Lynas Rare Earths is one of the world’s largest producers of rare earths, founded in 1983 and headquartered in Perth, Australia. The company has two main operations: a mining and beneficiation plant in Mt. Weld, Western Australia and the Lynas Advanced Material Plant (LAMP) in Kuantan, Malaysia.
LAMP generates three types of radioactive wastes from the extraction of rare earths, namely Water Leached Purification (WLP) Solids, Neutralized Underflow (NUF) Solids and Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) residue. Of these, WLP residue, which is radioactive, is the most environmentally controversial.
The Worrying Potential of Radiation Contamination
As early as November and December 2011, LAMP employees and local residents protested that the radioactive waste generated during rare earth processing would endanger the health of local residents and the environment. Thousands of local residents and employees staged a protest outside the plant. In 2012, the Malaysian Department of Environment discovered a leak in LAMP’s radioactive waste disposal system, with contaminants flowing out into the external environment, sparking intense public concern.
In 2014, Japanese researchers analyzed the soil in an estuary near LAMP and found that the levels of radioactive substances such as thorium and radium in the soil, while not exceeding the standards, were significantly higher than those before LAMP’s operation, suggesting that LAMP has a high potential to contaminate the surrounding environment.
In 2018, the Malaysian Ministry of Energy, Science, Technology, Environment & Climate Change (MESTECC) released a report that investigated the environmental impacts caused by the WLP Solids generated from the refining of rare earths at Lynas. The report notes that the way the WLP is subsequently processed and stored could be harmful to the surrounding land and water sources. In a 2018 government administrative review of the Lynas plant, it was found that groundwater near the Lynas plant had been heavily contaminated by toxic elements released.
In 2020, LAMP was again granted a 3-year operating license amid opposition. But the license requires Lynas to remove its Cracking and Leaching (C&L) facility from Malaysia by July 2023, stop importing radioactive materials, and develop a permanent waste disposal plan. The Malaysian government has asked Lynas to construct a permanent waste storage tank to store radioactive waste generated by July 2023. However, reports indicate that the permanent storage tank that Lynas plans to build is unlikely to remain intact after 20 years, and that the modeling of the waste tank does not take into account long-term (tens, hundreds, or thousands of years) radiation leakage due to extreme weather events caused by the environment or climate change. In addition, the radioactive materials in the WLP, thorium and uranium, have half-lives of millions and billions of years and cannot be diluted. Lynas cannot guarantee that these radioactive materials can be safely preserved for millions or billions of years, which will threaten future generations of Malay people.
Studies have shown that Lynas has seriously underestimated the radiation value of WLP. Lynas states on its website and in its Action Plan for WLP Residue Management that the concentration of thorium radiation in WLP is 6 Bq/g. However, according to a research report conducted by Kookmin University on the extraction of thorium from Lynas WLP waste, its radiation level reaches 7.98 Bq/g, which is close to 8 Bq/g. Lynas claims that the Water Leached Purification (WLP) Solid is a “naturally occurring” natural radioactive substance. However, “Friends of Nature” pointed out that these wastes cannot be regarded as natural radioactive materials, because the radioactive materials in Lynas rare earth raw materials have been artificially removed thorium and uranium, and enriched through mechanical and chemical processes. Natural radiation that has been enhanced by scientific and technological processing can no longer be considered as “naturally formed”, and the radionuclides found in industrial waste after technological processing may cause cell mutation and cancer.
According to Lynas’s initial EIA report, the radiation concentration of lanthanide ore excavated by the company in Western Australia was as high as 30.6 Bq/g; before shipping to Malaysia, the company “enriched” the ore so that the radiation concentration of the raw material arriving in Malaysia soared to 61.0 Bq/g, and the radiation level of the WLP residue produced after the rare-earth extraction was as high as 62.0 Bq/g, with thorium at 1,655 ppm and uranium at 22.5 ppm, and the 10-fold difference in the figures was due to the fact that Lynas had only taken into account the decomposition of the mother nucleus of Thorium-232, but had completely ignored the radiation threat caused by the decomposition of the daughter nucleus in its decay chain.
Lee Tan, an activist with the Australian NGO Aidwatch, has long been in contact with local residents: “I’ve spoken to people near the rivers where the wastewater is being discharged, and they say that the fish die, especially after heavy rains,” Tan speculated that health effects such as cancer may not be known for some time, because low-level radiation doses need to accumulate over a long period of time before showing adverse health effects. An example is the Minamata disease in Japan, where mercury in toxic wastewater poisoned seafood. Decades later, residents of a local coastal town developed horrific neurological symptoms from long-term consumption of toxic seafood.
The Government is Taking Action
As of February this year, LAMP has generated more than one million tons of radioactive waste. The Malaysian government, concerned about radiation levels in the cracking and leaching (C&L) process, has ruled that Lynas should shut down the C&L process, which generates radioactive contamination, by January next year.