The Australian Minerals Research

CSIRO Manufacturing, Materials and Minerals Group Executive Dr Steve Morton said world-class mineral processing research capability was essential to help the industry address challenges such as declining ore grades, increasing costs and greater competition.

“In 2003, CSIRO committed $15 million to expand our mineral processing laboratories in Western Australia and create a research facility that would enable increased collaboration between public research groups and industry,” Dr Morton said.

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Safety in Uranium Mining

In practice, radiation protection is based on the understanding that small increases over natural levels of exposure are not likely to be harmful but should be kept to a minimum. To put this into practice the International Commission for Radiological Protection (ICRP) has established recommended standards of protection (both for members of the public and radiation workers) based on three basic principles:

* Justification. No practice involving exposure to radiation should be adopted unless it produces a net benefit to those exposed or to society generally.
* Optimisation. Radiation doses and risks should be kept as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), economic and social factors being taken into account.
* Limitation. The exposure of individuals should be subject to dose or risk limits above which the radiation risk would be deemed unacceptable.

These principles apply to the potential for accidental exposures as well as predictable normal exposures.

Underlying these is the application of the "linear hypothesis" based on the idea that any level of radiation dose, no matter how low, involves the possibility of risk to human health. This assumption enables "risk factors" derived from studies of high radiation dose to populations (eg from Japanese bomb survivors) to be used in determining the risk to an individual from low doses (ICRP Publication 60). However the weight of scientific evidence does not indicate any cancer risk or immediate effects at doses below ablout 50 millisievert (mSv) per year.

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