Plant No. 1

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Ore is hoisted to the surface where it is fed to one of two grinding circuits. After grinding, the resultant slurry passes to a flotation circuit where a series of flotation stages and a further regrinding activity produce a copper concentrate. The concentrate then passes through a leaching circuit which is principally designed to extract uranium from the copper minerals. Uranium is extracted in a solvent extraction plant, producing yellow-cake, which is subsequently calcined to produce uranium oxide concentrate and then packaged in drums for export sales.

After drying, copper concentrate is fed to an Outokumpu flash furnace smelter, which produces blister copper and flash furnace slag. Blister copper is transferred to anode furnaces for fire refining. Anode copper is transported to the refinery where the ISA electro-refining process is used to produce copper cathodes. The slimes from this process are treated separately to recover gold and silver.

The deposit was discovered in 1975 by Western Mining Corporation Ltd which was looking for copper in buried sedimentary rocks. After considering geophysical data a drill hole was sunk near a small stock water dam known as Olympic Dam. It struck copper, and later drilling confirmed a resource of more than 2000 million tonnes of ore containing both copper and uranium. From 1979 the deposit was developed as a Joint Venture with British Petroleum Ltd. In 1985 it was decided to proceed with the project, and production commenced in 1988.

WMC (Olympic Dam Operations) Pty Ltd is the management company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BHP Billiton Limited, which took over WMC Resources in mid 2005. Initially BP Minerals Ltd was a 49% partner in the enterprise, but WMC took over BP Minerals' share in 1993 for $315 million.