no new mines” policy in 2007, and since being elected the Rudd Government has been busy selling Australia’s credentials as a dominant world supplier of uranium. Australia has the world’s largest uranium reserves, with about 24 per cent of the planet’s known stocks.

But Monash University civil engineering lecturer Dr Gavin Mudd says that US President Barack Obama’s push for a reduction in the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles would lead to a collapse in uranium prices.

“A lot of the uranium from those nuclear warheads would flood the energy market post-2013 and make the arguments for new mines completely botched. You can already see the jitters from uranium miners over some of these concerns,” Dr Mudd says.

“With expanded production capacity coming out of South Australia’s Olympic Dam it’s really hard to imagine a scenario where a project like Angela Pamela is going to be economically viable.” 

Dr Mudd says it is “silly” to say a uranium mine poses no risk to the Alice Springs water supply.

“If they’ve got an open cut mine or an underground mine they have to build a tailings dam. The fact remains that every tailings dam leaks. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of how much and what the potential impacts are likely to be.”

Cameco’s project manager Stephan Stander says there is a lot of misinformation about the company’s overseas operations and that it is “extremely focussed on environmental management”.

“I don’t think anybody can give a 100 per cent guarantee that we won’t have a (contamination) event somewhere in the future. But I honestly don’t think any such event would be unmanageable and I don’t think it would impact meaningfully on the town’s water supply or anybody’s safely.

“All the indications in terms of water quality that we’ve tested at that site indicate there is not a connection between the site and the town’s water supply.”

He says the Angela Pamela deposit is an attractive mine site because of its close proximity to infrastructure, its shallow location and its potential for relatively easy extraction. Cameco-Paladin will likely use an underground mining method with a “very small open cut area”.

Mr Stander says a mining application licence will be submitted by the end of next year and that Cameco, which opened an office in Alice Springs before it was granted an exploration licence, is committed to establishing itself as a “valuable and important part of the community”.

“Our ultimate aim is for at least 40 per cent Indigenous employment, which is the percentage we have at some of our Canadian operations.” But he admitted it would be a challenge to find sufficiently skilled people from the local region.

Mitch, a spokesperson for affected Indigenous families at Angela Pamela, says Aboriginal people are being forced to override their cultural rules by joining the uranium venture.

“You have to take the job that’s offered to you because under the intervention you get your welfare payments cut off for eight weeks if you don’t attend job appointments. They’ve pushed our people into a really hard situation,” Mitch says.

“They’re not high-paying jobs and Indigenous people will be on the pick and shovel because they don’t have the skills in the industry.

“We see it as a breakdown in our social networking and we open ourselves up to a mining culture that we don’t want.”

Mitch says under traditional beliefs the Angela Pamela uranium deposits are located on “poison” land.

“It’s all women’s country through there and we have strong laws that this part of country can’t be touched because it is poisonous; it is no good land.

“We’ve tried to tell that to Cameco-Paladin but they’re able to breakdown the culture through money. We feel powerless in that way.”

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