COMMENT | M'sia's devastation creep: What's next with Lynas?

COMMENT | In February 2020, regulators imposed a strict licensing condition requiring Lynas to relocate its radioactive cracking and leaching operations back to Australia by July 2023.

This was a mandate that included an explicit ban on importing raw Lanthanide Concentrate to halt the accumulation of radioactive waste in Kuantan.

Yet as the deadline arrived, the government caved, quietly lifting both the relocation requirement and the import ban in October 2023.

By 2026, with over 1.6 million tonnes of radioactive residue already mounded on-site, Lynas capitalised on Putrajaya’s retreat to push for expanded plant capacity fed by uninterrupted shipments of Australian ore.

That surrender culminated on March 2, 2026, when Malaysia granted Lynas a 10-year operating licence renewal through 2036.

Abandoning the previous three-year oversight cycles gave the company a decade-long runway, anchored by a five-year grace period until 2031 to commercialise its thorium extraction process.

By anchoring the plant’s future to a...

COMMENT | In February 2020, regulators imposed a strict licensing condition requiring Lynas to relocate its radioactive cracking and leaching operations back to Australia by July 2023.

This was a mandate that included an explicit ban on importing raw Lanthanide Concentrate to halt the accumulation of radioactive waste in Kuantan.

Yet as the deadline arrived, the government caved, quietly lifting both the relocation requirement and the import ban in October 2023.

By 2026, with over 1.6 million tonnes of radioactive residue already mounded on-site, Lynas capitalised on Putrajaya’s retreat to push for expanded plant capacity fed by uninterrupted shipments of Australian ore.

That surrender culminated on March 2, 2026, when Malaysia granted Lynas a 10-year operating licence renewal through 2036.

Abandoning the previous three-year oversight cycles gave the company a decade-long runway, anchored by a five-year grace period until 2031 to commercialise its thorium extraction process.

By anchoring the plant’s future to a 2031 licence horizon, the government has set a dangerous regulatory trap.

Putrajaya publicly promised that no new Permanent Disposal Facilities (PDFs) will be approved once the current site reaches capacity in December 2026.

Yet, as established in the environmental impact assessment (EIA), thorium extraction remains an unproven, early-stage research project.

Dangling a pilot-scale fix cleverly buys Lynas five more years of uninhibited dumping without a viable, long-term disposal solution.

Peat ecosystems are notoriously prone to flooding and subsidence. While the company's 2041 decommissioning plan assumes capping will isolate the radioactive material, synthetic liner systems inevitably degrade, guaranteeing that long-lived radioisotopes and heavy metals will leach into local aquatic ecosystems long after corporate oversight ends.

This entire saga exposes a classic model of systemic institutional failure fuelled by malfeasance, not necessarily brown envelopes changing hands, but institutional capture where state regulators prioritise corporate profits and foreign geopolitical leverage over the health and legal rights of their own citizens.

The true driver behind this regulatory surrender became unmistakable over two weeks in March 2026:

• March 2, 2026: Malaysia grants Lynas a ten-year license renewal.

• March 10, 2026: Lynas locks in up to three-quarters of its heavy rare earth output for Japan.

• March 16 2026: Lynas signs a US$96 million (RM391 million) agreement to supply the US Department of Defense - the American military - with material that feeds weapons manufacturing.

The public can draw its own conclusions. Multi-million-dollar defence and industrial supply pacts are not negotiated in six days; they require pre-arranged regulatory assurances.

What weight did these commitments carry in the renewal decision?

Foreign interest vs local environmental safety

Local environmental safety and scientific scrutiny were traded away to satisfy foreign strategic interests, forcing Malaysia to absorb the permanent toxic liability of imported waste while foreign superpowers capture the strategic reward.

Indeed, the deal immediately sparked fierce parliamentary backlash over concerns that locally processed rare earths could feed weapon systems deployed in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The safety review never stood a chance to decide the plant’s fate.

We have watched the political version of this too. In 2018, Pakatan Harapan had promised, at campaign rallies if not in the written manifesto, to shut Lynas down.

Within the following year, they reversed, and the reason offered was not safety but investor confidence, the fear of frightening away capital.

Australia's own high commissioner then brazenly and condescendingly praised the reversal in August 2019:

“Evidence-based decision-making is practically the definition of good economic governance… Given the international attention that the Lynas issue has attracted, this pro-science decision is a green light, signalling that Malaysia is a safe destination for serious investment in advanced manufacturing… Because of the special properties of rare earths, the ongoing presence of Lynas puts Malaysia at the heart of a global supply chain on which a variety of high-tech, low-emission industries depend."

Our government chose foreign capital over its own citizens’ concerns, and the dismissive comments of the high commissioner show how the rest of the world sees Malaysia: as long as we use evidence that works in favour of foreign investment, then we are welcome to join the “international community”.

One should also remind the former high commissioner who appears to have a poor understanding of the same that the arms industry is also notoriously high in emissions.

