BY JIM GREEN
Federal industry and science minister Nick Minchin announced on February 8 that the Howard government no longer intends to co-locate a store for long-lived intermediate-level radioactive wastes alongside the planned underground dump for low-level wastes in central South Australia.
Instead, the government plans to establish a separate store on commonwealth land taking wastes generated by federal government agencies. A site for the store will not be identified until after the next federal election.
Minchin said that state governments wishing to dispose of their own intermediate-level wastes could make their own arrangements or ask the federal government for permission to use its site.
The federal government is not ruling out any state or territory as the site for a store. Nor will it rule out using federal land acquisition powers if it cannot find a site on commonwealth land. Nor has the federal government ruled out trying to over-ride or ignore South Australian legislation passed last year which prohibits the siting in South Australia of a national intermediate-level waste store.
So the only real concession from Minchin is that the intermediate-level waste store will not be co-located with the planned dump in the Woomera region of South Australia.
Minchin said the decision to rule out co-location was prompted by the anti-dump campaign "waged against us" in South Australia. "It is time to put an end to the deliberate scare campaign by extremist groups seeking to whip up community concern about co-location and to use South Australians to give weight to their anti-nuclear stance", he stated in his February 8 media release.
In response to Minchin's comment about anti-nuclear "extremists", the Adelaide Advertiser reminded Minchin in a February 10 editorial that an independently conducted poll last year found that 87-96% of South Australians are opposed to the federal government's plans.
Co-location of intermediate-level wastes, including wastes arising from the reprocessing of irradiated fuel from the nuclear research reactor in Sydney, with the underground dump had previously been the government's "first siting option".
Minchin admitted his decision to rule out co-location was motivated by concern that plans for a low-level dump could be jeopardised by the (accurate) public perception that the dump would be the thin edge of the radioactive waste wedge.
The decision could turn out to be another tactical blunder by Minchin and his advisors. It has not had a positive response in South Australia. The February 10 Advertiser editorial said that the "problem remains that South Australia is still a possible, if not likely, location as the site of an intermediate level dump".
South Australian Liberal Premier John Olsen welcomed the decision to rule out co-location but warned that South Australians would be equally intolerant of plans to build the intermediate-level store anywhere else in the state. Despite this posturing, the Olsen government's willingness to accept an underground dump for low-level wastes at Woomera could be a significant factor in the next state election, expected late this year or early 2002.