The proposal is to mine alluvial diamonds in the Bow River area of Western Australia.
The proposal involves the establishment of a plant to process riverine gravel. The fine waste material will be disposed of in a tailing dam and the coarse waste material dumped near the processing plant. The diamondiferous material will be concentrated in a Heavy Medium Separater and then sorted using an x-ray diamond sorter. The plant will process 4,000 tonnes per day.
The orebody covers approximately 500 ha and has an average depth of 2 metres. The deposit will be mined progressively allowing rehabilitation to be ongoing during the mining operation. All topsoils and black soils will be stockpiled for rehabilitation or placed directly over mined out areas. The expected lifetime of the project is seven years. It will employ approximately 80 people on-site and 2 or 3 in Kununurra.
On completion of the project all plant equipment and camp facilities would be removed and the areas rehabilitated.
The Authority determined that potential for environmental impact would not require it to be formally accessed under Part IV of the Environmental Protection Act 1986, but assessed the Notice of Intent and made a number of recommendations.
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