Rare Earth Refinery at Gebang, Kuantan

Production of Rare Earth oxides generate Radioactive waste

Chief Minister of Pahang, Datuk Seri Adnan Yaakob said the whole of the Gebeng industrial zone may as well be closed if the public continues to protest against the setting up of a rare earth refinery because every industry in Gebeng, the nation's chemical and petrochemical hub, produced some form of emission.

“If the people really feel strongly about it, then we can recommend for a total closure of Gebeng, and we shall see the reaction of the 20,000 people working there and that of their families,”

Sorry, Kuantan folks, you have elected him.

As many as 2,500 construction workers are racing to finish the world’s largest refinery rare earth metals at Gebang, Kuantan - the first rare earth ore processing plant to be built outside China in nearly three decades.

Refining rare earth ore usually leaves thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste behind. So the world has largely left the dirty work to Chinese refineries that control 95% of the global rare earths supply. The refineries have also generated thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste.



This helps explain why Australian mining giant, Lynas, is spending $230 million to build a rare earth refinery in Kuantan to refine radioactive ore that are transported from the Mount Weld mine, deep in the Australian desert, 4,000 km away all the way to Kuantan by container ship. The Australian are not even prepared to refine their rare earths in their own zero population desert.


At this moment not many people is aware that

Mitsubishi is quietly spending $100 million cleaning up its former refinery site at Bukit Merah, Perak.


Lai Kwan prepares to bathe her son, who was born with severe mental disabilities. She remembers that while pregnant, she was told to take an unpaid day off only on days when the factory bosses said that a particularly dangerous consignment of ore had arrived.

Residents blamed the Mitsubishi rare earth refinery for birth defects and leukemia cases, many have since died.

The Bukit Merah case is little known even elsewhere in Malaysia because Mitsubishi Chemical quietly agreed to fix the problem even without a legal order to do so. Local protesters had contacted Japanese environmentalists and politicians, who in turn helped persuade the image-conscious company to close the refinery in 1992 and undertake to clean up the site.

Workers in protective gear have already removed 11,000 truckloads of radioactively contaminated material, and tainted soil from beneath it, down to the bedrock as much as 25 feet below to a hill three miles away in a forest reserve and buried the material inside the hill’s core and then entombed it under more than 20 feet of clay and granite.

The toughest part of the Bukit Merah cleanup will come this summer, when robots and workers in protective gear are to start trying to move more than 80,000 steel barrels of radioactive waste from a concrete bunker. They will mix it with cement and gypsum, and then permanently store it in the hilltop repository.

To read more click : Bukit Merah, Perak.



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