Antinuclear

Tourism industry at Maralinga – but how safe is Maralinga nuclear bomb site?

from THE AUSTRALIAN, 26 Oct 15 …… Robin Matthews, the weathered caretaker of Maralinga nuclear test site, welcomes his visitors with some soothing words: the endless expanse of red gibber plain is safe — just as long as you do not dig.

Concealed under the rusty soil lies 60-year-old secrets of the British Empire, where seven nuc­lear bombs were detonated and hundreds of minor trials using plutonium and other radioactive materials contaminated kilo­metres of land.

But look close enough and the remnants of the tests are there — from the salt bush that refuses to grow any taller than 30cm and marks out a wide circle in the blast zones to scattered shrapnel and dark-green glass scattered across ground zero at the Breakaway ­nuclear test site, created by the heat of the explosion……

Most of the land was handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal people in 2009 after rehabilitation work was finished, but Defence held on to the ­weapons-testing range in the Woomera Prohibited Area. In November last year, the 1782sq km site was officially handed back to the Aboriginal people.

Government papers released in 2011 show the site had required further remediation, with the topsoil over the massive Taranaki trench — four football fields wide and three storeys deep and now the burial site for contaminated topsoil and machinery — eroding over time.

Maralinga-Tjarutja general manager Richard Preece said the traditional owners of the land still did not want anything to do with the area, which they described as mamu (devil) country…..

Mr Preece said Maralinga was not only a legacy for Aboriginal people, but also for all Australians who had to remediate the site and were now left with buried radioactive material.

“I find it incredible that somehow it was all right for the British government on foreign soil to create a radioactive mess that was completely left to Australia,” he said.

October 26, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | aboriginal issues, environment, South Australia