Qualla: Husab Mine

Husab Mine: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somewhere in the gravel plains east of Swakopmund, machines the size of houses are digging fuel for nuclear reactors out of rock that is half a billion years old. The Husab Mine is one of the largest uranium operations on the planet and the biggest open-pit uranium mine on the African continent, three vast terraced craters gouged into the oldest desert on Earth. It began producing in 2016, and at full stride it can ship thousands of tonnes of uranium oxide a year, enough to power cities on the far side of the world. Yet the ground it disturbs is also home to plants that were already ancient when the first shovel arrived.

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Image: Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Husab Mine: Ore in the Bones of the Earth

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. The uranium at Husab is not scattered randomly. It sits locked in pale granite that welled up hundreds of millions of years ago, during the mountain-building convulsion geologists call the Damara Orogeny, when continents collided and the crust folded the rock that would become Na...

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Image: Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Husab Mine: A Chinese Megaproject in the Desert

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Husab is as much a financial landmark as a geological one. The Australian explorer Extract Resources proved the deposit, but the capital to build the mine came from China. Through a Hong Kong holding company, the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Company took control of the...

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Image: Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Husab Mine: Mining Where the Welwitschia Grows

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Namib is hyper-arid, one of the driest places people have ever tried to work. Swakopmund and the inland station of Gobabeb may see only a few millimetres of rain in a year, and the nearby Rössing records barely thirty to thirty-five. Water is the constraint that shadows every...

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Image: Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Husab Mine: What the Pits Leave Behind

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0. A uranium mine is a calculation that runs for generations. The ore body will not last forever, and when it is exhausted the pits, the towering waste dumps, and the tailings will remain, along with a radiation management plan submitted to Namibia's regulators and audited to keep t...

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Image: Hp.Baumeler | CC BY-SA 4.0