Antinuclear

Indigenous Australians Fight planned Flinders Ranges nuclear waste dump

Indigenous Australians Fight Planned Nuclear Dump On Sacred Lands“It’s like me and my sisters going to the Vatican and saying we want to put a waste dump right under the pillar where they say St. Peter is buried.” Timothy Large, Huffington Post,   08/18/2016 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Enice Marsh remembers the black clouds of “poison stuff” that billowed from the northwest after British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s spread fallout across swathes of South Australia.

Now a new kind of radioactivity could head to her ancestral home in the remote Flinders Ranges – a nuclear waste dump.

“To me, it feels like a death penalty,” said Marsh, 73, standing in the cemetery of the outback town of Hawker, where many of her relatives are buried under red earth.

“We are one big family and the land also is family to us. We care for the land just in the same way we care for our family.”

South Australia is at the heart of a debate over the nation’s nuclear future that highlights a familiar tension between quick economic gain and long-term custodianship of land occupied by Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years.

Two separate proposals divide opinion in the state with the country’s biggest uranium mine and a history going back nearly 20 years of saying “no” to nuclear dumps.

A recent Royal Commission report argues that South Australia could profit by storing high-level waste from nuclear reactors overseas, buried deep underground at a location still to be chosen.

As that recommendation is put to a “citizens’ jury” for further debate, the government is pushing ahead with plans to build a storage facility for less toxic waste generated domestically, mainly from industry and medicine.

It’s this above-ground dump for domestic waste that affects the Flinders, known for its haunting landscapes and home to the Adnyamathanha people, one of several hundred indigenous groups in Australia.

For the first time, the government says it has found a community — at least among non-Aboriginal people — willing to host a repository for the 40 cubic meters (125 square feet) of radioactive waste Australia generates annually……..ra ra http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/indigenous-australians-fight-planned-nuclear-dump-on-sacred-lands_us_57b5f8c9e4b00d9c3a161db9

August 19, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News