CANBERRA: South Australia’s uranium exports could triple by 2040 but the overall economic impact of an expansion in the uranium mining sector would not be significant, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission’s findings say.
The Commission’s tentative findings, released today, say that if SA simply maintained its market share of the global uranium supply sector, exports would potentially increase by a factor of three as nuclear energy doubled. But this would create only several hundred jobs over the next 14 years.
“An increase in uranium mining and milling of this order would add more than $300 million to state GSP (or 0.23 per cent) and enable the employment (direct and indirect) of approximately 800 persons on a full-time basis by 2030,’’ the findings say.
Growth in the value of the uranium mining industry of 32 per cent by 2029–30 in South Australia would represent significant growth in activity in regional areas. “However, on an economy-wide basis the impacts on real gross state product … are small and these mask the effect of growth at the industry level.
