In 2011, Olympic Dam 🇦🇺 secured environmental approval for the project that would have quadrupled its #uranium output: an open pit alongside the underground mine, lifting production to about 41.9 Mlb U3O8 a year. Over the last twelve months, Olympic Dam as a whole produced about 8.0 Mlb. For scale, those 41.9 Mlb would equal 17% to 21% of the reactor requirements the Red Book 2026 projects for 2035 (203-240 Mlb a year) ⚡ In August 2012, $BHP shelved the expansion to study a less capital-intensive design. Now, fourteen years later, today’s quarterly report removes the open-pit resource altogether 📉 (last row of the table, empty). According to the company, the remaining shallow mineralisation no longer warrants reporting, and the relevant portion has been reassessed as underground mining. In its place, BHP reports for the first time a block cave resource of 10,730 Mt, with not a single tonne converted to reserves. Its uranium grade is 0.19 kg/t U3O8, versus 0.46 in the resource that supports the current mine (SLOS). Getting the same pound of uranium would mean mining and processing about 2.4 times more rock. Copper tells the same story (0.59% versus 1.56%). BHP frames it as bulk, non-selective mining designed for large continuous volumes of rock and, in its own words, “its potential development timeframe is not yet known”. One of the largest uranium deposits in the world is still there, but with no plan to extract it quickly. If that ever changes, it will probably depend more on copper (the mine’s main metal) than on the uranium price: extensions to the mining lease are already tied to investments in the smelter and the concentrator, not to anything related to uranium. 📎 Sources: BHP, Operational review Q1 FY27 (20 Oct 2026); BHP Billiton 20-F FY2012; World Nuclear News (22 Aug 2012); Red Book 2026.