Ah, now I understand, Protagoras.

>>Your naïveté is perhaps exceeded only by the naivete of the constituents of Queensland who "democratically elected" rogue, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen<<

It is democracy, and democratically elected governments, that you have problems with.

Well I hate to break it to you, but that's the system we have here.

We elect politicians. They vote on legislation that we - simply because we are citizens - agree to abide by.

One of the other ideas behind it is that we don't get to pick and choose which laws we abide by and which we ignore.

There are of course alternative systems in operation around the world. Perhaps you'd like to recommend one of those to us.

In the meantime, suck it up. It is, quite specifically, "Democracy in action".

It should be stressed that Olympic Dam is not a uranium mine - it's a large copper mine that produces some gold and uranium on the side.

Therefore, if you want to talk about energy inputs into uranium mining, or water consumption into uranium mining, it's absolutely mendacious to cherry-pick Olympic Dam for such a discussion. Handling all that ore that is primarily mined for its copper content and smelting all that copper is where the majority of Olympic Dam's energy consumption goes. If you want to look at uranium mining, consider a typical uranium mine - Ranger, Honeymoon, Rossing, Cigar Lake, or so forth.

However, despite this, we could be providing Olympic Dam's entire electricity consumption - including providing all its water needs via seawater desalination - using only a tiny fraction of the mine's uranium output, even if this uranium was used really inefficiently in once-through use as low-enriched uranium in old-fashioned light water reactors. In fact, the present uranium output at Olympic Dam is almost enough to single handedly supply all of Australia's electricity - again, assuming only once-through inefficient use in LWRs.

Also - "radioactive waste" tailings? No. It's rock. It comes out of the ground, where all that radioactivity is already naturally present.