Australia's largest silver mine dangerous to environment: report

Australia's largest zinc, lead and silver mine posed a serious danger to the environment and should be shut down, according to a new report.

Up to 760 million U.S. dollars would need to be spent to rectify the McArthur River mine, located in Australia's Northern Territory (NT), which has experienced operational problems since it opened in 1995, report author Gavin Mudd said.

Mudd, a professor at Melbourne's Monash University and member of the Mineral Policy Institute, said a high proportion of the project's waste rock was acid-forming and therefore damaging to the environment.

An environmental impact statement completed before the mine began operations estimated the dangerous, acid-forming rock would make up 11 percent of the waste, but an independent 2015 report found more than 90 percent of the waste was acid-forming.

Mudd's analysis indicated that the high rate of acidic rock dumped next to the pit reacted with the air and gave off toxic fumes.

He said leaving a pile of the dangerous waste rock next to the mine once it finished operations, as is the current plan, would poison the local environment for decades.

The report said spending as much as 760 million U.S. dollars to backfill the pit was the only viable option to rehabilitate the site.

"That's just the cost of doing business," Mudd told the Guardian on Monday.

Traditional owners of the land have previously protested the mine over discoloration of water downstream from the site and contamination of fish eaten by the Indigenous community.

The report called for a public commission into the mine to be set up "immediately" to assess how the site could be made safe.

"Until then, mining should stop," Mudd said. Endit