In this, the third part of a series about Coalition plans for nuclear power in Australia, Peter Farley asks the question – How would we establish a nuclear power industry? It is often claimed that many countries are going nuclear and if Australia wants to be a ‘Developed Country’ we should have nuclear power. If…
The state which blazed the trail for lithium ion grid scale batteries – South Australia with the Tesla big battery in 2017 – is to get a far bigger big battery. While the Hornsdale Power Reserve, as it is properly known, originally had 129 MWh of storage, a new battery in the state’s south east…
Lithium ion battery materials group Lithium Australia and Mineral Resources (MinRes) will form a joint venture to commercialise the LieNA process to recover lithium from hard rock spodumene ores. The news comes after Lithium Australia completed the final stage of LieNA piloting activities at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) which commenced in…
More than 14,000 tonnes of soft plastics will be diverted from South Australian landfills every year, thanks to a $20 million investment in advanced recycling technology by the Australian Government. Recycling Plastics Australia in Kilburn will clean and purify soft plastics such as shopping bags, chip packets and food wrappers to create feedstock for new…
What were the five biggest stories of the week? Here’s what visitors to @AuManufacturing were reading. 5) Fortescue backpedals on green hydrogen, heads downstream Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue has backpedaled on its ambitions in green hydrogen, reorganising the mining and energy company and focusing more on familiar downstream green energy opportunities. The company, which has taken what some…
Visy officially opened a new $150 million investment at Penrith on Thursday, and says it is now running the country’s most energy-efficient glass furnace. Visy Chairman Anthony Pratt (pictured on right) said it is Australia’s first oxygen-only fuelled furnace, and uses less than half the energy than the one it replaced. This represented “saving enough…
BHP sets new copper smelting records BHP has set new records for smelted copper production at its South Australian copper mines centred on the Olympic Dam mine, concentrator and smelter. The company achieved record copper mined and concentrate smelted at Olympic Dam in FY24 production was up by 39 per cent to 322kt in the…
Eco Detection, which makes “lab-in-a-box” solutions for automated water quality monitoring, has announced an investment worth $10 million from London Stock Exchange-listed mining services company Capital Limited. In a statement on Friday, the Melbourne-based company said that its Ion-Q platform is currently gaining acceptance over a variety of water monitoring applications. Within mining it supports…
A space camera that can provide images back to Earth at high speed, aiding in disaster resilience operations, land management, and defence, is to be manufactured in Australia. This multi-sensor camera for Earth observation is now in development with Leonardo, Spiral Blue, Nominal Systems and The Australian National University (ANU), brought together under an iLAuNCH…
By Peter Roberts Just as the domestic electricity grid is making quick progress towards decarbonisation, so too are industrial processes such as steelmaking. Australia’s two primary steelmakers have taken different courses in moving towards lower carbon iron and steels. The GFG Alliance at Whyalla is moving from reliance on blast furnace technology towards a combination…