Kuantan MP to fight rare earth plant in two parliaments
By Debra Chong and Shannon Teoh, The Malaysian Insider
KUALA LUMPUR, March 10 — As Australian mining giant Lynas Corp readies to fire up its rare earths refinery in Kuantan, lawmakers here and Down Under are joining hands to halt its progress and prevent a potential environmental and health disaster.
Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh has said she is working together with her counterparts in Australia’s Green Party to pressure their respective governments to look deeper into the environmental and health risks posed by the US$230 million (RM700 million) project and set up safeguards before Lynas starts operations at the Kuantan facility.
Rare earths are a group of minerals that are increasingly vital to the manufacture of high-technology products — ranging from mobile phones and televisions to energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs — and contain low-levels of radioactive material.
“The Green Party MPs in Australia are going to pressure their Australian government to tell Lynas not to dump their waste in Malaysia,” the opposition MP told The Malaysian Insider yesterday.
On her side, Fuziah said she is lobbying the Najib administration to compel Lynas to take back its waste to Australia for disposal.
One of the biggest worries, she said, was over Lynas’s waste management plans.
Terengganu — which was Lynas’s first choice — had rejected the Australian company’s proposal in 2007, bowing to pressure from green groups for the same concerns, she noted.
“I plan to speak on Monday. I am the only MP who takes up this issue in Parliament… It’s a lonely battle,” the 51-year-old said, adding that she received little support even from her colleagues in the Pakatan Rakyat.
Perak DAP chief, Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham, told The Malaysian Insider he too was against the Lynas plant, after reading a New York Times report yesterday highlighting a decades-old radioactive disaster in his Perak home state.
“We should not bring to our shores things that have been rejected by others,” the Beruas MP said when contacted.
The New York Times reported eight leukaemia cases over the last five years in the former mining town of Bukit Merah, the site of a rare earths refinery for Japanese company, Mitsubishi Chemicals back in the 1990s.
The influential US newspaper added that the community of 11,000 people should only have one case every 30 years under normal circumstances.
Locals there have blamed Mitsubishi Chemicals for the spate of birth defects suffered by former workers exposed to the radioactive material, a view shared by healthcare personnel treating those affected by the radiation.
Ngeh said he understood that the world needs rare earth, and if a plant were to be built in Kuantan, it must be far away from residential areas and waste products should be disposed of safely.
But Fuziah said incidents of toxic effluents leaching into the ground and contaminating water sources nationwide have been widely reported, adding that it had already affected Sungai Balok, which runs through the industrial area just north of Kuantan and into the South China Sea.
