Jim Green
Federal science minister Brendan Nelson announced on July 15 that the Coalition government intends to dump its nuclear waste in the Northern Territory, thus breaching assurances given prior to the 2004 federal election that the radioactive waste would not be imposed on Territorians.
It wasn't a great day for Nelson. He kept fluffing his lines. He said that the material to be dumped in the NT is low-level waste. Wrong. If built, the dump will also take long-lived intermediate-level waste, including waste arising from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).
The waste to be dumped in the NT is orders of magnitude more radioactive — and more hazardous — than the lower-level waste the federal government wanted to dump in South Australia before it abandoned that plan last year.
Nelson said that "there's no high-level waste in Australia". Wrong again. Spent nuclear fuel from Lucas Heights meets the radiological and heat criteria for classification as high-level waste, but ANSTO and the government persist with the fiction that spent fuel is not waste. So it's high-level non-waste!
By the time spent nuclear fuel has been reprocessed in Europe and returned to Australia as reprocessing wastes, the heat has dropped below the high-level cut-off point of 2 kilowatts per cubic metre. But the waste is just as dangerous as spent fuel, as it still contains a toxic soup of uranium fission products and transuranics such as various plutonium isotopes.
Nelson said that "you've got a lot of uranium in the ground up there in the Territory, and that's actually more radioactive than the waste we're talking about". Wrong. The spent fuel reprocessing waste — and some other waste to be dumped in the NT — is far more radioactive and hazardous than uranium.
Predictably, Nelson's announcement was accompanied by misleading claims about medical isotopes produced at Lucas Heights, but no mention of the fact that there is very little if any disruption to isotope supply when the Lucas Heights reactor is closed for extended periods for maintenance.
Nelson repeatedly claimed that every Australian will undergo a nuclear medicine procedure at some stage in their life. Wrong. At one point the minister got so excited he implied that all Australians undergo a nuclear medicine procedure every day. Would that we were so lucky.
In fact, many Australians will never undergo a nuclear medicine procedure. Fewer people would submit to nuclear medicine procedures if the profit-driven overuse of nuclear medicine, especially in private clinics, was more widely understood. Fewer people would submit to nuclear medicine procedures if the attendant risks were better understood.
If nuclear medicine was the criterion for selecting a dump site, which it isn't, the NT would be the last choice because it has fewer nuclear medicine procedures than any other state or territory, and also the fewest nuclear medicine procedures on a per capita basis.
According to Nelson, the waste "facility" that the government plans will be an above-ground store. Nelson explained: "What can we expect? What is involved in a facility like this? Is it a building, is it underground, how does it work? Well this will be above ground." Wrong. The "information" sheets released by Nelson stated that lower-level wastes might be dumped underground or stored above ground, while the higher-level waste would be stored above ground.
Where would the higher-level wastes be disposed of in the long-term, a journalist asked. The minister had no idea.
Nelson said that states would have to deal with their own radioactive waste — the proposed federal dump in the NT would not accept such waste. Then he said the dump would accept waste from the states. Then he said the NT could dump its waste in the federal waste "facility" but the states could not.
Nelson was asked if any of the three sites short-listed by the federal government — one near Katherine and two near Alice Springs — had also been short-listed in the 1990s when scientific and environmental criteria were used to identify eight potential sites for a lower-level waste dump. "I am not able to tell you", Nelson replied.
In fact, none of the three sites currently under consideration were short-listed in the 1990s. And we don't know if any of the three sites was short-listed for an above-ground store in a process initiated by the federal government several years ago, because the government refuses to release the list.
"This waste represents no threat to human health or life", Nelson claimed. Really? If the waste is that innocuous, surely it could go to any suburban landfill.
Nelson said that "it's often not appreciated that in Australia each year, there are 30,000 shipments of nuclear waste material by road across Australia". Wrong, again.
Nelson complained on July 26 that there had been a number of "misleading" comments in relation to the nuclear dump plan. Indeed.
At his July 15 media conference, Nelson said that "preliminary assessment in terms of environmental impacts, particularly water tables, is that these three sites do lend themselves to the storage of this nature". ABC Science Online was unable to obtain the "preliminary assessment" from Nelson's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST).
The department said it based its assessment on Geoscience Australia's Hydrogeology of Australia publication, but that document indicates that the short-listed Fishers Ridge site near Katherine has extensive, highly productive aquifers.
The short-listing of Fishers Ridge was attacked by Dr Peter Jolly, a hydrogeologist with the NT environment department, who told ABC Science Online that a leak from the proposed Fishers Ridge site has the potential to endanger pristine groundwaters, and the Katherine and Daly rivers downstream.
Jolly noted that the Fishers Ridge area sometimes gets rainfall of more than two metres in two months and that water falling on the area forms many springs on Aboriginal land and flows onto sites used for ecotourism.
"If there were any leaks from a facility at this site it would be one of the worst sites in Australia in terms of having an impact on ecosystems and an impact on an aquifer that is used for drinking and for other water uses", Jolly said.
Warren de With, president of the Amateur Fishermen's Association NT, described the short-listing of Fishers Ridge as "laughable". He said the site was probably short listed as a "red herring" and that the government's real intention was to target one of the sites near Alice Springs.
[Jim Green is a nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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