The environmental group Earthlife Namibia has taken an Australian uranium company, which intends to open a uranium mine near Blutkuppe in the Namib Naukluft Park to task for not making the relevant environmental impact assessment available to the public. The Australian company Paladin Resources intends to start uranium mining with far reaching environmental consequences. "Earthlife Namibia strongly denounces that the foreign company has not yet published its final environmental assessment report in contradiction to assurance to do so more than two months ago", Earthlife spokesperson Bertchen Kohrs said in a statement this week. The EIA report was supposed to be available on Paladin’s website, but this was not done.

"It is unacceptable that Namibians are denied the chance to question the company’s assessment while it pushes government to grant a licence for the planned uranium mining ". This would be a violation of government policies in regard with big projects that might have dangerous impacts. Earthlife criticizes furthermore that Swakopmund and Walvis Bay residents mainly be affected by Paladin’s operations, were sufficiently informed about the dangers of the intended uranium mining. The extremely high consumption of already scarce water sources to be pumped through pipelines from the Swakopmund terminal reservoir was another concern, the environmental group said. Earthlife appealed to all civil society organisations and trade unions not to allow operations, which have detrimental and irreversible consequences to the environment and its people, just to please a foreign investor.