Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh is asking Putrajaya and Lynas Corp to reveal if the Australian miner will refine uranium-bearing rare earth ore mined from Malawi at the controversial RM700 million plant in Pahang’s Gebeng industrial area.
Lynas Corp is building the plant ostensibly to refine ore from Mount Weld in Western Australia, saying it is cheaper to process in Malaysia rather than in its home country.
“All this while, I thought they were only processing Mount Weld ore. And now this, [ore] from Malawi, which contains uranium.
“Is Lynas lying? What other things are Lynas hiding?” she said to The Malaysian Insider today.
The PKR vice-president said she recently found out the Sydney-based company had won a deal to mine rare earths from the south African nation, which has been reported to contain the more radioactive material, uranium, used to produce nuclear energy.
In its company report dated September 6, 2007, Lynas Corp announced it had bought the Kangankunde Carbonatite Complex (KGK) deposit in Malawi for US$4 million (RM12 million), where it hopes to produce at least 5,000 tonnes of rare earths a year.
“Importantly, the deposit has extremely low thorium and uranium levels for a rare earths deposit,” it highlighted in the same report.
