Antinuclear

a five-square-kilometer space would be built on the ground and a 20-square-kilometer space would be created 500 meters below the ground to store 75,000 metric tons of radioactive waste……The candidate area spread from Western Australia to South Australia

A plan to build a final disposal facility surfaced again in 2006 …The government that was then led by Prime Minister John Howard

Nuclear countries came close to solving problem of radioactive waste Mainichi Daily News. (By Haruyuki Aikawa, Japan December 13, 2011 LONDON —  “…The Pangea group of experts funded by nuclear energy-related companies and general contractors from many countries had been secretly planning to build an international disposal site for spent nuclear fuel in Australia. However, the plan fell through after an Australian news organization exposed it.

The Mainichi Shimbun recently interviewed key members of the group. The group named after Pangea, a huge continent which is believed to have existed more than 200 million years ago, was founded by nuclear experts and radioactive waste disposal companies in Britain, Switzerland, Canada and other countries in the late 1990s.

The disposal of radioactive waste is an issue that drags on the promotion of nuclear power generation. Unless a fundamental solution to the problem is found, all spent nuclear fuel storage facilities will be filled sooner or later, making it impossible to operate nuclear power stations.

The mission of the group, led by eight key members, was to try to look for candidate areas to host a final disposal site by fully utilizing their expertise and technology and persuading local communities in the areas to accept the plan.

Gregg Butler, a core member of the group, said it conducted geological surveys all over the world, and confirmed that Australia, Argentina, southern Chile, South Africa and Namibia were the most geologically stable areas.

Of the candidate areas, the group focused primarily on Australia from the standpoint of preventing nuclear-related materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. Since Australia is a Western country, there is no fear that it will proliferate nuclear technology and materials throughout the world.

Butler and others visited Australia and secretly attempted to persuade officials to accept a final disposal facility for radioactive waste by showing them documents detailing the plan and the benefits from hosting such a facility.

The documents stated that it would cost 6 billion U.S. dollars to build the disposal facility and 400 million dollars a year to maintain it. Moreover, noting that the facility would employ 2,000 workers and create a further 6,000 jobs related to the project, the documents emphasized that it would push up Australia’s gross domestic product by 1 percent.

They also stated that a five-square-kilometer space would be built on the ground and a 20-square-kilometer space would be created 500 meters below the ground to store 75,000 metric tons of radioactive waste, totaling more than 30 percent of the spent nuclear fuel in the world.

The candidate area spread from Western Australia to South Australia, a region that has the world’s most stable strata with the two states almost equal in size to the land area of all of western Europe.

Butler had told Australian officials that if Australia agreed to host the disposal facility, it would help expand nuclear-related businesses, such as exports of nuclear power stations and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, adding that the nuclear industry would last forever.

However, an incident occurred in the summer of 2002 just as members had almost completed their behind-the-scenes efforts to persuade Australian officials to host the facility.

Someone stole a secret video on the project from the organization’s library, according to another key member, Charles McCombie. Shortly afterwards, an Australian TV station got the scoop that a secret plan was under way to dump nuclear waste in Australia.

The report stirred protests from the Australian public and the plan fell through.

Companies that had invested in the project withdrew from it and the Pangea group was forced to disband itself.

The group, which is now operating under the name of the Association for Regional and International Underground Storage (ARIUS), is currently working out plans to build nuclear waste disposal facilities in Europe in cooperation with the European Union. McCombie says a Japanese general contractor is a stakeholder in Arius.

A plan to build a final disposal facility surfaced again in 2006 when Australia was under mounting criticism from the public over its deployment of troops in the Iraq war.

The government that was then led by Prime Minister John Howard emphasized that if a disposal facility was built, it would help improve Australia’s security environment and make it unnecessary to send Australian troops to battle.

However, the plan failed again after the Labor Party took over the reins of government following a 2007 general election.

Still, an Australia-based diplomatic source has pointed out that there are still strong calls for a resumption of the plan in Australia, especially from mining companies.

Nuclear waste final disposal facilities, which can be built only in limited areas for security reasons, are increasingly viewed as nuclear concessions, as plutonium, previously regarded as a “dream” fuel, is now becoming nuclear waste.

A secret plan to build an international spent nuclear fuel final disposal site in Mongolia, led by Japan and the United States, had also emerged against such a backdrop.  https://mail.google.com/mail/?tab=mm#drafts/13436a561fba83ff