Business South Australia’s Nigel McBride touts nuclear waste importing plan

Homer Simpson and nuclear politics as France shows the way for SA, Fin Rev 23 May 16 by Simon Evans Nigel McBride, the chief executive of Business SA, the organisation that oversees the interests of more than 46,000 businesses in South Australia, has just returned from Finland and France, where he researched the nuclear waste industry.

He is convinced there would be no detrimental impact to the image of prime wine regions such as the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley and the Coonawarra from having an underground storage facility elsewhere in the state.

“We’re not going to have any overt signs anywhere,” Mr McBride told reporters in Adelaide on Monday………

Mitchell Taylor, the managing director of Taylors Wines, which has operations in the Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, McLaren Vale and the Coonawarra, said the most sensible thing would be to locate any future nuclear waste storage facility in arid lands hundreds of kilometres away from agricultural land.

“You wouldn’t put it close to agricultural land,” he said…….

From an overseas marketing viewpoint, Mr Taylor said he didn’t think it would have any impact on the image of South Australian wines and premium food, provided the two were kept separate.

It was important that South Australia tests the overseas market soon, he said, to gauge whether there were interested parties who would use a large-scale underground facility. And he believed that an independent agency and regulator with the ability to educate the public should be set up straight away, because it should not be a government’s role to do it, he said.

“You’ve got to get politics out of it,” he said.

Mr McBride said the regulatory model in Finland was a good benchmark, and there had been too much simplistic criticism of a nuclear industry based on what he termed “The Simpson’s model” taken from the popular cartoon series where a hapless Homer Simpson works at the Springfield nuclear power plant.

A final report by royal commissioner Kevin Scarce in early May recommended the state set up a nuclear waste storage facility to generate $100 billion in profits over the project’s forecast 120-year life, with Mr Weatherill saying he would make a decision by the end of the year after an extensive community consultation process, on whether to proceed. http://www.afr.com/it-pro/homer-simpson-and-nuclear-politics-as-france-shows-the-way-for-sa-20160522-gp1851

May 25, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | NUCLEAR ROYAL COMMISSION 2016, South Australia, spinbuster

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