Different waste, same paperwork

And let’s go back to Bukit Merah. Forty years ago, Japanese-backed rare earth processing left radioactive waste in a Malaysian community, and it took sickness, a lawsuit, and a hundred-million-dollar cleanup to answer for it.

ALSO READ: Bukit Merah survivor: Our tears have run dry

Today, Japanese-financed rare earth processing is leaving radioactive waste in another Malaysian community, on ground even less able to hold it, this time backed by American military demand.

One wonders where the American military is deploying these resources.

Yet the same regulator that oversaw the first disaster has signed off on the second for another 10 years.

The incompetence, complacency, and the apparent corruption are not three separate failures. They are one failure from three angles. An institution that cannot measure has nothing to answer for.

One that answers to no one has no reason to measure. And into that gap steps whoever has the money - a developer, a foreign government, a company grading its own data - to take what it can from our country, at the long-term cost of our ecosystems and the health of our communities.

The waste in Gebeng will remain radioactive long after every person reading this, and every official who approved it, is gone.

READ MORE: COMMENT | M'sia's devastation creep: Lynas' licence to operate is 'radioactive stain' on our governance

The bare minimum owed to nearby communities was a transparent process with meaningful protections, not a predetermined outcome masked by obscure paperwork.

So much for a government that claims to govern for the people, when it treats our homeland as a sacrificial zone for foreign capital rather than a sanctuary to protect for all Malaysians.

What needs to happen now

1. Regulatory and policy mandates

End regulatory double standards: Reclassify Water Leach Purification (WLP) residue carrying massive volumes of long-lived radionuclides at an activity concentration of 6Bq/g as Low-Level Waste (LLW) in line with Australian standards, ending the Very Low-Level Waste (VLLW) loophole that permits surface storage on flood-prone coastal peatland.

Enforce the relocation order: Re-establish the 2020 licence condition requiring Lynas to relocate radioactive cracking and leaching operations to Australia under a non-negotiable deadline, reversing the 2023 lanthanide concentrate import waiver.

Freeze expansion pending commercial proof: Suspend all capacity expansions and revoke the 2031 grace period until thorium extraction is independently proven viable at commercial scale, rather than an experimental pilot.

Binding waste repatriation: Establish a legally binding timeline backed by severe financial penalties to repatriate all 1.6 million tonnes of legacy radioactive waste to Australia.

Ban waste recycling: Enforce strict European Union/International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) clearance thresholds prohibiting the commercial reuse of Thorium-bearing WLP residue in public road sub-base, construction fill, or soil additives without complete decontamination.

2. Operational and environmental safeguards

Mandate closed-loop zero liquid discharge (ZLD): Require fully enclosed mechanical ZLD systems - pairing reverse osmosis (RO) with evaporators and crystallisers - to stop effluent leaching into shallow aquifers and rivers.

Independent structural and peatland audits: Require third-party geotechnical audits of all waste containment cells on reclaimed peat swamp by independent engineers to verify liner and foundation integrity against settlement and flooding.

3. Technical and health oversight

Mandatory health risk assessment and biomonitoring: Rectify EIA deficiencies by requiring an independent human health risk assessment (HHRA) with baseline human biomonitoring (HBM) - testing blood, hair, and tissue for workers and nearby residents in Gebeng and along Sungai Balok.

Because Thorium-232 (14-billion-year half-life) has no safe radiation threshold, unquantified cumulative exposure renders a claim of "minimal health impact" scientifically invalid. Funding must use an independent escrow trust.

Independent audit of groundwater and mass-balance testing: Audit and retest all groundwater wells and benthic sediments using high-sensitivity analytical methods.

Regulate total contaminant mass rather than liquid concentration at discharge points to outlaw rainwater dilution tactics.

4. Transparency and accountability

Publish complete historical environmental data: Fulfil the 2014 IAEA directive by releasing all raw Environmental Radiological Monitoring Programme (ERMP) datasets from 2012 to the present.

Disclose terms of geopolitical deals: Compel full parliamentary disclosure of the March 2026 10-year licence renewal, the Japanese supply agreement, and the US$96 million US Department of Defense contract to reveal how domestic safety was weighed against foreign military supply chains.

Establish an independent rare earths science commission: As Malaysia cashes in on the global rare earths rush, establish an independent science-based committee to establish the guidelines for the approval and monitoring of these processing plants. We must finally learn the lessons of our past.

None of this is complicated. It is the minimum a government should ask of a foreign company extracting hundreds of millions of dollars whilst polluting resources in a country.

It is what every responsible international company should do as part of its social contract. The rules exist on paper, but nobody has made Lynas follow them in a consequential manner, and this is pervasive in our governance system.

This is the creeping devastation of our country.

A formal rebuttal of any of the arguments, data/facts laid out in this article, whether from the Malaysian government, Lynas, or the Australian High Commission, would be most welcome.

Such a response with facts would help set the record straight with the public and even help open the doors for a full-blown public inquiry.

That would show that all parties truly do care about protecting Tanah Malaysia.

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CHANDRAN NAIR is the founder and CEO of Global Institute for Tomorrow and the author of “Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World”.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.