Why must we always force nuclear waste onto Aboriginal people?
What we believe is needed now is an independent and deliberative inquiry into long-term isolation and stewardship options for this material, and learning from countries overseas who are dealing with much larger inventories of this material than we are. What have they learned, long term? Isolation and stewardship of this material, rather than simply which outstation we should build the shed on.
The second thing that we believe should happen while that inquiry is underway is to properly containerise, in these 60-year licence caskets, the existing spent fuel and reprocessed material that at the moment is lying at the Lucas Heights facility. We believe that should be properly hardened and containerised, and there should be an audit of the existing collections of dispersed waste, non-reactor isotope investigations so that we are not producing this waste, and a commitment to not take international waste.
We need to respect the voices of the communities who are standing up and saying no.
03 May 2016 | Scott Ludlam I rise this evening to speak on the long history of failed plans to locate national radioactive waste dumps here in Australia at multiple sites across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia and to point out the disturbing consistency with which it is disproportionately Aboriginal land that is targeted, Aboriginal communities who are expected to host the most dangerous categories of industrial waste that this society is capable of producing.
It seems that so little has been learnt since when long ago, in 1991 or 1992, the federal government embarked on a national site selection process to try and work out where the waste from the HIFAR reactor at Sydney’s Lucas Heights should go—more than 30 years after the reactor first went online. It probably came as something of a surprise to the community then that, 30 years after this industrial facility had started operating, there was still no coherent plan for the disposal of its waste products.
And here we are now, in 2016, and you have to ask: what on earth have we learnt in the intervening time? One thing I think we have learnt is that coercive attempts to dump radioactive waste on unwilling communities are doomed to fail. That is not just the experience here in Australia; international experience bears this out as well. And so little has been learnt from a process which, in my view and in the view of some of my colleagues, actually held some promise…..
Whether it be spent fuel, whether it be radioactive waste from the isotope plant at the Lucas Heights complex, whether it be other categories of medical waste—trash, gloves and other items—or whether it be radioactive waste of various categories from mining operations, the question ‘Which outstation should this stuff be dumped on, which Aboriginal community should host this material, at which outback site can we dump this stuff out of sight out of mind?’ is simply wrong. If we start with the wrong question, we inevitably come to the wrong answer………
In fact, this is tremendously important country for the Adnyamathanha, and these are people who have already suffered greatly at the hands of dispossession. Anybody who thinks that the dispossession of Aboriginal land or questions of sovereignty or self-determination are from the colonial era two centuries ago had best be paying attention to what is now unfolding in the Flinders Ranges.
What the Adnyamathanha traditional owners said in the statement of the other day is that they do not want it, that this will be a no-consent arrangement and that they are planning on fighting it. Here is what they said in their statement of 27 November 2015, when they were still on the short list:
It is flood land. The water comes from the hills and floods the plains, including the proposed dump site. Sometimes there are massive floods, the last one on 20 January 2006. The massive floods uproot huge trees, you can come out here now and see all the trees uprooted by the 2006 flood. In 1956, 50 years earlier, to the day, a massive flood destroyed Cotabena homestead and all the houses in Hookina township. The pub was destroyed by the 1956 flood and is now a pile of rocks……
What the Greens think should happen next, instead of a gruesome and futile repeat of what was done to the Muckaty mob, and those old women and men, who did not need that additional stress placed on their shoulders, is to ask the right question before we simply move to siting decisions about where this shed or this hole in the ground should go.
What we believe is needed now is an independent and deliberative inquiry into long-term isolation and stewardship options for this material, and learning from countries overseas who are dealing with much larger inventories of this material than we are. What have they learned, long term? Isolation and stewardship of this material, rather than simply which outstation we should build the shed on. The second thing that we believe should happen while that inquiry is underway is to properly containerise, in these 60-year licence caskets, the existing spent fuel and reprocessed material that at the moment is lying at the Lucas Heights facility. We believe that should be properly hardened and containerised, and there should be an audit of the existing collections of dispersed waste, non-reactor isotope investigations so that we are not producing this waste, and a commitment to not take international waste. We need to respect the voices of the communities who are standing up and saying no.
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