Qualla: Olympic Dam mine

Olympic Dam mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geomartin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The most extraordinary thing about Olympic Dam is that you cannot see it. There is no towering open pit, no mountain of waste rock visible for miles. The ore lies some 350 metres beneath the flat red plain near Roxby Downs, reached by shafts and declines that drop into a labyrinth of tunnels carved through one of the richest single ore bodies ever found. Down there, in the dark, sits the largest known deposit of uranium on the planet, bound up with copper, gold and silver in quantities that have made this remote corner of the outback a fixture of global mineral markets and a flashpoint of Australian argument for more than forty years.

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Image: Geomartin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Olympic Dam mine: An Ore Body Without Equal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J. Thomas Nash, Public domain. What WMC Resources stumbled onto in 1975, drilling near a sheep station, defies easy comparison. Olympic Dam is the world's largest known uranium deposit and ranks among the largest copper resources anywhere, an iron oxide copper gold body holding billions of tonnes of ore. Coppe...

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Image: J. Thomas Nash | Public domain

Olympic Dam mine: Whose Country This Is

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geomartin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The mine stands on the traditional lands of the Kokatha people, with the neighbouring Arabana also holding deep connection to this country. Their relationship with Olympic Dam has been fraught from the start. The legal framework that authorised the mine, the Roxby Downs Indenture...

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Image: Geomartin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Olympic Dam mine: The Thirst of the Desert

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geomartin, CC BY-SA 3.0. A mine this size in a place this dry needs water, and Olympic Dam's appetite is staggering. It draws around 35 million litres of Great Artesian Basin water every day, pumped from bore fields up to 200 km away, which makes it the largest industrial user of underground water in the...

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Image: Geomartin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Olympic Dam mine: Decades of Dissent

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danimations, CC BY-SA 4.0. Opposition is woven through Olympic Dam's whole history. Even before the mine opened, anti-nuclear protesters held a vigil at the site through 1983 and 1984, and hundreds were arrested. When BHP, which took over in 2005, proposed a 30 billion dollar expansion to dig an enormous o...

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Image: Danimations | CC BY-SA 4.0