Lynas Corp taking advantage of lax environmental laws, says Fuziah
By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal, The Malaysian Insider
KUALA LUMPUR, May 25 — PKR’s Fuziah Salleh accused Lynas Corp of adopting weaker safety standards for its Kuantan rare earths refinery, relying on lax local environmental laws to use suspect Chinese standards.
The Kuantan MP based her claims on the Australian miner’s previous proposal to the Terengganu state government back in 2007, which quoted standards from China for the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (Lamp).
“It goes further to strengthen my argument that Lynas is using different standards in Australia and different standards in Malaysia. Lynas is also taking advantage of the lax environmental laws in Malaysia to push a proposal using the Chinese Standards,” she said in a statement.
According to Fuziah, the radiation specific activity based on Chinese standards sets the limit of 74 becquerels per gram (Bq/g), therefore the waste will be categorised as “non-radioactive.”
This, she said was a problem because based on limits set by Australia’s Department of Industry and Resources (Doir) on the Lynas Concentration Plant in Mt Weld, any radiation specific activity exceeding the limit of 1Bq/g was already deemed “radioactive”.
The amendments to work approval on the Lynas Rare Earth Concentration Plant dated April 1, 2011 revealed that the radiation specific activity of the tailings of the Lynas Plant in Mt Weld had exceeded the radioactive limit. The Environmental Assessment Report that accompanied the amendments also stated that Lynas needed to increase the impermeability of the lining of their storage facility and that Lynas has not complied to the original requirements.
In contrast, Fuziah said that Malaysia’s Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB) had easily approved environmental the impact assessment (EIA) on the Lynas Plant in Gebeng without “any criticisms.”
“Considering the PEIA on LAMP was received by the DOE of Pahang on the January 20, 2008 and approved 3 weeks later on the February 15, 2008, I wonder why is it that it was too easy for DOE of Pahang to give an approval on such a high risk project. This goes to strengthen my argument that the Malaysian government does not have the capacity to monitor the enforcement on the safety of an industry such as Lamp,” added Fuziah.
