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Mines/Australia

Olympic Dam mine

Olympic Dam mine, Australia. Producing, underground, mining uranium, copper, gold, silver since 1988.

Why Olympic Dam is famous

South Australia's Olympic Dam is an underground copper, gold, silver and uranium operation. BHP's Copper South Australia produced 321 kt payable copper, 393 koz gold and 3.6 kt uranium in the year to June 2026. The deposit has no surface outcrop. A magnetic anomaly led to drilling that proved a large copper-gold-uranium body in 1975. The Roxby Downs Indenture Act of 1982 set the mining terms, and copper production began in 1988. BHP bought it with Western Mining Corporation in 2005. Milling capacity was raised to 11 Mtpa in 2023. BHP places it 560 km north-west of Adelaide.1,2,3,4

Story cards

Timeline

  1. 1885Broken Hill Proprietary Company formed6
  2. 1975Olympic Dam drill hole RD15

What kind of deposit

Olympic Dam type (iron oxide copper-gold-uranium)

Olympic Dam today

Where uranium is mined todayWhere copper is mined todayWhere gold is mined todayWhere silver is mined todayMining in Australia

Where next

Mines

ExamplesRanger uranium mineRanger stopped production in January 2021. Olympic Dam still makes 3.6 kt of uranium.7

Events

Owned byBroken Hill Proprietary Company formedBHP's Olympic Dam made 321 kt of payable copper in the year to June 2026.1Led toOlympic Dam drill hole RD1Read what happened near Olympic Dam: Olympic Dam drill hole RD1.1

Deposit types

An example ofOlympic Dam type (iron oxide copper-gold-uranium)A working example of the olympic dam type (iron oxide copper-gold-uranium) type.8

Sources

  1. Form 20-F for the year ended 30 June 2026 BHP Group (SEC)
  2. data/minerals/operations.csv Prospector Trails (internal)
  3. Copper industry History Trust of South Australia (SA History Hub)
  4. Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended 30 June 2026 BHP Group (SEC)
  5. Report GA9508 (Olympic Dam, drill hole RD1 text) Geoscience Australia
  6. History of Broken Hill Broken Hill City Council
  7. Australia's Identified Mineral Resources, uranium (Ranger) Geoscience Australia
  8. Mineral Deposit Models (Bulletin 1693, Cox and Singer, eds., 1986) US Geological Survey

From the Prospector Trails mining history dataset: each fact links to the source it was checked against. Figures are as the source gives them, in the money of their day. Not investment advice.

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Pictures: The laboratories of Marie and Pierre Curie, Paris: room where experiments on uranium ore took place. Photograph, ca. 1900., Unknown (Wellcome Collection) (Public Domain Mark 1.0).