Antinuclear

Social Consent and South Australia’s Nuclear Waste Import Plan

Risks, ethics and consent: Australia shouldn’t become the world’s nuclear wasteland, The Conversation, Mark Diesendorf,  Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, UNSW Australia, June 28, 2016 

“…….Aware that Australians are divided on the nuclear industry, the royal commission acknowledges that gaining “social consent warrants much greater attention than the technical issues during planning and development”.

Then, on the same page of its report, it postulates that community support could be gained by “careful, considered and detailed technical work”. It thus creates the false impression that all social and ethical concerns can be reduced to technical issues.

Ultimately, gaining social consent is a socio-political struggle that draws only slightly on research and education on science, technology and economics. This is demonstrated by current debate in Australia on climate science, in which citizens are influenced by a print media that in many cases is biased towards denial, and a Coalition government that contains several vocal climate sceptics

Indigenous Australians have successfully opposed for 20 years an above-ground dump for low-level national nuclear waste on their land at Muckaty in the Northern Territory. Indigenous communities are already mobilising, together with environmentalists, to resist very strongly any development of intermediate- and high-level repositories in South Australia. The social impacts of a low-level waste dump are bad enough, but would be dwarfed by the social, physical and financial impacts of a high-level waste repository…….”  https://theconversation.com/risks-ethics-and-consent-australia-shouldnt-become-the-worlds-nuclear-wasteland-61380

June 29, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, NUCLEAR ROYAL COMMISSION 2016, opposition to nuclear, politics