Antinuclear

Where to trash Australia’s dead but radioactive Hifar nuclear reactor?

Australia’s media rarely covers anything to do with the nuclear industry, and never covers the issue of  trashing the dead nuclear reactor, sorry, I mean “decommissioning’ it.  That’s a much nicer word.  You can visualise the general pulling the epaulettes off the shoulder of the disgraced captain – decommissioning him – a nice formal protocol.

But what is ANSTO going to do with its dead Hifar nuclear reactor in Sydney?    After all, there was a helluva fuss about the uranium left in posh Hunter’s Hill.  No doubt   ANSTO and the New South Wales government will find some working class suburb in which to dump ANSTO”s old trashed reactor –  seeing that ANSTO has a nice new one which is not trash (yet).

But, no – I forgot, the Australian Government will step in and promise some Aborigines the normal facilities that the rest of us have anyway, –  if they’ll just be obliging and “volunteer” to have the dead but radioactive nuclear reactor. – Christina Macpherson

 Australian Senate, ANSTO transcripts, 19 Feb, 2012, 

 ……Senator LUDLAM: If this is complex, perhaps you can table it, but can you provide me with a current timetable and order of works for the decommissioning of the former HIFAR reactor in the site?

Dr Paterson: There is no formal decommissioning plan which has been adopted at the moment. As we indicated, I believe, at a previous estimates, there is a window of time in which we would like to begin that decommissioning process. A will take on notice the current status of how we are thinking about that window and when the works can begin.

Senator LUDLAM: Can I see it if I look in the right spot in the four-year forward estimates, or is it not there?

Dr Paterson: It is not in the four-year.

Senator LUDLAM: Did you want to add something, Mr McIntosh?

Mr McIntosh: No, certainly not in the four-year. Clearly, there will be a number of issues to be taken into account. One of them is obviously funding, but there is also: there is not much point demolishing a reactor if you have got nowhere to put the waste.

Senator LUDLAM: That is what I am going to come to now. Is it too early for me to ask you what the cost is going to be of pulling that facility apart?

Dr Paterson: I think the engineering estimates for the moment can be tabled.

Senator LUDLAM: Can be?

[ I couldn’t make much sense of the lengthy answer here. C.M.]…. and the second thing that can happen is that the cost estimates which are based on normative numbers that you can extract from quantity surveyors and others in the marketplace may have changed because the marketplace itself has changed. So there are two bases for having reasonable contingencies in these projects: one is scope changes and the other is cost changes because of market forces….

….. Senator LUDLAM: Is it still ANSTO’s intention to store that material which is contracted to return from Europe temporarily in Sydney while the issue of the remote waste dump is resolved one way or another?

Dr Paterson: That is our current planning.

February 21, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, wastes