UP to 12,500 jobs and $750million annually would be lost if the Illawarra’s coalmines closed.

That’s the devastating scenario community, union and industry leaders paint after Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and Greens leader Bob Brown called for exports and, eventually, the industry to be phased out. Read more

KEMEROVO. Feb 16 (Interfax) – The Kemerovo-based Stroiservis plans
to invest 796 million rubles this year in its coal enterprises in the
region, which will be about the same as in 2006.
The money will be spent on new machinery and construction of two
concentrating facilities with capacity for 1 million tonnes of coal Read more

New Delhi, Feb 15 (IANS) National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML), two state-run firms, Thursday announced their tie-up to explore opportunities of joint business development in coal mining.

NTPC has recently entered the coal mining sector and has been allotted six coalmines by the government. It would require huge quantities of equipment, spares and dedicated services for maintenance in future, NTPC said in a statement. Read more

Cernice, North Bohemia: Scores of Greenpeace activists today formed a huge inscription Climate Change Starts Here at the Cernice coal mine near Most to protest against raising the official Czech limits for brown coal mining.

Jan Rovensky, head of the Czech Greenpeace climate campaign, said that if the limits are broken, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions will double. He added that breaking the limits would also strengthen a non-sustainable structure of Czech energy industry. Read more

VIENNA, Austria – Shrugging off the threat of tougher U.N. sanctions,
Iran has set up more than 300 centrifuges in two uranium enrichment units at its underground Natanz complex, diplomats and officials said Monday.

The move potentially opens the way for larger scale enrichment that could be used to create nuclear warheads. Iranian leaders have repeatedly said the Natanz underground hall would house first 3,000 centrifuges and ultimately 54,000 machines. Read more

TORONTO, ONTARIO — Sparton Resources Inc. (CDNX:SRI.V) (the “Company”) reported today that it will shortly begin an exploration program on the company’s wholly owned +150 claim (2400 ha) “Whiskey” copper- uranium property in central New Brunswick. The claim areas are easily accessible by a network of main and secondary roads and trails.

The property acquisition was made as a consequence of Sparton’s research into non conventional metallic resources, and the association of copper and uranium occurrences with phosphate rich host rocks. Read more

HONG KONG – Australia’s PepinNini Minerals Ltd. PNN.AX has sealed a deal with China’s state-owned Sinosteel Corp to develop the Crocker Well and Mt. Victoria uranium deposits in South Australia, the company said on Wednesday.

Sinosteel will pay the Australian explorer A$28.5 million (US$22.1 million) for a 60 percent stake in the project, subject to approval from the governments of both countries. The two had signed a memorandum of understanding in September. Read more