Antinuclear

Monday night in Adelaide was just the first of four presentations of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission’s initial findings, a whistlestop tour of South Australia that culminated on Thursday in Mount Gambier.

The royal commission’s brief was to examine the feasibility of South Australia mining more uranium, processing it, using it for nuclear energy and then storing the waste – turning the state into a value-adding, vertically integrated hub of radioactivity.

The initial findings, based on interviews with 128 witnesses and more than 250 submissions, will be out for public comment for a five-week period before informing a final report due on May 6……….

Scarce urged attendees in Adelaide to contemplate the state’s future, but when question time arrived, the locals appeared to be thinking further ahead than he had in mind.

There was Lorraine Brady, who described herself as being from a group of mothers concerned about jobs for their children and future generations, but “not at any price”.

Brady asked: “How can you guarantee the safe containment of toxic, high-level nuclear waste for thousands of years to come?”

To speak of millennia is not hyperbole – by the royal commission’s own admission, some of the waste in question will remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

Craig Wilkins, chief executive of Conservation Council SA, an organisation that has actively questioned the impartiality of the royal commission, said the overall time frame needed to be taken into account not just in an environmental sense but an economic one.

“The commission acknowledges that nuclear waste needs to be isolated from the environment for ‘many hundreds of thousands of years’ yet there is no attempt to cost the management of waste over those time frames,” he said.

“If there’s one thing we know, the nuclear industry is expert at overstating the benefits and radically understating the costs and risks.”……..

there is the actual journey – the transportation of waste internationally across oceans, and then through ports and populated areas, before arriving at a temporary above-ground dump site, where it will have to remain until enough funds have been accrued from such imports to invest in a large-scale underground facility.

As the attendees noted, communities all along the route would need to offer consent, along with anyone living near the final destination………..https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/02/20/south-australia-ponders-nuclear-waste-options/14558868002910