News & Views item - October 2007

 

The Chief Scientist and the Pulp Mill at Bell Bay. (October 8, 2007)

 Pulp mill at Skutskär, south-eastern Sweden
     Is Gunns' proposed pulp mill at Bell bay on Tasmania's Tamar River approved or not approved?

The Minister for the Environment and Water Malcolm Turnbull says it is conditionally approved.

 

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has defended the Federal Government's approval of the Tasmanian pulp mill with the 24 extra environmental conditions suggested by the chief scientist, Jim Peacock.

 

But Commonwealth chief scientist Jim Peacock says he is still waiting on further testing that could determine whether the Gunns pulp mill goes ahead suggesting that as far as Dr Peacock is concerned, it has yet to be approved.

Dr Peacock says the extra recommendations contained in his report must be undertaken and approved before construction of the controversial mill can get the final tick of approval.

He told Macquarie Regional Radio he still has some environmental concerns about possible toxic run-offs.

"We found the work that had been done for Gunns by consultants and others was inadequate in our view," he said.

"We couldn't recommend to Minister Turnbull that things should proceed until such time as a quality analysis was carried out."

 

Apparently the mill is somewhat approved.

 

And then there are the concerns raised by members of the public the regarding of which the chief scientist was told (á la Joh Bjelke-Petersen') "don't you worry about that" -- such as the effect on nearby agriculture and the matter of the required timber supply, how that was to be met and what environmental impact that would have.

 

Concerning that matter of timber availability, Dr Chris Beadle, whom Australasian Science describes as "a professional forest scientist based in Hobart with 35 years' experience", has written in the October 2007 issue, "Tasmania's Pulp Mill: The Forgotten Issue is Wood Supply".

 

As TFW noted on October 4:

 

Taking Senator Brown's figure of 200,000 hectares that equates to 772 square miles or a paddock of  28 miles x 27.8 miles. Or perhaps think of drawing a circle with a radius of 15.7miles (25¼ km) from the CBD of Sydney or Melbourne or in fact from the proposed site of the pulp mile to the outskirts of Launceston.

 

It's interesting to note a sentence from the Chief Scientist's report: (section 1.1.6)  ...The potential impact of wood supply to the mill is exempt from assessment by the Commonwealth under S.75 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

 

While the question may, or may not, be exempt from Commonwealth assessment, it doesn't mean that the chief scientist and his committee was legally precluded from addressing it.

 

What we don't know is whether or not Dr Peacock raised any objections concerning the areas that he was told should be of no concern, which brings up the matter of how the chief scientist viewed his brief, i.e. that he is the servant of the people or the political party that happens to be in power and appointed him.

 

Dr Beadle in addressing the problem lays out what appears to be a conservative assessment of what would be involved to obtain a sustainable supply for the proposed Gunns mill.

 

[N]utrient and water supply limit growth rates in Tasmania. Low temperatures in winter also restrict growth, and average harvestable yields are probably about 15 green metric tonnes per hectare per year(GMt/ha/year)

     Simple arithmetic shows that about 260,000 ha of eucalypt plantations dedicated to pulpwood production would be required to meet the total wood supply for the mill which when operating at full capacity, is stated to require 4 million GMt of wood to annually produce 1.1 million Mt of kraft pulp. If 10% of the wood used by the mill was pine, the area required for eucalypts would be about 235,000 ha.

 

The calculation assumes a rotation harvest of 15 years, in short even including the possible contribution of pine, 15,667 hectares of eucalypt plantation would need to be harvested annually on a 15 year cycle, and Dr Beadle goes on to show that the hectarage, age and consignment of eucalypt plantations is such that large tracts of native forest would need to be cut in addition to plantation timber to adequately supply the proposed mill.