Nuclear Waste Dump: three recommended Australian Defence Force sites excluded. Why?
A bill presently before parliament rules out the possibility of using one of three previously nominated sites on Australian Defence Force land in the Northern Territory,
Plan For Nuclear Waste Dump Faces Backlash, IPS ipsnews.net, By Stephen de Tarczynski, MELBOURNE, Apr 26, 2010 – Aboriginal landowners in Australia’s far north are battling government plans to construct this country’s long-term nuclear waste storage facility on their land…
… The question of what to do with Australia’s radioactive waste from the country’s medical, industrial, agricultural and research use of nuclear material has been ongoing for decades and remains far from resolved.
The waste is currently stored at numerous sites around the country. Some Australian radioactive waste is also stored in Scotland and France…… A bill presently before parliament rules out the possibility of using one of three previously nominated sites on Australian Defence Force land in the Northern Territory, effectively leaving Muckaty Station as the only potential site currently up for consideration.
While the Minister for Energy and Resources, Martin Ferguson, said that the bill “means that a site can no longer be automatically imposed on a community in any state or territory,” the proposed legislation also recognises the “voluntary” nomination of the Muckaty site made by Ngapa clan members in 2007……. Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam has called for Muckaty to be scrapped as a potential site for radioactive waste storage as the nomination process for the site was “flawed.”
“Numerous traditional owners outlined how they and their people were completely excluded from the shared decision making process, which is the norm in aboriginal custom on issues to do with kinship of land. Despite claims to the contrary, it is clear that they were not consulted and have never given consent,” says Ludlam.
Dave Sweeney, an anti-nuclear campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), has slammed Minister Ferguson for breaking away from the principles set out by his own party regarding radioactive waste.
The ACF activist said that in 2007 the governing Australian Labor Party promised “a new process, a new site selection study based on community inclusion and consent, based on best science, based on robust and transparent processes and principles.”
Sweeney argues that much is at stake “with radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years, that can be cancer causing and gene changing, that can mobilise into the external environment, that can affect bush food and people’s perception of their relationship with the land.”
Dr Bill Williams, president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, said that a leak from a radioactive waste facility could easily reach humans through food and water, while an airborne leak could be breathed directly into the lungs.
“There is no such thing as a safe dose of ionising radiation to any of us,” he warns. RIGHTS-AUSTRALIA: Plan For Nuclear Waste Dump Faces Backlash – IPS ipsnews.net
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