News – full story
LAMP has met heavy resistance from campaigners
30/11/2012
Lynas finally starts up at rare earths plant
Ends months of delays
Richard Jansen
AUSTRALIAN miner Lynas announced that after months of delays it has started production at a controversial rare earths refinery in Malaysia.
The company says that it has finally fed the first raw materials into the plant’s kiln, and plans to progress to continuous feeding within the next week.
The Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP), based in Gebeng, was given final approval to operate in early November, when a Malaysian court dismissed a series of appeals from activists looking to get its operating licence scrapped. Shortly after, it announced that it was “on the threshold of production,” and intended to start the plant up in December.
“This is a significant milestone for Lynas,” says Lynas chairman Nicholas Curtis. “The operation of the LAMP is now a reality, and the LAMP will provide real data that will assure people that [the plant] is entirely safe for our local communities and the environment.”
The rare earths refinery has met with heavy resistance from environmental campaigners and local residents over the past year. A barrage of appeals, government inquiries and legal challenges have pushed back the plant’s opening date by several months, and fuelled speculation that the fully-constructed plant would never be allowed to begin commercial operations. Since the beginning of 2012, the company has seen its share price cut almost in half.
Much of the local opposition to the facility stems from a previous rare earths plant in Bukit Merah, which has since been linked to leukaemia and birth defects. Lynas, however, argues that these fears are completely unfounded, saying that the old refinery produced waste 100 times more radioactive than LAMP will.
The company says that the first finished materials – rare earth metals used in high-tech manufacturing – will be on the market in Q1 2013, with the plant ramping up to its full 22,000 t/y of production by the end of the year. If and when it achieves this, LAMP will have enough capacity to produce around a sixth of the world’s supply of rare earth elements, the vast majority of which is currently controlled by China.
