Antinuclear

One of the first backers of a high level facility, Mr Kenyon told the Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle the plan was not dead, but said a referendum would be “quite a long time away” due to the bulk of information required.

“I think if you go to a population with a vague question, should we have a nuclear waste facility in SA, to be honest I think the result of that referendum would be not much better than what we saw from the Citizens Jury,” Mr Kenyon said.

“If it was ever going to happen firstly it would need bipartisan support to at least continue those investigations and continue discussions.

Then you would need to have quite a lot of information, and I would suspect you would need to know how much you were going to get paid and how much it was going to cost you to store and to know that you almost certainly need to know a site and you would need to have most likely an agreement of a community around a site.”

Asked if the Government could expect support of the Parliament to continue those discussions, Mr Kenyon responded “not at the moment”.

Liberal Treasury spokesman Rob Lucas, the first opposition MP to publicly air concerns about the proposal, told the conference the economic risks were “too great”.

“I always thought it was a naive and ill informed view that you would ever get majority support, whether it be from a Citizens Jury or any other process.

“Frankly if you were going to take on this particular challenge it was going to be an issue of leadership where ultimately the government of the day and the Parliament would have to say, we think it’s in the best interests of South Australia and even though there’s a majority view against it; we’re prepared to support it in terms of the public interest.” http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/nuclear-roadblock-warning-but-door-still-open-says-tom-kenyon/news-story/e19a89bfb94a87bbe14d2a18d082da0a