Antinuclear

Michele Madigan points out the National dangers of transporting nuclear wastes

Nuclear waste danger knows no state borders, Eureka Street Michele Madigan |  09 February 2016 “……..It would be a mistake for anyone living outside of South Australia to think that the premier’s plan is just a South Australian problem. Transport and containment risks are hugely significant. State boundaries are no guarantees of safety.

Professor John Veevers of Macquarie University notes the ‘tonnes of enormously dangerous radioactive waste in the northern hemisphere, 20,000km from its destined dump in Australia … must remain intact for at least 10,000 years.

‘These magnitudes — of tonnage, lethality, distance of transport and time — entail great inherent risk.’

In 1998 when the federal government identified the central northern area of South Australia to be site for a proposed national radioactive waste dump, it was not only South Australians who were concerned.

In 2003 the mayors of Sutherland, Bathurst, Blue Mountains, Broken Hill, Dubbo, Griffith, Lithgow, Orange, Wagga Wagga, Auburn, Bankstown, Blacktown, Fairfield, Holroyd, Liverpool, Parramatta and Penrith — communities along potential transport routes — opposed ‘any increase in nuclear waste production until a satisfactory resolution occurs to the waste repository question’.

The NSW parliamentary inquiry into radioactive waste found ‘there is no doubt that the transportation of radioactive waste increases the risk of accident or incident — including some form of terrorist intervention’.

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation itself acknowledges there are one to two ‘incidents’ every year involving the transportation of radioactive materials to and from its Lucas Heights reactor plant.

In a post Fukushima world, the dangers of radioactivity seem self-evident. However it seems that the ever-active pro nuclear lobby continues to do all possible to deny or conceal the following simple facts:

Radioactive waste gives off energy that is dangerous to humans, animals and plants. It can cause cancer, which may only grow many years after exposure. If such waste gets into the soil, air or underground water then it can get into our bodies, so even communities not living near the waste dump can be affected.

It is not medical waste, which decays quickly, that is the problem, but other types, such high-level international waste, which take tens of thousands of years.

The environmentalist Dr Jim Green advised one community shortlisted for the proposed national dump: ‘the long lived intermediate waste would … be sitting in an above-ground shed … for an ‘interim’ period likely to last for many decades since absolutely no effort is being made to find a disposal site for it …

‘The risks … pretty much anything you can imagine has happened at one or another radioactive waste repository around the world: fires, leaks, water infiltration and corrosion of waste drums, a chemical explosion …’

With the federal government seemingly having no intention of building a suitable underground site, it’s certain that just one state government, intent on making supposedly huge profits out of importing high-level waste, is not envisaging spending the billions required to build such a facility either.

These problems of transport and containment are extremely serious and remain unaddressed. Just one state premier is intent on importing high-level waste from other countries, but it’s not just one state or territory being put at risk.

Clearly federal and state governments of both persuasions continue to see Australia’s vast expanses as simply a commodity to be exploited, whatever the enormous risks involved.

February 22, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, opposition to nuclear, safety