Thirty years after his first anti-uranium benefit gig at Sydney Town Hall, Environment Minister Peter Garret approved the expansion of the Beverley Uranium mine in South Australia.

The Beverley uranium mine is 520km north of Adelaide, deep in the heart of the South Australian desert. This is an area of low rainfall with sparse vegetation, reliant on underground water for development. Discovered in 1969, the ore body of approximately 21,000 tonnes of uranium oxide has an average grade of 0.18% and stretches four kilometres by 500 metres.

Minister Garrett's decision to expand the mine equates to a six-fold increase in the size of the Beverley borefields - from 16 square km to more than 100 square km - radically expanding the impact area into which hundreds of millions of litres of liquid radioactive waste is being discharged.

We are being told that the decision came after 'comprehensive, scientifically-robust and transparent process in the assessment of the potential environmental impacts.' Who would believe that an Environment Minister would describe 90 million litres of liquid radioactive and acidic mine waste being discharged into groundwater in one year as 'world's best practice?' Peter Garrett may have decided to swallow a bitter pill to gain his Ministry, but he shouldn't expect the public to swallow the idea that what is going on at Beverley is in any way acceptable.

The dangerous in-situ leaching mining technique being used at Beverley is at the heart of the wider controversy. Large quantities of sulphuric acid are pumped directly into the underground water aquifer to make the uranium soluble. The solution is returned to the surface, the uranium is removed for processing and the remains are pumped back into the water table. What is returned is often highly acidic and radioactive as radionuclides and other heavy metals, once dormant in sand granules, are mobilised.

As it is almost impossible to accurately monitor the migration of water in the aquifer, the extent and degree of contamination from this practice is unknown. It is unlikely that the aquifers are isolated and that water will not migrate out of the region or contaminate the Great Artesian Basin. Commercially the acid-leach technique is no longer used in the US, as previous operations in the US and Eastern Europe have led to significant ground contamination.

Acid in-situ leaching is a technique not used anywhere in the OECD due to its shocking record of groundwater contamination, and will ultimately result in turning the Beverley aquifer into a liquid radioactive waste dump. To extract a tonne of yellowcake here takes 18 tonnes of sulphuric acid and a tonne of hydrogen peroxide, not to mention the extreme cost of water. Beverley is in the driest state in the driest continent on earth. South Australia can't afford to give up the water that the Beverley mine will pollute.

In fact, pumping millions of litres of strongly acid or alkaline solution into the ground water to strip uranium from the host rock should be considered a crime. The Environment Minister's use of powers under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999 to expand this uranium mine provides yet more urgency to the Senate Inquiry into the effectiveness and operations of the Act currently underway.

Australia should not be involved in the uranium mining industry. It is an industry that remains extremely hazardous to human health and requires huge amounts of our already scarce water resources. It creates an eternal pollution legacy for future generations of Australians to deal with. It is a dirty industry that leaves behind waste products that are radioactive for thousands of years and ultimately feeds the dangerous international nuclear industry.