The pollutants are being carried into the wetlands where they concentrate in the silt over the dry season. Aborigines living downstream, whose food comes from hunting, fishing and gathering from the land, oppose such releases. The Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry recommended the tailings be returned to the pit when mining ceases. ERA wanted the tailings to be left as a terraced hill. Inevitably as the hill eroded radioactive sands would drift into the creek.
Aborigines insist they be returned to the pit.
Even so pollutants will leach out infinitely faster than occurred before mining. At Roxby mine the tailings dam could one day be the highest landform in the area. Here too evaporation was supposed to remove all the water from the dam. However, water has seeped through underlying porous limestone formations to contaminate the ground waters. Planned rehabilitation amounts to no more than a thin covering of soil and vegetation, a poor defence against desert winds for thousands of years.