Lynas has invested RM700 million in a refinery to process the radioactive ore by end of this year, making it the only new plant built outside China which has its own reserves of rare earths.
“Storage onsite will never be a final solution,” regulator Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB) director-general Raja Datuk Abdul Aziz Raja Adnan told The Malaysian Insider.
He said in an interview that the approved storage area in the plant was only meant to facilitate the refining process as a “temporary area to hold the waste.”
Lynas had said earlier this week that it had “perfectly good permission (from the government) to store it onsite, safely, forever” if plans to recycle its thorium — the radioactive element found in nearly all rare earth deposits — waste for further industrial use did not find a commercial application.
Its executive chairman Nicholas Curtis said that special storage dams that can hold six years of waste have been built that will cause “zero exposure” to the public.
“Two-thirds or more are gypsum. There is no issue with respect to it being used as plasterboard and other markets. Malaysia is a net importer of gypsum so we will use it in commercial quantities for sure. This increases our storage (for the radioactive waste) to 24 years,” he told The Malaysian Insider in an interview on Monday.
It plans to ramp up production to 22,000 tonnes per year of the material that is crucial to high-technology applications such as smartphones, hybrid cars and even bombs, thereby producing about 120 tonnes of thorium per year or nearly 3,000 tonnes after 24 years.
“We will not let them accumulate that much. We will stop them. They cannot be accumulating that much. There must be a parallel process,” said Raja Aziz.
Local residents and environmentalists have countered Lynas’ claims that its raw material has only two per cent of the thorium as Malaysia’s last rare earth project in Bukit Merah, stating that the waste would build up over time, especially as it was reported that Lynas would process 10 times as much ore as the Asian Rare Earth (ARE) plant.
“The waste is a sitting time bomb,” Environmental Protection Society of Malaysia (EPSM) president Nithi Nesadurai had said.
The ARE plant has been linked to at least eight leukaemia cases with seven deaths after being shut down in 1992, and is still undergoing a cleanup process that is costing over RM300 million.
Raja Aziz said Lynas would have to prove that it could move the thorium out of its site in a safe way during the pre-operating period which lasts for three years, failing which it would eventually not be given a full operating licence.
“From the ARE experience, the public will not allow the buildup of thorium. That is why when Lynas says it has submitted the application we say it is incomplete. If you are unable to move the waste, what are you going to do? This is very important,” he said.
“We will ask them, what if you can’t sell it? If the waste continues to grow, we will stop importation and accumulation,” he added.
Environmentalists and residents living near the factory site in the Gebeng industrial zone have raised questions over the potential environmental hazards arising from radioactive waste being produced and stored at the plant.
But Lynas expects to receive a preliminary operating licence from the AELB before September which will be renewed as a full licence within three years should the plant comply with agreed standards.
The company hopes to earn RM8 billion in annual revenues from 2013 based on the refined metals’ current prices, when it will produce one-third of the world’s demand outside of China. - Malaysian Insider
